Nominees announced for Prometheus Award for best "pro-freedom" sf novel; Little Brother's a finalist!
* Matter, by Iain Banks (Orbit Books) - Part of Banks' series of far-future space operas about the Culture, a utopia which reflects Banks' interest in anarchism through its avoidance of the use of force except when necessary for protection and defense. The novel focuses on an agent in Special Circumstances, the Culture's special forces unit, who returns to her home planet, a "shellworld" with multiple layers of habitation, after her father has been killed in a coup.2009 PROMETHEUS AWARDS FINALISTS ANNOUNCED* Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow (TOR Books) - A cautionary tale about a high-school student and his friends who are rounded up in the hysteria following a terrorist attack, the novel focuses on how people find the courage to respond to oppression.
* The January Dancer, by Michael Flynn (TOR Books) -The classic space opera, set in an interstellar civilization created by a wide-ranging human diaspora, revolves around how discovery of a an alien relic sends agents of a multisystem federation on a quest that exposes them to political and economic institutions of many different cultures and requires them to deal with threats to freedom, from piracy to political corruption.
* Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross (Ace Books) -A robot's adventures after all the humans in a society have died raises complex issues of ethics, duty, family and struggle in this Heinlenesque novel.
* Opening Atlantis, by Harry Turtledove (Penguin/Roc Books) - Set in a world where medieval Europeans discover an island continent in the Atlantic Ocean, this first novel in a new atternate-history series explores the politics of colonization and the struggle for self-determination while offering parallels and contrasts with development of the Americas.
* Half a Crown, by Jo Walton (TOR Books) -The sequel to Walton's Prometheus Award-winning Ha'penny concludes her alternative-history trilogy, set two decades after Britain reached accommodation with Hitler's Germany in the 1940s, with a chilling portrait of people all too willing to trade freedom for security.
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Woo Hoo!
Yeah, and great company too!
Just finished reading "Little Brother" yesterday -- thought it was great (and way more fun/terrifying than "1984"!). Congrats to Cory.
Awards like this are tough. Do you give it to the better written book, with less of a libertarian message, or the not as well written book with more?
I am amused to see 'Matter' in a list from a libertarian group. The Culture is a socialist utopia, after all.
I just read Little Brother this weekend (on my XO laptop!). Thanks for a great story, Cory. Good luck with the award and congrats on the nomination.
As an aside, I look forward to a functional Paranoid Linux (http://paranoidlinux.org) I have run tinfoilhat linux in the past.
Great news! And a perfect award for that book in terms of theme.
Re: #6 posted by tim , March 25, 2009 7:54 AM
Where did you get the idea that The Culture is a socialist utopia? I'd argue that it isn't anything. It has no government, no laws, no economy (because it has no scarcity). Socialism is a political and economic way of managing scarcity, and would be obsolete in any post-scarcity society.
Felicitaciones! Congratulations!
have you read Little Brother?
NOW READ THIS:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/133273/do_the_secret_bush_memos_amount_to_treason_top_constitutional_scholar_says_yes/?page=entire
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-26/partisan-war-breaks-out