![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lfs.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Music-of-Darkover-SY346_.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a>Fish, interviewed by journalist and blog editor Michael Grossberg, won the 2014 Special Prometheus Award for her novella \u201cTower of Horses\u201d (published in the Music of Darkover<\/em> anthology) and related filk-song \u201cThe Horseman\u2019s Daughter.\u201d<\/p>\nLFS: Did science fiction and fantasy have a major influence on how you developed your views of the world?<\/p>\n
Fish: Yes, if only by leading me to think outside the box, and to always ask “What if?”<\/p>\n
LFS: How did your anarchist and anti-statist views evolve?<\/p>\n
Fish: I learned early on to throw out the muddy ideas of “socialism\u201d… from my observation of the real world.\u00a0 I saw for myself that in a free society people will voluntarily gather into interest groups to achieve what they want, and no “force-propped authority” is necessary to make them do it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Humans are social animals, and they create societies and sub-societies and agreements for dealing with such as naturally as beavers build dams.\u00a0 If anything, external authorities get in the way of such society-building and agreements.<\/p>\n
Get the government out of the picture, and the people will solve their problems themselves.\u00a0 When individuals or groups conflict, all that’s needed is a neutral third party whom both sides can agree on to decide the dispute — like the Libertarian poll-worker with the contested (Republican vs. Democrat) ballot!<\/p>\n
Fish: Yes.\u00a0 Being opposed to an obviously bad war (Vietnam) led me to study the forces in society that had caused it.\u00a0 I came to the conclusion that people left to themselves will commit feuds, riots, brawls, and even lynchings — but only a government (a monopoly on force, under any name) can *command* people to commit war. LFS: Which political thinkers have influenced you the most?<\/p>\n Fish: Well, for a long time my personal guidebook was the anthology, “Patterns of Anarchy”. LFS: Besides those 19th<\/sup>-century anarchist and European\/Russian writers, have you found any modern libertarian writers instructive?<\/p>\n Fish: I know I’ve run into surprisingly Libertarian\/Anarchist tropes from SF writers, but the only names I can quote are L. Neil Smith, Robert Heinlein, and Rudyard Kipling (for two stories, including “With The Night Mail”).<\/p>\n LFS: When you first became active in sf fandom and filking, did you find fan culture was more open to ideas and more welcoming of people who think or look differently?<\/p>\n Fish: Oh yes.\u00a0 People who dreamed of first contact with aliens were a lot more accepting of odd human beings than Mundane folk.\u00a0 Of course, in those days SF fans were “the few, the proud, the lonely”, and the Mundane world largely ignored them.<\/p>\n LFS: When you\u2019re invited to speak, perform or be a guest of honor at sf\/fantasy cons, do you mention your Prometheus Award in your program bio? And if so, how do people react?<\/p>\n Fish: \u00a0I mention it on my blog and Facebook page.\u00a0 Alas, I haven’t been able to get to any live conventions in the past couple years (during the pandemic), so I don’t know how fans there would react.<\/p>\n LFS: What\u2019s your impression of how sf\/fantasy fans view the Prometheus Awards?<\/p>\n Fish: From what I’ve been able to pick up, it’s respected for its literary quality and regarded with respect and a bit of trepidation for its shameless political stance.\u00a0 Only hard-core Wokey-dokes actually argue with its political opinions, and they don’t do it well.<\/p>\n LFS: Have you found that libertarian and classically liberal open-mindedness, curiosity and respect for intellectual diversity are as strong today within fandom?<\/p>\n Fish: Nowadays SciFi concepts — and fans — are a lot more accepted in mainstream society, and there’s real money to be made off them, in the entertainment industry at least, so there’s less acceptance of non-mainstream ideas which might interfere with the money-flow.\u00a0 It’s really sad to see how many once-freethinking fans have fallen for the intellectual laziness of Woke ideology.<\/p>\n LFS: Over our lifetime, we\u2019ve seen the spread of liberty in some important areas (such as gay rights, marijuana decriminalization, partial airline\/trucking deregulation) but also the growth of coercive government, the rise of disturbing authoritarian tendencies on the Left and Right and the spread of increasingly illiberal PC views, especially among so-called \u201cwoke\u201d progressives. As you\u2019ve gotten older, have your beliefs in equal liberty, humanity and universal rights changed or become less optimistic?<\/p>\n Fish: I’ve learned to be a lot more patient.\u00a0 Dismantling a bloated and intrusive government is as tricky as defusing an unexploded bomb;\u00a0 you have to make each move in just the right order, in just the right way, or the whole thing blows up in your face.<\/p>\n This is going to take time — probably longer than my lifetime — and there’s no way to rush it.\u00a0 First you have to change the culture, and that will change the forms of society, and those will change the forms of the economy, and that will alter the political structure, so that open warfare may not be necessary at all.\u00a0 That’s why it’s so important to combat Woke culture here and now.\u00a0 I’m used to that; I’ve been working at the cultural level all my life.<\/p>\n Note: Read the first part of the Leslie Fish interview here<\/em> <\/a>and an author’s update of the stories, songs and other books Fish is writing or has published here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n * 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 enhanced\u00a0Prometheus Awards page\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to the full set of published appreciation-reviews of past winners.<\/p>\n * Watch the videos<\/strong>\u00a0of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog\u2019s Video page.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n * Read\u00a0\u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0an 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 *\u00a0Join us<\/strong>! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards,\u00a0join\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here is the second half of the Prometheus Blog interview with author-songwriter Leslie Fish. Fish, interviewed by journalist and blog editor Michael Grossberg, won the 2014 Special Prometheus Award for her novella \u201cTower of Horses\u201d (published in the Music of Darkover anthology) and related filk-song \u201cThe Horseman\u2019s Daughter.\u201d LFS: Did science fiction and fantasy have … Continue reading Attending cons and thinking outside the box: Part 2 of the Prometheus interview with writer Leslie Fish<\/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":[32,36],"tags":[1446,1453,1451,1447,29,1449,1450,16,21,866,1448,1452],"class_list":["post-4181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-author-updates","category-interviews","tag-bakunin","tag-free-thinking-fans","tag-intellectual-diversity","tag-kropotkin","tag-l-neil-smith","tag-mundane-folk","tag-open-mindedness","tag-prometheus-award","tag-robert-heinlein","tag-rudyard-kipling","tag-tolstoy","tag-woke-ideology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-15r","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181","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=4181"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4850,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4181\/revisions\/4850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>LFS: Randolph Bourne coined the phrase \u201cwar is the health of the state\u201d in The State,<\/em>\u00a0his manuscript left unfinished when he died from the flu pandemic in 1918. Your biography indicates that your anti-statist and anti-war views are closely intertwined.\u00a0 Did one lead you to the other?<\/p>\n
\nWar may not be the health of the state (quite often, it’s a state’s ruin), but a government is necessary to create war.<\/p>\n
\nI giggled a lot over Max Stirner’s writing, contrasting it to his day-job, and guessing how much of it he wrote just to p!ss off Marx.
\nThe Russian Three — Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tolstoy — were terribly ponderous writers, but in real life they put their ideas into practice and made a good account of themselves.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n