J. Kenton Pierce’s A Kiss for Damocles is a compellingly readable work of science fiction. It offers its readers an inherently dramatic situation: The struggle to survive and rebuild civilization in the aftermath of an apocalyptic war.
To add tension, remnants of the other side still linger, in the form of orbital systems waiting to strike down any resurgence of advanced technology.
Pierce’s setting is a distant planet, Hesperides, in whose skies the core of the galaxy can apparently be seen much more clearly than from Earth—which suggests superluminal travel, though no one in the novel seems to have it. There are two sapient races, humans and Imps, who seem to be smaller and more aggressive.
REALISTIC TECHNOLOGY
Other than this, there’s no technology that exceeds the limits of realistic speculation. There are references to nanos, which apparently can keep functioning for generations and have a lot of medical functions; they apparently use little enough power so they can’t be detected from orbit. Other than that, the technology seems to be fairly simple things, such as superior alloys, plastic explosives, fullerenes, and spring-powered missile weapons.
There’s a hinted at backstory in which a Terran Commonwealth was attacked by an interstellar power called Mutual Prosperity, but we don’t get a full history. Earth’s history seems to have turned into legend, judging by references to Scheherazade and Tomoe Gozen that don’t fit the stories we have about them.
A VITAL CULTURE
However, these stories play a vital part in maintaining the culture of Hesperides. So do more recent stories such as the account of the Watchful Mother, a woman who stayed in orbit to help preserve human society on the ground. One of the running themes of this book is piety in the Roman sense: respect for those who came before.
The society of survivors, a century or two later, seems to be made up of homesteads and a few towns. The initial setting, Twelvety Homestead, is based in an old iron mine, now carefully camouflaged. The people who live in it seem to be organized something like a large extended family.
FREE TRADING AMONG TOWNS AND HOMESTEADERS
A certain amount of trade takes place between homesteads, but towns are the main sites for market activity. There are also groups without fixed geographical bases: the Gentle Walkers, who seem to be something like a religious order, and the Riders, apparently a band of patrollers somewhat like Tolkien’s Rangers (also inhabitants of a depopulated land created by massively destructive wars).
What there isn’t is a system of centralized authority. Instead, Pierce examines how people survive without one, relying on customary law and on market transactions, under conditions of extreme scarcity.
SHAI, A COMPELLING CENTRAL CHARACTER
This novel’s viewpoint character, Shaifennen te’ Freydis-Daitte Roehe, or “Shai,” seems to be a girl in her early to mid teens, but one who, under the hard conditions of her society, is already being entrusted with serious responsibilities—starting with leading a foraging party going out to investigate relics of the higher-tech past. The relics turn out to be a major find that promises substantial economic advances both to Twelvety Homestead and to the planetary society. The consequences of that discovery drive most of Pierce’s plot.
A Kiss for Damocles doesn’t seem to be quite a young adult novel in the current style. But it’s a lot like the older juvenile science fiction of writers such as Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton. Its issues aren’t Shai’s alienation from a dystopian society, but her struggle for practical, pro-survival goals, on one hand, and the long-term project of rebuilding a viable planetary economy, on the other.
IMPORTANT LIBERTARIAN ISSUES
And an issue that emerges from these is the threat of local authorities using more advanced technology as a resources for dominating other communities. All of these are important libertarian issues, at a level more basic than legislation and government policy.
These themes make A Kiss for Damocles, one of 14 works nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel, worth reading. But it’s also worth reading for its lively prose style; for its complex world-building and its ability to bring its fictional history to life; and for its characterization, especially of Shai, a complex and engaging figure with a lot of agency.
(Frequent Prometheus Blog reviewer William H. Stoddard is president of the Libertarian Futurist Society.)
ABOUT THE LFS AND THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
* 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 international association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and 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, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in 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. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of the 106 works that have won a Prometheus since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* 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.
* 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.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
A Kiss For Damocles is, indeed, a wonderful book.