Victor Koman, a veteran libertarian SF writer, had the honor of presenting the Best Novel category Sunday at the 44th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
Who better to fulfill that role than Koman, one of very few writers to win as many as three Prometheus awards for Best Novel?
Here, for the record, is the transcript of Koman’s speech.
Editor’s introduction: Victor Koman has won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel for these three novels:
• The Jehovah Contract, an audacious thriller-noir fantasy about a dying, atheistic assassin given a contract to kill God;
• Solomon’s Knife, a medical thriller going beyond partisan debates over abortion by imagining a plausible future in which a controversial new surgical procedure helps women with unwanted pregnancies and women who want children but can’t become pregnant; and
• Kings of the High Frontier, which imagined a profit-enhanced competition via free enterprise to reach the stars (published before the X Prize that saw SpaceShip One reach space in 2004.)
Although Koman appeared at previous Prometheus ceremonies to offer eloquent acceptance speeches when he won for Best Novel, the 2024 ceremony is the first time that Koman has participated as an awards presenter – an honor long overdue.
By Victor Koman
It’s hard for me to grasp the fact that the first Prometheus Award was granted forty-five years ago by the originator of the award — L. Neil Smith — to F. Paul Wilson for Wheels Within Wheels. Paul is still with us, but Neil passed away almost exactly three years ago.
In those forty-five years, in addition to Neil Smith, we’ve lost a number of winners:
• Poul Anderson in 2001
• James P. Hogan in 2010
• Sir Terry Pratchett in 2015
• Dr. Jerry Pournelle in 2017
• Victor Milan in 2018, which really hurt because he was only 6 days
And my close friends, within weeks of each other:
• J. Neil Schulman and Brad Linaweaver both five years ago in August
• And — last year — Michael Flynn
• And then, just this last March, Vernor Vinge
Perhaps the fact that I just turned 70 (!) causes me to reflect on mortality, but I also think back to that great philosopher who meditated on — and I quote — “the significance of the passage of time, so when you think about it there is great significance to the passage of time. There is such great significance to the passage of time when you think of a day in the life of our children.” Unquote. So profound.
But addlepated statists aside, it is our children, both literally and metaphorically, for whom we write. As members of the Libertarian Futurist Society, we read and we write about a future of Freedom, and of the constant battle between Tyranny and Liberty, Collectivism and Individuality, Dark Ages and Renaissance.
There is one weapon in that battle of which I am personally proud.
In 1997, my novel Kings of the High Frontier won the Prometheus Award despite not having been published in any traditional format. Neither hardcover nor paperback nor magazine serialization, Kings was published in digital format by Neil Schulman’s Pulpless.Com and sold exclusively as a download from the nascent World Wide Web.
It was the first purely digital novel to win a major literary award and paved the way for many more non-traditional publication routes to reaching readers without middlemen or gatekeepers, such as desktop publishing, Print-On-Demand, eBooks, and more.
Think about it: For the first time in in the history of the written word, book length didn’t matter.
As I pointed out in my 1997 acceptance speech, Neil didn’t have to buy paper or glue or ink, or pay for typesetting, or arrange for warehousing or shipping. He wasn’t concerned that I had several full-color illustrations — he didn’t have to shoot plates or pay for color proofs.
He simply had to come up with a way to allow people to buy a digital copy of the book over the Internet and download it immediately. The cost of publishing a novel plummeted. Now, Kindle readers and ePub versions of books abound and are considered valid avenues for publication.
Nearly all of our nominee novels this year would not have been considered “legitimately published” thirty years ago.
But in the 21st Century, they have found their way almost directly from writer to reader, and now the Libertarian Futurist Society stands ready — for the forty-fourth time (or forty-third — I’m lookin’ at you, 1985!) — to honor an author for a novel of “speculative fiction that champions individual rights, based on the moral/legal principle of non-aggression as the ethical and practical foundation for peace, prosperity, progress, justice, tolerance, mutual respect, civility, and civilization itself.”
Here are the five finalists for this year’s Prometheus Award for Best Novel:
• Devon Eriksen’s Theft of Fire, set mostly on an asteroid-mining ship diverted to reach what may be hidden alien technology, is a chamber-sized space opera set within an anarchocapitalist, contract-based frontier where industrialization, colonization and free-market innovations have spread throughout the solar system in a free-wheeling future that offers insights into personal agency, ethics, free will, property rights, and other individual rights.
• Karl K. Gallagher’s Swim Among the People is the fifth novel of his Fall of the Censor series about the fight against an interstellar empire that maintains totalitarian power through censorship, suppression of history, destruction of older books, and other less savory methods.
Against this occupation, a voluntary covert organization seeks to preserve and disseminate forbidden knowledge.
• God’s Girlfriend by Gordon Hanka (writing as Dr. Insensitive Jerk, a fellow PhD, I presume) is the fifth and final novel in his subversive and satirical Gaia’s Wasp series.
The book raises prickly questions about coercion, consent, sainthood, morality, masculinity, femininity, and the use of weapons of mass destruction amid a taboo-smashing clash of two cultures: Earth humans and Wyrms, human refugees from another planet.
• In Howard Andrew Jones’ Lord of a Shattered Land, a grief-stricken former military general risks his life to free the enslaved remnants of his free-trading people, traveling through a brutal empire filled with human and inhuman dangers, all while embracing a libertarian ethic of non-aggression. This epic sword-and-sorcery fantasy reveals the clash between the evils of slavery and tyranny and the eternal human passion for liberty and individuality.
• Finally, Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass is his sequel to Delta-V and concerns heroic near-future “astropreneurs” mounting a rescue of colleagues marooned on an asteroid.
To save them, they must battle nature and governmental impediments in an audacious mission to mine an asteroid, complete the first spin-gravity space station, build a nuclear-powered spaceship, promote the commercialization of the solar system, and create a secure, decentralized currency in the course of proving that space-based industry is not just profitable, but is humanity’s last, best hope for a survivable, peaceful, and prosperous future for all.
And the winner of this year’s Prometheus Award for best Novel is Daniel Suarez, for Critical Mass!
Congratulations to Daniel and all of this year’s finalists.
Note: The 44th Prometheus awards show was recorded Aug. 25, 2024, by LFS Webmaster Chris Hibbert and will be posted soon on Youtube and later on the LFS website’s Video page.
Meanwhile, the Prometheus Blog is publishing a series of reports on the ceremony that includes the full texts of its eloquent, inspiring and sometimes amusing speeches (including by Best Novel winner Daniel Suarez; Reason’s Robert Poole, who presented the Hall of Fame category; LFS President William H. Stoddard, who emceed the Zoom event and accepted the Hall of Fame award for the late great Terry Pratchett; and LFS co-founder Michael Grossberg, who discussed the impressive track record of the Best Novel category and introduced Koman.)
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 ceremony with inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freer and 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 page for 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, join the 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.
