Guess what world-famous billionaire has revealed that Robert Heinlein’s libertarian sf classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was his favorite novel while growing up?
Hint: The billionaire praises the novel, one of the earliest and best known Prometheus Award winners, on his blog.
“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with science fiction… The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a particular favorite,” he writes.
(Make your guess before clicking on to the next page to see the answer…)
By Michael Grossberg
The sympathetic character at the center of Klara and the Sun is profoundly human in her caring, determination, curiosity, loyalty and observant intelligence.
And yet, Klara is an artificial being, an android branded and sold as an Artificial Friend in Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel, one of five 2022 Prometheus Best Novel finalists.
Set a generation or two into the future and strictly told from the highly limited point of view of Klara, the novel never fully answers the question of whether Klara has achieved full self-awareness (and thus should be treated as a person with rights.)
Yet, Ishiguro carefully drops enough clues and hints to make Klara and the Sun both a tantalizingly ambiguous mystery about the threshold of full consciousness and a haunting meta-libertarian parable about the foundations of rights and the tragedy that can occur when basic “humanity” and basic rights go unrecognized.
By Michael Grossberg
Almost three quarters of a century after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the influence and prophetic power of George Orwell hasn’t faded.
Quite the contrary.
With the rise of “cancel culture” and various online-sparked mob panics increasingly common in our so-called enlightened modern era and with such dystopian experiments as the recent failed roll-out of the current administration’s “Disinformation Governance Board,” it’s become virtually impossible to read informed commentary across a broad spectrum of opinion magazines and columnists without coming across Orwellian references and warnings these days.
Rich Man’s Sky, one of five 2022 Best Novel finalists currently competing for the Prometheus Award, will have a sequel.
Actually, two!
Continue reading Author update: Wil McCarthy writing sequels to Best Novel finalist Rich Man’s Sky
Author Karl K. Gallagher, a frequent Prometheus Awards nominee and Best Novel finalist, is keeping busy and catching up with an ambitious writing schedule – including a new novel just published: Captain Trader Helmsman Spy.
This is the fourth novel in the Fall of the Censor series for the Texas-based writer, currently a 2022 Best Novel finalist for two different novels (the second and third) in that series.
Captain Trader Helmsman Spy, published May 9, 2022 by Kelt Haven Press, focuses on an exploratory mission to gather more information about the authoritarian Censorate in the ongoing series about a complex interstellar conflict between two long-separated but newly connected sets of human-colonized solar systems – one relatively free and peaceful, blending diverse cultures through mutual trade, and the other near-totalitarian in its murderous control of many planets and Orwellian cancellation of history and culture.
Continue reading Author update: Karl K. Gallagher continues writing his Fall of the Censor series
Libertarianism and science fiction have been closely connected since their early history, a rich topic often explored here on the Prometheus Blog.
Libertarian sf fan Tom Jackson explores their connections anew in his recently published essay “Heinlein’s Children: Libertarians in fandom.”
Published in “Portable Storage,” William Brieding’s sf fanzine, Jackson’s interesting and historically knowledgeable article offers a very readable introduction to the subject for the fanzine’s “The Great Sercon Issue Part One.”
Continue reading Heinlein’s Children: Tom Jackson’s fanzine essay on libertarians in sf fandom
Maverick American-British writer Lionel Shriver has been recognized – again – in the Prometheus Awards.
First nominated in 2017 for The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, which went on to become a Best Novel finalist, Shriver has been recognized as one of five 2022 Best Novel finalists for her novel Should We Stay Or Should We Go.
Wil McCarthy has developed a reputation as one of today’s most imaginative, zestful, pro-science and realistic science-fiction writers.
His 11 novels and additional stories blend a Heinlein-esque flair for action and adventure with hard-science extrapolations, plausible futuristic scenarios and interesting characters.
And yet, McCarthy has never been recognized or nominated for a Prometheus Award – until this year.
McCarthy was nominated for the first time for Rich Man’s Sky, recently named by Libertarian Futurist Society judges one of five Best Novel finalists. The fast-paced 2021 novel dramatizes a near-future space race led by a group of four quite different billionaires.
Continue reading Meet the author: Wil McCarthy, a Best Novel finalist for Rich Man’s Sky
For only the third time in the 43-year history of the Prometheus Awards, one author has been recognized twice within one year as a Best Novel finalist.
That’s Karl K. Gallagher, whose 2022 finalists include Between Home and Ruin and Seize What’s Held Dear, respectively the second and third novels in his Fall of the Censor series.
A Nobel-Prize-winning author has written a novel chosen as a Best Novel finalist – a notable and interesting intersection of two literary awards with quite different focuses.
Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, writes mostly “mainstream” fiction that often conveys a wistful sense of loss and missed connections.
Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro’s latest novel about the ambiguous status of an intelligent and curious A.F. (Artificial Friend), was recently named by Libertarian Futurist Society judges as one of five 2022 Best Novel finalists.
