By William H. Stoddard<\/a> and Michael Grossberg<\/a><\/strong> Set in the 761st\u00a0<\/sup>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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t remember. Kingsbury accomplishes something highly unusual in fiction by conveying dramatically the limits of centralized knowledge, and the impossibility of government central planning, as demonstrated by the Austrian-school economist Ludwig von Mises, while evoking Nobel-Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek\u2019s pivotal insights making an efficacious case for the spontaneous order of the marketplace over State centralization.<\/p>\n Asimov imagined psychohistorians whose new science enabled them to guide a galactic empire \u2013 a futuristic update of the similarly utopian and collectivist\/elite visions that have led humanity astray from Plato\u2019s The\u00a0Republic\u00a0<\/em>and More\u2019s Utopia <\/em>to Marx\u2019s <\/em>pseudo-scientific socialism.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0This brilliant novel explodes the technocratic fallacy that such vastly dispersed knowledge can be centralized or that such control can remain benevolent.<\/p>\n Kingsbury shows a civilization bent on achieving utopia through predictive social science confronted with unmanageable forces as its people seek the power to predict and create their own futures.<\/p>\n Note: Kingsbury also won Prometheus recognition in 2016 when his 1982 novel Courtship Rite\u00a0<\/em>was inducted into the Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n * Coming up soon on the Prometheus Blog:\u00a0<\/strong>A 40th<\/sup>Anniversary Celebration and appreciation of the next novel to be recognized with a Prometheus Award: Terry Pratchett\u2019s Night Watch<\/em>, the 2003 winner for Best Novel.<\/p>\n * See related introductory essay<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>about the LFS\u2019s 40th<\/sup>anniversary retrospective series of Appreciations of past Prometheus Awards winners, with an overview of the awards\u2019 four-decade history.<\/p>\n * Other Prometheus winners:\u00a0<\/strong>For a full list of winners \u2013 for the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the recently updated and enhanced Prometheus Awards page<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>on the LFS website.<\/p>\n * Join us<\/strong>! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards, join<\/strong> <\/a>the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), a non-profit volunteer association of libertarian sf\/fantasy fans and freedom-lovers. 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\u2019re continuing in 2020 to present a series of weekly Appreciations of Prometheus Award-winners, … Continue reading Galactic empires, central planning & the technocratic fallacy: An Appreciation of Donald Kingsbury\u2019s Psychohistorical Crisis, the 2002 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],"tags":[336,337,334,332,50,129,338,339,333,340,335],"class_list":["post-1405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appreciations","category-best-novels","tag-civilization","tag-collapse","tag-courtship-rite","tag-donald-kingsbury","tag-friedrich-hayek","tag-ludwig-von-mises","tag-marx","tag-plato","tag-psychohistorical-crisis","tag-the-republic","tag-utopia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-mF","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405","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=1405"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2454,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405\/revisions\/2454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Donald Kingsbury\u2019s Psychohistorical Crisis,\u00a0<\/em>an expansion of the Canadian-American sf writer\u2019s 1995 novella \u201cHistorical Crisis,\u201d reimagines and critiques the statist and technocratic assumptions of Isaac Asimov\u2019s classic Foundation <\/em>series.
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lfs.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/0-Psychohistorical-Crisis-00_-222x300.jpg?resize=222%2C300&ssl=1\")
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\nAs a penalty, he must give up his \u201cfam\u201d or personal familiar, which enhances every part of his daily life in the complex society via a device plugged into his brain.<\/p>\n
\nLibertarian futurists believe cultural change is as vital as political change (and often more fun!) in achieving universal individual rights and a better world (perhaps eventually, worlds) for all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"