By William H. Stoddard<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n The year 2008 saw, for the first time, a tie between two Prometheus Award nominees for Best Novel: Harry Turtledove’s The Gladiator\u00a0<\/em>(in his Crosstime Traffic series from Tor Books) and Jo Walton’s Ha’Penny\u00a0<\/em>(in her Small Change series, also from Tor Books).<\/p>\n Ordinarily, each winner would merit its own entry; but there are interesting parallels between the two, which make it especially fitting that they shared the award, and illuminating to examine them together. Turtledove has been known primarily as an author of alternate history, making his mark with early works such as A Different Flesh\u00a0<\/em>(1988), set on an Earth where the Americas are inhabited by surviving Homo erectus<\/em>, and The Guns of the South<\/em>, in which South African engineers help Robert E. Lee to victory, with surprising results. The six volumes of Crosstime Traffic are a young adult series about trade between parallel Earths.<\/p>\n Walton’s oeuvre has been more varied, but Small Change is definitely alternate history, set in a timeline where the United Kingdom came to terms with Germany in the 1930s.<\/p>\n Walton mixes this with a different subgenre, the police procedural, making her continuing protagonist a Scotland Yard investigator. The science-fictional aspect comes from Walton’s careful exploration of the cultural divergence to be expected in her alternate timeline. Walton’s point of departure is thus the survival of National Socialism after 1945 \u2014 ironically, not by military victory, but through fortuitous events that prevented it from achieving the kind of apocalyptic struggle for military triumph that its ideology aspired to.<\/p>\n And that’s what makes Turtledove’s\u00a0The Gladiator\u00a0<\/em>such a perfect bookend for her series: It envisions a twenty-first century where Soviet Communism not only survived but triumphed, where (for example) Italian high school students take courses in Russian, and are startled by the bad grammar and crude language of a pair of Russian visitors.<\/p>\n In these two novels, the authors give us visions of the mid-twentieth century’s two great examples of authoritarian and brutal politics, happily no longer with us, and ask what they might be like had they survived. It would be hard to find two more ideal complements.<\/p>\n Turtledove’s Communist Italy isn’t a totalitarian horror like Stalinist Russia, or even a dystopia like George Orwell’s Oceania. For the most part, it’s simply a drab bureaucratic state, combining economic meagerness, administrative delays, and relentless political infighting.<\/p>\n In the\u00a0midst of this, a store starts selling games, including a game of competitive railroad building set during the age of capitalism \u2014 and comes to the attention of two high school students, who get caught up when the authorities take an interest in these subversive ideas. This isn’t as harshly realistic as some of Heinlein’s juveniles, but its young characters face some real challenges and threats.<\/p>\n In particular, she focuses on a detective struggling to preserve (some of) his integrity under official pressures as he investigates specific murder cases, often politically motivated \u2014 while he himself is vulnerable to political pressures that could destroy his career, or worse. Walton’s depth of characterization is greater, offering the kind of pleasure to be found in some of the best classic mystery writers, from Dorothy Sayers to P.D. James.<\/p>\n In a time when government often seems intrusive and liberty imperiled, it’s thought-provoking to read two novels that remind us of how very much worse the twentieth century could have gone, and of what political horrors remain possible.<\/p>\n Note: Harry Turtledove, an American novelist best known for his work in the genres of alternate history, science fiction, fantasy and historical fiction, also has been nominated for a Prometheus Award for Best Novel for Between the Rivers\u00a0<\/i>(in 1999), Opening Atlantis\u00a0<\/i>(in 2009),\u00a0Liberating Atlantis\u00a0<\/i>and The United States of Atlantis (<\/i>in 2010) and Joe Steele\u00a0<\/i>(in 2016).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jo Walton – a Welsh and Canadian sf\/fantasy writer who won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002, the World Fantasy award for her novel Tooth and Claw\u00a0<\/em>in 2004, and the Nebula Award for Best Novel for Among Others\u00a0<\/em>in 2011, also has been nominated for a Prometheus Award for Best Novel for Half a Crown\u00a0<\/em>(in 2008), the sequel to Ha\u2019penny;\u00a0<\/em>The Just City\u00a0<\/em>(in 2016); and Necessity\u00a0<\/em>(in 2017).<\/p>\n * Coming up soon on the Prometheus Blog:<\/strong>\u00a0A 40th<\/sup>Anniversary Celebration and appreciation of the next novel to be recognized with a Prometheus Award: Cory Doctorow\u2019s Little Brother<\/em>, the 2009 winner for Best Novel.<\/p>\n * See related introductory essay<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0about 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 * Other Prometheus winners:<\/strong>\u00a0For 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<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0on 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 presentING a series of weekly Appreciations of Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our first … Continue reading Alternate history as a fruitful genre for re-imagining themes of Liberty versus Power: An Appreciation and Comparison of Harry Turtledove\u2019s The Gladiator and Jo Walton\u2019s Ha\u2019Penny, co-winners of the 2008 Prometheus Award for Best Novel<\/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":[2399,43,159,2353,8,2605,996],"tags":[390,388,395,385,386,391,384,198,394,393,389,201,387,392],"class_list":["post-1467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alternate-history","category-appreciations","category-best-novels","category-book-reviews","category-review","category-sequels","category-young-adult-fiction","tag-authoritarian-dystopias","tag-crosstie-traffic-series","tag-cultural-divergence","tag-hapenny","tag-harry-turtledove","tag-jeeves","tag-jo-walton","tag-national-socialism","tag-police-procedural","tag-scotland-yard-investigator","tag-small-change-series","tag-soviet-communism","tag-the-gladiator","tag-wooster-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-nF","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467","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=1467"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3051,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions\/3051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a>It belongs to a subgenre that’s not usually considered science fictional: the cozy mystery, commonly set in a domain of wealthy and privileged people (not very different from the setting of the Jeeves and Wooster stories!) and keeping overt violence and the cruder sorts of crime offstage.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Walton’s fascist United Kingdom also isn’t out and out murderous. Much of its corruption takes place through the channels of influence among the “right sort of people.”<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lfs.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/0-Harry_Turtledove-2005.jpg?resize=220%2C244&ssl=1\")
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\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":"