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<\/a>This part of the interview focuses on the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction, which Stoddard has been closely involved with for two decades.<\/p>\n
As chair of the Hall of Fame finalist judging committee, Stoddard leads a group of LFS members who read, discuss and rank the annual nominees to select a slate of typically five finalists for the entire LFS membership to rank and vote on. The winner is inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, established in 1983.<\/p>\n
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Q: What works of fiction especially pleased you when they were inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction?<\/p>\n
For the Hall of Fame Award, far and away the one that meant most to me was Donald M. Kingsbury’s\u00a0Courtship Rite <\/em>(2016; original publication 1982).<\/p>\n Q: What do you mean by optimization?<\/p>\n A:\u00a0Mathematically (and Kingsbury is a mathematician), optimization means choosing a value for one variable that causes another variable to take on the highest or lowest value possible, at least in a certain range.<\/p>\n This has been generalized to other fields; for example, in economics, a situation is “Pareto optimal” if it’s not possible to make anyone better off without making someone else worse off (which in libertarian terms means that it shouldn’t be interfered with, since people usually won’t voluntarily accept being made worse off). Optimization can sometimes take place through decentralized evolutionary processes, such as market competition or natural selection, and that’s the form that Kingsbury mostly writes about.<\/p>\n Q: How does Kingsbury\u2019s novel dramatize that optimization theme and what does that have to do with modern libertarian thought?<\/p>\n A: Kingsbury gives us a symbol for this early in the novel, when the character Teenae falls into one of her planet’s rare seas and uses her mathematical intuition to arrive at the least effortful swimming stroke.<\/p>\n I see Kingsbury as showing optimization at work in several dimensions.<\/p>\n There’s biological optimization, as different families and clans each seek to have children of high “kalothi” (apparently derived from the English word “quality” and meaning roughly “inclusive fitness”).<\/p>\n There’s economic optimization by markets.<\/p>\n There’s political optimization, as embodied in the customs and laws of the Kaiel clan, where policy is set by voting — but how many votes a Kaiel gets is based on how many people have voluntarily chosen them as a representative, and anyone’s votes can be challenged by asking them to name all their constituents and discuss the concerns of each, which is a lot like libertarian thought on “the consent of the governed.”<\/p>\n And finally, there’s ethical optimization, the choice of the best set of values and principles to live by, which in Kingsbury’s presentation involves, first, ensuring independence and autonomy, in such forms as a tendency to stoicism, but, second, encouraging cooperation.<\/p>\n The resonances between these levels make the novel conceptually rich, and while it’s not ideologically libertarian, it explores issues that are of great interest to libertarians. And at the same time, since they pervade the culture of his imaginary planet Geta, they make it not merely exotic—though it is fascinatingly exotic—but coherent.<\/p>\n Q: How important is the Hall of Fame category to the Prometheus Awards, and how does it balance the Best Novel category?<\/p>\n I think we’re experiencing what might be called an age of repudiation, akin to ancient China, where Qin Shihuangdi burned literary classics and buried alive scholars who tried to preserve them, or to the Puritans who destroyed stained glass windows.<\/p>\n In the science fiction community, for example, we’ve seen the renaming of the Campbell and Tiptree Awards, and we’ve seen entire eras of science fiction dismissed as worthless and uninteresting. I would prefer to look back and see what value we can find in them, and I think the Hall of Fame encourages doing so.<\/p>\n But I think that the recent change (editor’s note: approved by the board in January 2019) from works five years old being eligible to only works at least twenty years old being eligible has helped to move away from that.<\/p>\n I don’t think we can really assess whether a work as recent as five or ten years old is an enduring classic, but I think when a generation has passed the really lasting works start to emerge.<\/p>\n Q: The first Prometheus Hall of Fame was established in 1983, just a year after the Libertarian Futurist Society was founded in 1982 to revive and sustain the Prometheus Awards, conceived by L. Neil Smith and first presented in 1979. We began celebrating the 40th\u00a0<\/sup>anniversary of the awards last year, and looking ahead, the Prometheus Hall of Fame will celebrate its 40th\u00a0<\/sup>anniversary in 2023. And you\u2019ve played a large role in sustaining that awards category. How do you view that milestone and your contributions to achieving it?<\/p>\n A: I find it satisfying to do the work, but I don’t think about anniversaries much; they don’t seem like real achievements to me.<\/p>\n<\/a>I consider it one of the best science fiction novels ever written, for its portrayal of a exotic human culture, for its getting the reader (or at least me!) into the mind and viewpoint of characters from that culture through Campbellian indirect exposition, and for its theme of optimization, with its striking congruences with libertarian ideas.<\/p>\n<\/a>A: I think the Hall of Fame embodies an attitude I might call “piety,” not in the religious sense but more in the Roman sense: not, for libertarians, blind conformity to the past, but an interest in the past and an openness to learning from it.<\/p>\n<\/a>I think that there’s some impulse to use the Hall of Fame as a “second thoughts” award, a way of giving recognition to a novel that didn’t win Best Novel in its year. I don’t see that as productive; the other nominees for Best Novel have already been recognized by being nominated, and I think we’re better off making a choice and moving forward.<\/p>\n