{"id":1135,"date":"2019-10-10T15:44:02","date_gmt":"2019-10-10T20:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lfs.org\/blog\/?p=1135"},"modified":"2024-05-11T14:47:39","modified_gmt":"2024-05-11T19:47:39","slug":"40th-anniversary-celebration-an-appreciation-of-j-neil-schulmans-the-rainbow-cadenza-the-1984-prometheus-best-novel-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/40th-anniversary-celebration-an-appreciation-of-j-neil-schulmans-the-rainbow-cadenza-the-1984-prometheus-best-novel-winner\/","title":{"rendered":"Artistic freedom, creativity, conscription and gay marriage: An Appreciation of J. Neil Schulman\u2019s The Rainbow Cadenza, the 1984 Prometheus Best Novel winner"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Libertarian Futurist Society’s ongoing Appreciation series strives to make clear what LFS members and other libertarian sf\/fantasy fans see in each of our past winners and how each fit the Prometheus award’s distinctive focus on Liberty vs. Power. Here\u2019s our Appreciation for J. Neil Schulman\u2019s The Rainbow Cadenza,<\/em>\u00a0the 1984 Prometheus Best Novel winner:<\/em><\/p>\n

Romantic and passionate, J. Neil Schulman\u2019s The Rainbow Cadenza<\/em> explores the power of art, the thirst for creativity and the threat to such individuality and self-expression in a future Brave New World dominated by one world government.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nSchulman was prescient and years ahead of his time in envisioning a positive future where gay marriage is normal and legal.
\nYet, his complex story portrays a very mixed and disconcerting dystopian future where teenage women are drafted into government prostitution service for three years, clones are treated as inferior and a new underclass called Touchables are hunted for sport.<\/p>\n


\nSchulman posits those among the unexpected and authoritarian consequences of a disturbing future in which men drastically outnumber women, with seven males to every female on Earth. The imbalance was the result of a new pharmacy drug, Adamine, which allows men to ensure that any offspring they may have will only be male \u2013 and a choice predominantly made by men around the world, especially in patriarchal cultures.\u00a0 Among the horrific long-term unanticipated consequences for societies around the world, including the U.S., is a normalized rape epidemic.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
J. Neil Schulman in 2017 (Photo by Arturo Ruggeroli. Creative Commons photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yet, further social, political and pharmalogical developments eventually undercut that society and rebalanced the sexes, ushering in an era that in many ways seems at first blush to be utopian. But is it?<\/p>\n

At the emotional core of Schulman’s path-breaking 1984 novel<\/a> and what makes it inspiring for freedom-lovers amid its dystopian darkness, is the heroic battle for self-determination by women, especially a brilliant young woman artist who works within the new genre of laser concerts.<\/p>\n

Still traumatized by a murder she witnessed as a child, the artist Eleanor \u00a0\u2013 who has a complicated relationship with her self-conceived twin daughter Vera – is torn between her desire to play music and pressures to become a plaything for male desires in a male-dominated society where men outnumber women seven to one.<\/p>\n

Schulman weaves in libertarian feminist themes and dramatizes them with heroic feminist characters:
\n\u201cVera was to have been Eleanor\u2019s reply both to her grandparents \u2013 now living in the colonies \u2013 and to her own society. Eleanor had given Vera the opportunity and the encouragement to sample the world\u2019s culture \u2013 to choose an ascending path for herself \u2013 and to demonstrate to the world that a mind and a spirit in a female body could equal or better any accomplishment a mind and a spirit in a male body could achieve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the artist\u2019s struggle for independence amid her woundedness as well as the fascinating portrait of her artistry in a new medium underlines the evils and horrors of government control in a darkly cautionary tale about real trouble in an alleged \u201cparadise\u201d where even libertarian ideology has become corrupted by one-party rule.<\/p>\n

* Read another Appreciation<\/strong> <\/a>of The Rainbow Cadenza<\/em> by Michael Grossberg, originally published as an essay afterword to the first paperback edition.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Note:\u00a0<\/strong>Schulman (1953-2019) also won a Prometheus Hall of Fame award for his novel Alongside Night<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

His novel Escape From Heaven<\/em><\/a> was a Best Novel finalist in 2003. Most recently, Schulman’s novel The Fractal Man<\/em><\/a> was a Best Novel finalist in 2019.<\/p>\n

* See related introductory essay<\/strong> <\/a>about the LFS\u2019 40th<\/sup>anniversary retrospective series of Appreciations of past Prometheus Awards winners, with an overview of the awards\u2019 four-decade history.<\/p>\n

* Read the Prometheus blog’s obit notice<\/strong><\/a> for Schulman, who died in August, 2019.<\/p>\n

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS:<\/strong><\/p>\n

* Prometheus winners:\u00a0<\/strong>For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees \u2013 including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the enhanced\u00a0Prometheus Awards page<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>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\u2019 distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

* Read \u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/strong><\/a>an essay in the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/em>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Watch <\/strong>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\u2019s\u00a0Video page.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society\u2019s Facebook page<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Join us! <\/em><\/strong>To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, \u00a0join<\/a>the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s rights, individuality and human dignity.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Libertarian Futurist Society’s ongoing Appreciation series strives to make clear what LFS members and other libertarian sf\/fantasy fans see in each of our past winners and how each fit the Prometheus award’s distinctive focus on Liberty vs. Power. Here\u2019s our Appreciation for J. Neil Schulman\u2019s The Rainbow Cadenza,\u00a0the 1984 Prometheus Best Novel winner: Romantic … Continue reading Artistic freedom, creativity, conscription and gay marriage: An Appreciation of J. Neil Schulman\u2019s The Rainbow Cadenza, the 1984 Prometheus Best Novel winner<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[43,159,2353,8],"tags":[65,1276,1279,1277,23,1280,1278,46,131],"class_list":["post-1135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appreciations","category-best-novels","category-book-reviews","category-review","tag-alongside-night","tag-draft","tag-gay-marriage","tag-gay-rights","tag-j-neil-schulman","tag-legalized-prostitution","tag-libertarian-feminism","tag-prometheus-awards","tag-the-rainbow-cadenza"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-ij","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7575,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions\/7575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}