Vernor Vinge receives Lifetime Achievement Award

Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge received the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Special Award for Lifetime Achievement on Saturday, October 11. The ceremony took place at Conjecture/Conchord, in San Diego, California. Among the audience were David Friedman, Dani and Eytan Kollin, and Todd McCaffrey.

LFS President William H. Stoddard briefly reviewed the history of the LFS and its various awards, and discussed Vinge’s significance as a writer, his contributions to science fiction as a literature of ideas, and his ongoing exploration of libertarian themes. In particular, he pointed to the contrast between positive-sum and negative-sum relationships in the Zones of Thought series, and the preference for positive-sum relationships, as essentially libertarian ideas.

In his acceptance speech, Vernor Vinge discussed his early sense of the ethical gulf between voluntary personal relationships and governmental coercion. He identified David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom as the key work that inspired his more explicitly libertarian works. Finally, he remarked on the advantages of fiction, especially science fiction, in exploring novel and radical ideas.

The ceremony was followed by a short question and answer period, in which David Friedman cited Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (winner of the LFS’s Hall of Fame Award in 1983) as having inspired his own ideas on the legal institutions of a libertarian society.

There are several photos from the ceremony in the pdf version of the issue