Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Day Before the Revolution has been highlighted and recommended by Reactor Magazine among “five SF stories in which hope survives.”
The story, available in the Le Guin short-story collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, should be of interested to LFS members and other freedom-loving SF/fantasy fans because it’s considered a sequel to Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, an early Prometheus Hall of Fame winner.
“Science fiction has the power to remind us that hope is valuable, and necessary,” James Davis Nicoll wrote in the Reactor column.
That insight, and sentiment, rings true to Prometheus Awards voters and fans. After all, our award in part aims to recognize worthy works of speculative fiction that in many cases do remind us that even amid troubled times and authoritarian societies, better and freer futures remain possible.
Le Guin’s story was published in 1974, the same year as The Dispossessed, which was inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 1993 after several years of debate and controversy.
Here is how Nicoll describes the story:
“Laia lives on a distant, isolated world populated by humans (of a lightly furred sort). She believes passionately in Odonianism, an anarchist political philosophy akin to the teachings of Earth’s Kropotkin or Goldman. The society around her does not find Odo persuasive. The government hasn’t either. Laia has often been a political prisoner.”
“Her fellow Odonians revere Laia, which she finds disconcerting. Following a leader is not consistent with Odo’s teachings. But there is some hope: news arrives of successful revolution in distant Thu. Not every society is deaf to Odo.”
Nicoll, who wrote the then TOR.com (now Reactor) story in 2019 celebrating the “remarkable” and “rewarding” range of Prometheus Awards winners on its 40th anniversary, is known for his insightful TOR/Reactor commentary on science fiction and fantasy.
Thus, it’s not surprising to read Nicoll’s apt and penetrating analysis of The Dispossessed, and how it fits in so well with The Day Before the Revolution.
“(The Dispossessed) is set partially on an Odonian moon colony, partially in Thu. It’s very clear that Anarres, the moon society, hasn’t turned out quite as Laia or Odo had hoped. Hence the novel’s subtitle, “an ambiguous utopia.” Nevertheless, the novel makes it clear that Anarres is a much better place to be poor (as everyone there is by Thuvian standards) than is Thu. Laia’s hopes have been to great extent fulfilled,” Nicoll writes.
The other four SF works that Nicoll selected to highlight include Lisa Goldstein’s A Mask for the General, Norman Spinrad’s Child of Fortune, Pat Murphy’s The City, Not Long After and Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless.
Spinrad, by the way, has been nominated three times for a Prometheus Award – including for Best Novel, both in 1982, for A World Between and Song From the Stars; and for the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction in the 1990s for Agent of Chaos (an anti-state, anarchistic novel that might be due for re-examination and renomination.)
* Read the Prometheus Blog Appreciation essay-review of The Dispossessed.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS:
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including 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, which now includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* 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.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies (including the recent 2023 ceremony with inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freer and Sarah Hoyt), Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.
* 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 association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters. We understand that the arts and literature can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future – and in some ways can be even more 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.
Through recognizing the literature of liberty and the many different but complementary visions of a free future via the Prometheus Awards, the LFS hopes to help spread ideas, humane ideals and ethical principles that help humanity overcome tyranny, end slavery, reduce the threat of war, repeal or constrain other abuses of coercive power and achieve universal liberty, respect for human rights and a better world (perhaps ultimately, worlds) for all.
It seems as if Nicoll may be reading hastily and a little carelessly. In The Dispossessed, the country Shevek visits on Urras is not Thu but A-Io, the country that is “capitalist” (and somewhat feudalist) rather than “communist/state socialist” (as is Thu). As for “The Day before the Revolution,” the founder of Urras’s anarchist movement’s full name was Laia Asieio Odo, so “Laia” and “Odo” presumably refer to the same person, and Odonianism is the movement she founded. The phrase about “Laia or Odo” makes it seem that Nicoll didn’t grasp that.