{"id":528,"date":"2018-08-18T17:49:54","date_gmt":"2018-08-18T22:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lfs.org\/blog\/?p=528"},"modified":"2025-06-19T21:20:30","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T02:20:30","slug":"travis-corcorans-acceptance-speech-for-powers-of-the-earth-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/travis-corcorans-acceptance-speech-for-powers-of-the-earth-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Travis Corcoran’s acceptance speech for ‘The Powers of the Earth’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Travis Corcoran<\/p>\n

Travis Corcoran won the Prometheus Award <\/a>for his excellent novel, The Powers of the Earth<\/strong>.\u00a0He couldn’t make it to the Worldcon for this weekend’s awards ceremony, but here is the text of his acceptance speech, read by Chris Hibbert.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I’m sorry I couldn’t be here tonight, but I live on a farm and it’s\u00a0harvest season in the Granite State. Live free or die!<\/p>\n

I first heard of the Prometheus Award a quarter century ago and put\u00a0“writing a novel worthy of winning it” on my bucket list. It was an\u00a0amazing honor to be nominated alongside so many other worthy authors, and I can still barely wrap my head around having won.<\/p>\n

Eric S Raymond said it best: “Hard SF is the vital heart of the\u00a0field”. The core of hard science fiction is libertarianism: “ornery\u00a0and insistent individualism, veneration of the competent man,\u00a0instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering”.
\n<\/p>\n

I agree; science fiction is best when it tells stories about free\u00a0people using intelligence, skills and hard work to overcome\u00a0challenges.<\/p>\n

This vision of science fiction is under attack by collectivists, and\u00a0hard SF and libertarian SF are being pushed out of publisher lineups\u00a0and off of bookstore shelves.<\/p>\n

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

Very well. We have intelligence, we have skills and we’re not afraid\u00a0of hard work. Let’s rise to this challenge!<\/p>\n

The Powers of the Earth<\/em><\/a> is a novel about many things.<\/p>\n

It’s a war story about ancaps, uplifted dogs, and AI fighting against\u00a0government using combat robots, large guns, and kinetic energy\u00a0weapons.<\/p>\n

It’s an engineering story about space travel, open source software,\u00a0tunnel boring machines, and fintech.<\/p>\n

It’s a cyberpunk story about prediction markets, CNC guns, and\u00a0illegal ROMs.<\/p>\n

It’s a story about competent men who build machines, competent women\u00a0who pilot spaceships, and competent dogs who write code.<\/p>\n

It’s a novel that pays homage to Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh<\/em>\u00a0Mistress,<\/em> which in turn pays homage to the American Revolution.<\/p>\n

. . . But the historical inspiration for the novel was not, actually,\u00a0the American Revolution. It’s the founding of the Icelandic Free\u00a0State almost a thousand years earlier. The difference is subtle, but\u00a0important.<\/p>\n

The American Revolution was an act of secession: one part of a\u00a0government declaring itself independent and co-equal, and continuing\u00a0to act as a government. The establishment of the Icelandic Free State\u00a0is different in two important particulars. First, it did not consist\u00a0of people challenging an existing government, but of people physically\u00a0leaving a region governed by a tyrant. And second, the men and women who expatriated themselves from the reign of Harald Fairhair did not create a government – they wanted to flee authoritarianism, not\u00a0establish their own branch of it!<\/p>\n

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

Thus we get to one of the most important themes of The Powers of the<\/em>\u00a0Earth<\/em> and its sequel, Causes of Separation<\/em>: the concepts of Exit,\u00a0Voice, and Loyalty. The tri-chotomy was first codified in an essay\u2014titled “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms,\u00a0Organizations, and States”\u2014by economist Albert Hirschman in 1970.<\/p>\n

An aside: I love that this essay was penned while Americans walked on\u00a0the moon.<\/p>\n

Hirschman argued that when a vendor or government fails to deliver,\u00a0people can either remain loyal, can speak out within the system, or\u00a0can exit the system.<\/p>\n

The problem we Americans have in 2018 is that there is no more\u00a0frontier. Like the engineers in Christopher Priest’s “The Inverted\u00a0World”, we moved west until we hit an ocean, and that has been our\u00a0doom.<\/p>\n

When there is a frontier, it is impossible to deny that the pie is\u00a0growing. Want a farm? Go hack one out of the forest. Want a house?\u00a0Go build one.<\/p>\n

Once the frontier is gone, value can still be created ab initio. The\u00a0pie is not fixed. For the price of a cheap computer you can create a\u00a0novel or a software package. With a $100 video camera you can be a\u00a0garage Kubrick. With a free Craigslist ad you can be a dog-walking\u00a0entrepreneur.<\/p>\n

. . . But the closing of the frontier made it easier for the\u00a0collectivists to argue that the pie is fixed. And\u2014worse yet\u2014it\u00a0made it impossible for the rest of us to get away.<\/p>\n

We’d all love to live in David Friedman’s polycentric legal system,\u00a0Robert Nozick’s meta-utopia, Moldbug’s patchwork, or Scott Alexander’s archipelago – a place where each of us could live by rules we choose,\u00a0and people who preferred another set could live by those… but we\u00a0can’t, and that’s for one reason and one reason alone: the\u00a0collectivists who can’t bear to let anyone, anywhere, be ungoverned.<\/p>\n

Totalitarian ideologies – Nazism, Communism, Islamofascism,\u00a0Progressivism – all subscribe to the Mussolini quote “All within the\u00a0state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”<\/p>\n

The Nazi sees any area not under Nazi control as a threat.<\/p>\n

The communist sees any area not under communist control as a threat.<\/p>\n

The Islamofascist sees any area outside of Dar al Islam as Dar al-Harb\u2014a populace to be subjugated.<\/p>\n

Collectivists sees anything not under collectivist control as a threat\u2014and as an opportunity.<\/p>\n

A threat, because areas not under collectivist control always work\u00a0better. It is no accident that just as the Soviets jammed broadcasts\u00a0from the west, Nazis outlawed American music, Chinese built a Great\u00a0Firewall, so too do progressives shadow-ban free voices on Twitter and\u00a0Facebook and expel people from conventions.<\/p>\n

An opportunity, because of what totalitarians do when they see a patch\u00a0of freedom: they try to take it over. “All within, nothing outside”.<\/p>\n

When the patch of freedom is a state, we get the long march through\u00a0the institutions, as outlined by communist Antonio Gramsci and refined by communist Rudi Dutschke. First they become teachers, then they influence the students, then they take over the courts . . . and then it’s not too long until some O’Brien is holding up four fingers to some Winston Smith, crushing out the last of the wrongthink.<\/p>\n

When the patch of freedom is a subculture the mechanism is different\u2014it’s discussed in the brilliant essay “Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in\u00a0subculture evolution” by David Chapman.<\/p>\n

One core attribute of totalitarians is that they don’t create, they\u00a0steal. And because they steal, they are both confused by and hate\u00a0those who do create. As Barrack Obama said “You didn’t build that.”\u00a0As the internet meme says: “You made this? <pause> I made this.”<\/p>\n

Since the first Worldcon in 1939 science fiction has been a\u00a0libertarian territory under attack from authoritarians. Futurian\u00a0Donald Wollheim was a communist, and argued that all of science\u00a0fiction “should actively work for the realization of the . . .\u00a0world-state as the only . . . justification for their activities”.<\/p>\n

Wollheim failed with his takeover in 1939\u2014he was physically removed from Worldcon\u2014but he started a Gramscian long march through the institutions, and it worked. In the current year conventions, editors, and publishing houses are all cordy-cepted. The sociopaths have pushed the geeks out and have taken over the cultural territory.<\/p>\n

“You made this? <pause> I made this.”<\/p>\n

When the state tries to take your home, they come with guns, and you\u00a0have to fight them with guns, if at all.<\/p>\n

When a subculture tries to take your home, they come with snark and\u00a0shame and entryism . . . and you fight them by making better art.<\/p>\n

The bad news for us libertarians is that the cities we built have\u00a0fallen. The publishers? Gone. The bookstore shelves? Gone.<\/p>\n

But what of it? We have Amazon, we have print on demand, we have\u00a0Kickstarter.<\/p>\n

And, most importantly of all, we have the vital heart, the radiant\u00a0core of science fiction: we can tell great stories about ornery\u00a0individualism, about competent men and women using skills and hard\u00a0work to overcome challenges. This is the one thing the collectivists\u00a0can never steal from us, because it is antithetical to their nature.<\/p>\n

There is not an ocean in front of us, dooming us to captivity\u2014there\u00a0is only sky. The frontier is still open.<\/p>\n

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

Travis Corcoran Travis Corcoran won the Prometheus Award for his excellent novel, The Powers of the Earth.\u00a0He couldn’t make it to the Worldcon for this weekend’s awards ceremony, but here is the text of his acceptance speech, read by Chris Hibbert.\u00a0 I’m sorry I couldn’t be here tonight, but I live on a farm and … Continue reading Travis Corcoran’s acceptance speech for ‘The Powers of the Earth’<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"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":[32,687,31,9,2664],"tags":[1802,594,744,2032,2031,525,109,16,175,135,42,2030,1339],"class_list":["post-528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-author-updates","category-award-acceptance-speech","category-awards-news","category-essay","category-travis-corcoran","tag-ai","tag-best-novel","tag-collectivism","tag-david-chapman","tag-donald-wollheim","tag-individualism","tag-libertarianism","tag-prometheus-award","tag-science-fiction","tag-the-powers-of-the-earth","tag-travis-corcoran","tag-uplifted-dogs","tag-winston-smith"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-8w","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528","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\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6076,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions\/6076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}