Now retired but with some important life lessons and insights to share, Rick Triplett has worked for the cause of liberty in many ways over many decades – including as a Prometheus judge, reviewer and board member in the Libertarian Futurist Society.
Here’s the fifth and final part of the Prometheus Blog interview with Rick, recently honored by the LFS board as the LFS’s first Emeritus member:
Q: What role can fiction play in helping to form the future or inspire people with new visions of a free-er future?
A:I think fiction is where big ideas are popularized and gain broad acceptance. We’ll always need intellectuals and polemicists to lay the theoretical groundwork of the movement, but we need novelists, screenwriters, and lyricists to get those ideas into the popular culture.
The abolitionist movement made slow but steady progress over generations through pamphleteering, but it was the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin that provided the tipping point.
Q: Can novels, whether science fiction and fantasy or other genres, actually educate and raise awareness? Or is that utopian wishful thinking?
A: Science fiction continues to inspire readers to look beyond their boundaries, and this is an important contribution to education.
But I no longer think education will or even can deal with the ancient penchant for using force to get your way. Education slows the destruction of civilization, but human nature eventually prevails, societies become hierarchies of power, and Rome falls yet again. We need a product that will effectively out-compete coercion.
Q: LFS outreach flyers, posters and ads often describe the Libertarian Futurist Society as a nonprofit international group of freedom-loving science fiction/fantasy fans who believe “cultural change is as vital as political change in achieving freedom and justice for all.” How important is that focus, in this era when almost everything seems to have become politicized, partisan and subject to tribal pressures to demonize the “Other”?
A: The term “nonprofit” is a legal classification of little consequence and is a slur to most libertarians, for we profit by slowing the trend toward the centralization of power.
But I agree that cultural change is vital. In our highly politicized society political change is exigent but largely a lost cause: The “bad guys” have won because humans, generally, are not a very civilized species; ease, sex, money, and power lure us away from long-term thinking.
Q: You’ve written quite a few reviews of Prometheus-nominated novels over the decades – and have written a review, soon to be posted on the Prometheus blog, of Wil McCarthy’s 2024 novel Beggar’s Sky, a sequel to Rich Man’s Sky, the 2022 Prometheus Best Novel winner.
You also have written reviews of many novels for Prometheus, the LFS’ former printed quarterly that preceded the blog (and whose back issues and reviews are still available to read on the LFS website’s newsletter index page).
Among the Prometheus Best Novel nominees that you reviewed: Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson’s Variable Star, L. Neil Smith’s uncensored and revised 2005 edition of his Best Novel finalist Tom Paine Maru, Michael Z. Williamson’s The Weapon, F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack novel Infernal, Orson Scott Card’s Empire, Claire Wolf and Aaron Zelman’s Rebelfire: Out of the Grey Zone, Walter Mosley’s 47, and Tobias Buckell’s Ragamuffin.
What are the challenges and pleasures of reviewing freedom-loving sf and fantasy for fellow freedom lovers?
A: I’d say those challenges and pleasures are a mix of daunting and exhilarating. Reviewers sort through a lot of chaff to get to the wheat.
Material that gets low marks is either poorly written or amateurishly conceived, and reading a few of theses to get to one that inspires can take a toll on one’s spirit. But those inspirational ones also restore our hope in the future; and though they may not map out a path to utopia, they provide hints and constantly assure that our dreams are worth dreaming.
Q: You and your wife Tennie (who passed in 2017) were among the LFS members fortunate to attend the first LFScon, held at and within Columbus’ Marcon sf/fantasy/media convention in 2001 and with a large number of Prometheus-winning novelists as Marcon/LFScon guests of honor (including Vernor Vinge, F. Paul Wilson, James P. Hogan, L. Neil Smith, Victor Koman, Victor Milan, J. Neil Schulman and Brad Linaweaver.)
What did that LFScon experience mean to you?
A: It meant a lot to both of us; it was a joy we could share. Having a partner with largely overlapping values is important to friendship, and what is marriage but a sexy friendship?
I could not talk to her about differential equations and she could not talk to me about fashion; but we agreed that government was too intrusive into people’s lives, and we were delighted to mix with other civilized folks; civilized, after all, means fit to live in the company of others.
* Check out Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four of the Prometheus Blog interview with Rick Triplett.
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, jointhe 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, individuality and human dignity.
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 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.
I finally got a chance to sit down and read this series – and what a great little window into a BIG subject this was! Kudos to Rick Triplett for being the kind of aikido-wielding warrior the world needs, and thanks to Michael Grossberg for bring us the stories of these Literary Wonderkins!