Tag: utopia

Review: Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe is Buried offers realistic cautionary tale about AIs, oppression and resistance

By Michael Grossberg

Today, it seems like nearly everyone is caught up in either utopian dreams or dystopian nightmares about AI. It feels like it’s almost gotten to the point where you can’t pick up a science fiction story or watch SF on the large or small screens without coming across exaggerated scenarios projecting humanity’s highest hopes or worst fears about what may be coming in artificial intelligence.

Where the Axe is Buried, one of 14 works nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel, takes a more intelligent, balanced, nuanced and realistic view of such possibilities.

Where all too often such AI-themed novels uncritically embrace one extreme or the other, Ray Nayler’s post-apocalyptic utopian/dystopian tale probes both scenarios from an anti-authoritarian, very human and humane perspective. His novel is notable for finding both extremes lacking from the standpoints of community, common decency and personal liberty.

In a gripping but sobering narrative highlighting libertarian themes of resistance to tyranny and human endurance under oppression, Nayler ultimately rejects such wishful social engineering as an unattractive prescription for suffering and stagnation.

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“Propertarians,” anarchism, socialism and ambiguous utopias: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the 1993 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner for Best Classic Fiction

To highlight the Prometheus Awards’ four-decade history and make clear why each winner deserves recognition as a notable pro-freedom work, the Libertarian Futurist Society began publishing in 2019 an Appreciation series of all past award-winners.

Here’s an Appreciation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the 1993 inductee into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction (and perhaps the most controversial work to ever be inducted into the Hall of Fame.)

By Michael Grossberg
Two alleged utopias are explored and contrasted in The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel about a rebel who leaves one world for the other.

As befits any intelligent observer of the 20th and 21st century who must take into account the emergence of dystopian fiction as a major subgenre in response to the authoritarian and collectivist horrors of socialism, communism, national socialism and fascism in Russia, China, Germany, Italy and elsewhere, Le Guin underlines her complex theme by subtitling her novel “An Ambiguous Utopia.”

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Galactic empires, central planning & the technocratic fallacy: An Appreciation of Donald Kingsbury’s Psychohistorical Crisis, the 2002 Prometheus Best Novel winner

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society began celebrating in 2019, and to make clear what libertarian futurists saw in each of our past winners that made them deserve recognition as pro-freedom sf/fantasy, we’re continuing in 2020 to present a series of weekly Appreciations of Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our first category for Best Novel.

Here’s the latest Appreciation for Donald Kingsbury’s Psychohistorical Crisis, the 2002 Prometheus winner for Best Novel:

By William H. Stoddard and Michael Grossberg
    Donald Kingsbury’s Psychohistorical Crisis, an expansion of the Canadian-American sf writer’s 1995 novella “Historical Crisis,” reimagines and critiques the statist and technocratic assumptions of Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation series.

Set in the 761st century, long after the events of that series, as the galactic empire is failing, the clever, complex and suspenseful 2001 novel offers a perceptive and implicitly libertarian critique of Asimov’s books, especially their determinism and political centralization.

At the center of the vast landscape of the Second Galactic Empire, which has spread to millions of worlds throughout the Milky Way galaxy but without any nonhuman intelligences except for genetically enhanced talking dogs, is a 30-year-old psychohistorian who committed a crime he can’t remember.
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