Here is the second part of the Prometheus interview with Australian/Tasmanian author Dave Freer, the 2023 Prometheus winner for Best Novel for Cloud-Castles.
Q: How did you first get interested in science fiction/fantasy?
A: I was born into it, you might say. No, not in a hut hopping the Taiga on a solitary chicken-leg as might seem likely, or even half way up a space-elevator, hanging between heaven and earth. Into a family where reading sf and fantasy were a norm.
If you think there to be nothing unusual about this, it is plain you know little of the country and times of my birth.
It was one the many odd gifts of my mother. And she had started by reading US pulp mags left behind by the US servicemen who had been installing equipment for the Naval Artillery guns on Robben Island, while she was serving there in World War II. She loved them, and thus I grew up in home where sf/fantasy were ‘normal reading’.
I assumed everyone read such things, if they read anything at all, and that anyone who didn’t was very weird. It was a rude shock to discover that that most of them thought I had it the wrong way around. How ill-informed they were!
Q: Growing up, did you have any early reading favorites?
A: I read anything that wasn’t tied down, locked away – and that usually was a mere temporary delay. One of the most formative experience of my life was – while my older brother was at school, getting hold of his copy of Jack Vance’s The Blue World.
The satire part floated straight over my about eight-year-old head, but I absolutely adored the aspect of solving the problems of resource-paucity with ingenuity. To be honest, the story, per se, was less interesting that the idea of extracting metals from blood, and making devices from seaweed.
Q: What else did you enjoy reading?
A: The next sf book to come my way was L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall.
Once again, the satire aspects floated right over my head, and I was intrigued by Mouse Padway’s re-invention of modern devices to change history.
Padway… in a way, became a role model. A man who used ingenuity and engineering rather than his mere physical strength to overcome the odds. I was a sick little kid, not really expected to live past the first couple of years, and always rather small as a result, so it was something very easy to identify with.
Q: How did your parents and family shape your coming of age?
A: I grew up in South Africa, with parents who probably epitomized ‘odd’ in their milieu, of ‘white’ people.
My father thought in Sotho (not English), which he’d grown up speaking in an environment where he was the only white kid for 50 miles in the mountains of what was then Basotholand, and all his friends spoke Sotho. He translated everything in his head, and found the idea of racial separation bizarre.
Q: What did you learn from your dad?
A: Other kids’ dads went fishing for fun – my dad’s second job was on a commercial linefish boat. That was the most egalitarian merit-driven work environment I have ever encountered.
Each man had his own ‘bin’ and your catch went in that – one for the boat, one for the Skipper, and one for you. You didn’t catch enough, and you didn’t get a ‘site’ – but they didn’t care if you were black, white or green, otherwise. It suited my dad, but it was very different to the stratified society of South Africa.
Q: How did your mother inspire you?
A: My mother… well, she is probably the source of many of my contrarian genes.
In an era of housewives and respectable ‘womanly’ hobbies, mum found all of that a dead bore – which is why she’d volunteered for service in World War II and ended up an Artillery Sergeant and meeting sf.
She liked spiders and snakes, and while she never met an ‘unsuitable’ handcraft from woodwork to metalwork she didn’t want to learn, rocks and geology were her passion, along with sf.
She was the great-niece of Generaal Koos De La Rey – the Lion of the West, and one of the last two commanders in the field when the Boer war ended, and dad was the grandson of a British Surgeon General of the same war.
They got married. This, in US terms, was like Civil War General’s kids getting married. The hatred was deep and wide. They were a determined couple, in the face of horrified opposition – and making it work. My dad ended up a prime favorite with his in-laws.
Q: Your novel Cloud-Castles brims with satirical and anti-authoritarian themes. How has your view of authority evolved?
A: I never found a form of authority I did accept easily, not as a boy, not as a conscript in the midst of the Angolan War (I was in the medical corps), and not since.
I left there swearing blind I’d never go into medicine (something I had considered before, given family history), and ended up following a Brownian Motion course into Zoology, where I ended up seven years later on the bludgeoning edge of science as an Ichthyologist.
Coming up soon: Part Three of the Prometheus Interview with Freer.
Read the first part of the Prometheus interview with Dave Freer.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE:
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – for the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to the full set of published appreciation-reviews of past winners.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
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