As voting enters its final weeks to determine the winners of the next Prometheus awards, it’s worth highlighting how several of this year’s Best Novel finalists have been gaining recognition and sparking discussions in the broader culture.
That includes Lionel Shriver’s Mania, Danny King’s Cancelled, Wil McCarthy’s Beggar’s Sky, C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher’s Alliance Unbound, Michael Flynn’s In the Belly of the Whale, based on interviews, podcasts and publications we’ve come across. (If you become aware of columns, podcasts, interviews or other media coverage of any of our Best Novel finalists, or for that matter, our Hall of Fame finalists, please let us know as soon as possible!)
Mania, in particular, has sparked both timely commentary and podcasts, including an interesting interview with Shriver and a Substack column drawing parallels between Mania and today’s cultural-political trends.
Dutch-American writer and courageous dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali invited Shriver, an international best-selling author, to join her on a podcast for a lengthy interview – with some relevant excerpts quoted below.
Meanwhile, on Holly’s Substack column, Holly “Mathnerd” has written a column titled “The Sound of One Window Shifting” about “the moment a satirical novel I read and enjoyed last year stopped feeling like fiction.”
That novel, of course, is Shriver’s Mania – whose satirical and cautionary themes are highlighted in the Prometheus blog review.
HOLLY’S COLUMN ON THE RELEVANCE OF MANIA
“Lionel Shriver’s Mania came out last year, to almost no mainstream fanfare. That’s not surprising. The book is scathing, unsparing, and brilliant; which is to say, culturally radioactive,” Holly writes on her Substack column.
“It tells the story of a United States overtaken by a movement for “Cognitive Equality,” a world in which IQ is denounced as hate speech, intellectual disability is rebranded as “alternative processing,” and the gravest sin imaginable is to suggest that some people might be smarter than others.
“It’s a razor-edged satire of the trans movement, thinly veiled and unapologetically direct. And when I first read it — and reviewed it here — I thought that was all it was.”
“I was wrong. Shriver didn’t just write a trans parody. She wrote a prophecy. Because what Mania captures — in ways that are only now becoming clear — is not just the absurdity of insisting that identity overrides biology,” Holly writes. “It’s the slow, systemic dismantling of discernment itself. About our society failing to recognize the reality that no, not every perspective is equally valid.”
“Not every person is equally smart. Not every religion is equally deserving of respect. And in that sense, the world she imagined is the world we now live in. Because we’re there.
“In Mania, the institutions don’t just affirm nonsense — they punish dissent. The protagonist nearly loses custody of her children for using the word “stupid” at home. Surgeons are hired without reference to qualifications. Elite universities switch to lottery admissions in the name of fairness. And when people express concern, they’re told they’re bigots. Or worse, deniers.”
WHY HOLLY DEVOTED HER COLUMN TO MANIA
Why did Holly write such a column?
After all, she describes herself as a “a math nerd.” Her Substack column is billed as covering “math lessons, creativity, deafness, drawing, painting, PTSD, personal reflections.” It mostly focuses on “How to Not Suck at Math” and her creative writing series – but occasionally Holly will focus on how aspects of today’s politics and culture undermine the teaching of math, respect for knowledge and the importance of independent thinking and individual liberty.
The latter helps explain why Holly has taken the themes of Mania to heart.
“The scariest part of her novel wasn’t the language-policing or the institutional cowardice. It was the sense that society had quietly, collectively agreed to pretend. To affirm things everyone knew weren’t true. To nod along with the delusion, because the punishment for reality was too high.
“We’re pretending again. Pretending that earned authority means nothing, that vibes trump expertise and experience,” she said.
“…That’s what haunts me about Mania. The sheer volume of things it got right — not just the parody, but the progression. The way good intentions turned to rules, rules turned to punishment, and punishment turned to madness.”
HIRSI ALI’S INTERVIEW WITH SHRIVER
In podcast Episode 12 of her Courage.Media website, Hirsi Ali hailed Shriver as an “outspoken critic of what she calls the ‘culture police’ – people in literary circles who have determined which subjects are allowed in print, and who is allowed to cover them.”
The podcast, titled “Fighting Back Against the Literary Mob,” also has a subtitle: “There Is Universal Cowardice at the Top of the Publishing World.”
In the interview, Shriver explains “how professional cowardice at the top of the publishing world has allowed younger employees to gain undue influence over the industry and punish authors” – including anyone who doesn’t conform to their (predominantly progressive-left) worldview.
“The people on the side of the censors constitute the majority of the so-called literary community. It’s taken as a cultural given by that majority that to offend anyone is an outrage and they should be silenced,” Shriver said in the interview.
There’s always somebody out there who will take offense, she added.
“You cannot have freedom of speech with that kind of restriction.”
Intriguingly, Shriver discussed her own coming of age and how it’s shaped her views.
“I didn’t come of age as a writer in that kind of atmosphere. When I grew up in the 1960s, the attitude was ‘let it all hang out.’ The sixties were all about free expression, the throwing off of rules,” she said. “Back then, it was the conservatives who were oppressive. We didn’t even have the term canceled back then.”
WHY IS SHRIVER STILL GETTING PUBLISHED?
Hirsi Ali asked Shriver a good question: If so many writers and others are excluded from publishing and public discourse because of an insular, fearful, conformist and illiberal orthodoxy, then why is Shriver still getting published?
“I get away with what I get away with for a couple of reasons. One is I’ve been around for a long time. I’m established. But also because I happen to have a publisher who has some guts,” Shriver said.
“It doesn’t mean the staff of HarperCollins doesn’t disagree with me, especially about the nonfiction, or don’t have reservations about my novels. But they have a commitment to publishing a spectrum of opinion. You don’t get checked at the door for your ideological credentials… This is one of the big-five publishers who will still publish a big range of writers.”
“One explanation for how and why we’ve got where we are in publishing is complete capitulation and cowardice to younger staff. You’d think they’d have no power and get fired. But they’ve actually started running the places.”
Another question Hirsi Ali asks: Why has a suffocating blanket of conformity, anti-intellectuality and cancellation descended upon most publishers?
“It has to do with social media, reputation and the desire to make people happy,” Shriver said. “My protagonist, like me by sheer coincidence (she laughs), doesn’t have the conformity gene, so she thinks the Mental-Parity movement is a load of nonsense.
While Shriver agreed to some extent with Hirsi Ali that her novel’s scenario and theme metaphorically apply to the delusional extremes of the DEI movement and climate-change’s most pseudo-scientific claims of alarmism, she points to another current trend and movement as more relevant.
“My Mental Parity movement has the most kinship with the trans movement, because you can’t change your sex. It’s impossible, because it’s written in every cell of your body. and is in defiance of reality,” she said.
WHAT SPARKED HIRSI ALI’S INTEREST IN SHRIVER AND MANIA?
Hirsi Ali’s life and focus illuminates why she found Mania of such great interest and wanted to interview Shriver.
Hirsi Ali, a former member of the House of Representatives of the Netherlands who grew up as a Muslim in Somalia, has became internationally known as a consistent critic of all authoritarian political or religious systems. Her bestselling books include Infidel: My Life (2007), Nomad: From Islam to America (2010) and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015).
She received political asylum in the Netherlands after growing up under the communist and fundamentalist-Islamic government of Somalia, which imprisoned her father and forced her as a child to undergo female genital mutilation despite opposition from her father.
While serving in the Dutch parliament, Ali collaborated with Theo Van Gogh on Submission, a short documentary film depicting the oppression of women under fundamentalist Islamic law. The 2004 film sparked death threats and the assassination of Van Gogh, driving Hirsi Ali into hiding.
Recognizing Hirsi Ali’s courage and wide influence in standing up for individual rights and liberties, Time magazine named her in 2005 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
She continues to have an impact as a writer, columnist and podcaster on her website Courage.Media, which is “dedicated to creating a platform for open and fearless dialogue, challenging dominant narratives that hinder truth and intellectual debate. By fostering a space for courageous conversations, we aim to defend core Western values, such as free speech, individual liberty, and the importance of informed discourse….
We are committed to addressing pressing cultural, political, and ideological issues, advocating for solutions that restore societal cohesion, and promoting a more resilient, truth-driven society. At Courage.Media, we emphasize the need to question and confront dangerous ideologies to protect and strengthen our shared values…. and (promote) a more resilient, truth-driven society.”
Coming up in this Best Novel finalist series: Posts on author Danny King’s podcast interview about Cancelled, and how the late Michael Flynn has been recognized with positive reviews for his final, posthumous novel In the Belly of the Whale.
Editor’s note: The Prometheus Blog strives to report widely on all Prometheus-recognized fiction and authors, especially if and when their work is referenced in the popular culture in newspapers, magazines, columns and debates.
If you know about such references – whether in columns, podcasts, interviews, commentary or positive reviews – please bring them to our attention right away, so we can highlight them in a timely fashion.
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