Freshly exploring utopian and dystopian themes, Salt contrasts an anarchist community and its statist neighbor on a harsh desert planet.
Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Adam Roberts’ science fiction novel illuminates how customs, attitudes and ideologies on both sides spark mutual misunderstandings and accelerating conflicts.
A finalist for the next Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction, Robert’s cautionary tale invites us to question our deepest assumptions about freedom.
Here is the Prometheus Blog Appreciation of Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite, the 2016 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner for Best Classic Fiction.
As an opening epigraph in Glory Road, Robert Heinlein quotes some lines by Bernard Shaw that include the sentence “He is a barbarian, and thinks the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.” One of the things science fiction can do for its readers is to jar us out of such complacency, by portraying worlds with customs other than ours – not utopias or dystopias, but heterotopias, “other places.” Donald M. Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite is one of the great heterotopias.
