By Charlie Morrison and Michael Grossberg
A deep understanding and passion for commercial space development informs and enlivens Critical Mass, the 2024 Prometheus winner for Best Novel.
A courageous band of astronaut-entrepreneurs strive to alleviate Earth-based problems through commercial space projects in Daniel Suarez’s grippingly realistic SF thriller.
Set mostly off the Earth and around the solar system, the suspenseful, fast-paced drama follows the resourceful heroes as they strive to achieve their ambitious, unprecedented goals amid Cold War tensions, shifting global political alliances and shortsighted opposition from Earth governments.
Suarez, a previous Best Novel winner for his sci-fi-laced techno-thriller Influx, has developed a reputation as a master at depicting plausible next-generation technology in a series of best-selling near-future sociopolitical tech thrillers.
In Critical Mass, Suarez combines his admirable vision for free-market space development with his understanding of the grievous harm and threats to human progress caused by obtrusive, abusive and/or corrupt government.
PROGRESS THROUGH ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Against the odds – and against serious obstacles imposed by Earth politicians more interested in power and control than in fostering freedom and innovation – a valiant crew risk their lives in an unsanctioned private and secretive asteroid-mining project.
While struggling to complete their mission, the resilient astronauts strive to save two stranded crew members on a distant asteroid.
With a high level of granular detail and engineering expertise unusual even in the hardest of hard-SF novels, Suarez convincingly portrays both the human drama and scientific complexities that emerge as the plucky crew face a series of daunting and unexpected challenges.
Among them: solving the complex problems amidst the deadly dangers of commercial asteroid-mining, building the first orbiting solar-power satellite and refinery, creating infrastructure for human operations on the moon and establishing the first spin-gravity station in deep space.
WHO ARE THE REAL BAD GUYS?
With too many other contemporary sci-fi novels framing capitalistic entrepreneurs as the cliched bad guys while uncritically portraying expansive government as somehow the automatic source of goodness and progress, Suarez refreshingly offers a dramatically different and more realistic perspective enriched by his understanding of economics, history and politics.
Critical Mass brims with implicit libertarian themes. Governments are shown as largely wishing to restrict human action and individual choice, while the protagonists want to expand human possibilities.
Meanwhile, at considerable risk to their own safety, the central band of space engineers admirably try their best to avoid killing, even in self-defense or when it would be easier or less costly toward achieving their goals.
That private, peaceful and cooperative behavior –representative of how most people typically strive to work together to achieve goals in free or largely free societies – stands in marked contrast to the fundamental tendencies of many governments. Historically, the State, allying with or manipulated by other bad actors, tends to kill, enslave or otherwise coerce innocent people – all too often “for their own good” and in the name of misconceived ideals or misbegotten true-believer ideologies.
CENSORSHIP, PROPAGANDA AND STATE POWER
Critical Mass largely and accurately portrays government as the antagonist, not only stifling private efforts to set up a space station in free space, but also to shortsightedly act for the sake of power rather than doing what’s best for the people on Earth.
The novel depicts governments misleading people through censorship and propaganda to demonize private space development or outright deny its very existence and achievement; or worse, covertly supporting State-sanctioned violence and crime – all to delay, undermine, or halt the commercialization of space.
In this era of misinformation (often spread by governments as well as various factions and interests) and suppression of politically incorrect facts or reasonable alternative views, that sub-theme seems all too timely.
While the space entrepreneurs hope to use the resources mined from an asteroid to fuel the development of space-based industry, Earth governments want to seize (legally steal) the resources to hold in reserve against a future need to wage war with other governments.
Countering stale anti-market and pro-State rhetoric demonizing the profit motive, the story shows private enterprise doing good for humanity even while making money.
THE BENEFITS OF FREE-MARKET INNOVATIONS
Especially to freedom-loving sf fans knowledgeable about the historic dangers of government fiat money and the potential benefits of free-market alternatives, Suarez’s credible portrayal of a functional and stable private currency created outside the reach of Earth governments will be especially interesting.
So will the novel’s insights into how advanced technology, with its private, encrypted safeguards and potential for decentralization, might keep legacy interests in check, without entrenched interests taking over and undermining worthy projects.
Here Suarez explores the importance of “the rule of law and trust necessary for business in frontier territory like deep space.”
Meanwhile, the plausible financial ecosystem Suarez envisions – emerging from an encrypted new private currency protected from State takeovers by decentralized distribution and computer backups among multiple satellites beyond Earth – is one specifically designed to be independent of political control, with participation and ownership stakes granted only to people and businesses that contribute assets.
A PLAUSIBLE SCENARIO FOR PRIVATE MONEY
The new private money system is a key aspect of story and its characters.
As a native of South America, Ramon Marin, one of the spacefarers, is likely aware of the authoritarian history of Argentina and other South American countries and their closely related recurrent tendency toward runaway inflation from massive government printing of unbacked and increasingly worthless paper money.
Motivated partly by that cultural mindset and partly by his deep investment in and commitment to the project, Ramon risks his life during a massive solar flare to preserve specialized computer systems maintaining the new blockchain-based money.
In a revealing and powerfully libertarian passage, Suarez reveals why Ramon is willing to go that far:
“It may seem inconsequential, but a blockchain-based DeFI system like the CCE (the Cislunar Commodity Exchange) is, to me, the key to containing the spread of authoritarianism in space,” Ramon explains to a fellow spacefarer.
“The moment any citizen of an authoritarian regime starts using lunas to invest in the CCE here in orbit, they are no longer bound by centralized authority. They are instead presented with limitless opportunities,” Ramon says.
“The market undermines centralized control. The open protocol itself is the authority, and no self-appointed power can control or constrain it, and so individual autonomy prevails in the cosmos – and in the future.”
A SUPERIOR SEQUEL
Set after the events of Delta-v, the first novel in Suarez’s projected Delta-V trilogy, where part of the asteroid-mining team made it back to Earth, Critical Mass proves to be a superior sequel.
Battle-scarred and grieving from their life-and-death projects in outer space, remnants of the team prove remarkably resilient. As they strive to save the Earth from environmental catastrophe, they continue to muster their courage and resourcefulness, even as they face sabotage, United Nations and other governmental restrictions, and other roadblocks to their success in space.
Critical Mass focuses on the team’s efforts to rescue remaining crew-members still at the asteroid while completing other space-based firsts – including building and staffing a space station at the L2 LaGrange point on the far side of the moon, and enriching their own uranium to launch a nuclear-powered spaceship to rescue stranded team members.
The sequel also sidesteps a weakness in Delta-v, an anti-libertarian aspect of its otherwise suspenseful story involving fraudulent behavior by Joyce, the billionaire backer of the team’s space efforts. With Joyce now deceased, the team in Critical Mass stands on a firmer foundation of integrity and individual responsibility.
THE REALITIES OF WORKING IN SPACE
To his credit, Suarez goes beyond most space-exploration, space industrialization and colonization sagas in fully dramatizing in Critical Mass the supremely high risks of working and living outside Earth.
Suarez underscores just how deadly outer space can be for living organisms, which remain best suited to the planet of our evolution.
One of Suarez’s most sobering themes is how much needs to go absolutely right in space, detail by detail, checklist by exhaustive checklist, day by day or even moment by moment. If anything at all goes wrong, the mission can fail – and people die.
Yet, such grim realities are outweighed, Suarez passionately argues, by the manifold possibilities for our species in expanding industry and habitats throughout the solar system.
Thoroughly researched, Critical Mass makes a strong case outlining a real path for space development, asteroid mining and other industrial/habitat projects throughout our solar system.
Reading Suarez’s gripping story, one realizes more than ever that all this could happen – and that such bold science fiction may become well-engineered scientific fact sooner than we’ve previously imagined.
Note: This Prometheus Appreciation has been edited and slightly revised from an earlier blog review of Critical Mass posted in April, before the 2024 Best Novel finalists were announced.
* See the video of the 44th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
* The 44th Prometheus awards show, recorded by LFS Webmaster Chris Hibbert, has been posted on the LFS website’s Video page and on Youtube.
* Read 2024 Best Novel winner Daniel Suarez’s acceptance speech for Critical Mass on “How SF offers a critical forum to imagine new ideas and futures”
* Also check out the recently published Prometheus Blog Appreciation of Terry Pratchett’s novel The Truth, the 2024 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner for Best Classic Fiction.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS:
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including 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 all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* 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 (including the recent 2023 ceremonywith inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freerand Sarah Hoyt), Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook pagefor comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, jointhe Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters! We understand that the arts and literature can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future – and in some ways can be even more powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, individuality and human dignity.
Through recognizing the literature of liberty and the many different but complementary visions of a free future via the Prometheus Awards, the LFS hopes to help spread ideas and ethical principles that help humanity overcome tyranny, end slavery, reduce the threat of war, repeal or constrain other abuses of coercive power and achieve universal liberty, respect for human rights and a better world (perhaps ultimately, worlds) for all.
