British publisher backtracks, “saves” Roald Dahl’s uncut classics (but don’t breathe sighs of relief just yet)

By Michael Grossberg

Good news for lovers of liberty, culture and artistic integrity: Matilda, The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Roald Dahl’s other children’s classics will continue to be published and reprinted in their original uncensored forms.

That sudden and welcome reversal (see our previous blog post) is thanks to a remarkably wide range of principled and thoughtful responses from across the political spectrum objecting to the plans by the late great Dahl’s cowardly and conformist British publisher to bowdlerize his bestselling children’s classics in doctored reprints.

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The rise of the Therapeutic State: Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, the 1992 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner

To make clear why each winner deserves recognition as a pro-freedom work, the Libertarian Futurist Society is publishing an Appreciation series of all past award-winners. Here’s our appreciation for Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, the 1992 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner:

By Michael Grossberg

Bestselling novelist Ira Levin may be best remembered for genre novels and plays adapted into quite a few popular movies.

Among them: Rosemary’s Baby (modern horror), The Stepford Wives (satirical feminist horror-fantasy), The Boys from Brazil (conspiratorial political-spi medical-genetics thriller), A Kiss Before Dying (romantic crime drama), and Deathtrap (mystery-comedy), his long-running Broadway play.

Yet, one of Levin’s least-known novels, This Perfect Day, may rank among his best. (It’s also one of the few Levin novels left that hasn’t yet been adapted into a Hollywood movie. Hint, hint….)

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A 40th Anniversary Retrospective: Introducing a Reader’s Guide to the Prometheus Award Winners

By Michael Grossberg

To highlight and honor the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we are providing a reader’s guide with capsule Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with the Best Novel category.

If you’ve ever wondered why a particular work of fiction has been recognized with a Prometheus Award and what libertarian sf fans see in these award-winning works, then our upcoming series of Appreciations should be must reading – as well as informative and illuminating!

Or, if you’re simply  looking for something enjoyable and stimulating to read within the realm of science fiction and fantasy, which also illuminates abiding questions about the perennial tensions between Liberty and Power, an excellent place to begin is with this recommended reading list of award-winning fiction (to be published here on a regular weekly (or biweekly) schedule, starting now (September 2019).

These capsule appreciations are being written and edited by LFS members (including LFS founder Michael Grossberg, LFS President William H. Stoddard, and veteran LFS leaders and board members Chris Hibbert, Tom Jackson, Anders Monsen, Eric Raymond, and others). In a few cases, the Appreciations will be based in part on reviews printed in the Prometheus quarterly (1982-2016) or the Prometheus blog (2017-today).

Since 1979, a wide array of novels, novellas, stories, films, TV series and other works of fiction have won Prometheus awards by highlighting in fascinatingly different ways the value of voluntary social cooperation over institutionalized State coercion, the importance of respecting human rights (even for that smallest minority, the individual), and the evils of tyranny (whether on the Left or the Right).


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