Pandora and Wonder
Most people remember most of that part of the myth. What they fail to remember was that Prometheus gave reason to men, and men specifically. In this myth women were created later, as a punishment for men. Pandora (the gift of all) was created to be lovely, a wonder to look on for both men and gods, but possessed by powerful curiosity. Pandora was unable to withstand the temptation offered by a beautiful box, a gift which she was forbidden to open. By opening it, Pandora released a host of misfortunes on humanity. Combining the two myths, male rebellion against authority is what is most likely to be conflated with freedom. One would expect libertarian science fiction to accent a traditionally masculinist form of reason, and to treat female beauty as a dangerous given. The sense of wonder so central to science fiction comes, in libertarian science fiction, from rebellion and material achievement, and not from curiosity and its satisfaction, which are innately less important in this schema. When we look at the novels that have won the Prometheus Award, we see this hierarchy repeated again and again—and is it an accident that, despite the fact that women are more highly represented in science fiction than ever before, all the Prometheus Award winners to date have been male?
The Novum
Turning to the books themselves, what do we see? Immediately, we see that the defining novum of libertarian science fiction is not liberty, but rebellion. Some of these rebellions encompass an actual overturning of the social system (Wheels Within Wheels, Pallas); all of these novels emphasize the actions of an individual (occasionally a small coalition of individuals). In a few cases (most notably in Marooned in Realtime), the action is not rebellion proper, but the demonstration of the superiority of private action to government action. However, the prevalence of rebellion is so strong, that this, rather than freedom, seems to provide the core plot for libertarian fiction. In several books, criminals who do not just break the laws libertarians disagree with—laws impeding free trade, for example—but who kill or rob are cast as the hero (Varley’s The Golden Globe is the most overt example here). In others, the fundamental structures of organized society are taken to task for the threats they carry against the individual.
This is most clearly the case in Pallas, in which agriculture is seen as a wrong turn in human history, rather than the advancement that allowed all human development, especially the accumulation of learning that became the sciences. This example is extreme, but it is a case where the narrative thrust to overturn accepted notions leads the author to cut the theoretical ground from under his own feet. In the philosophical traditions of classical liberalism, which the libertarian claims to use as a justification for its political stances, agricultural labor is the metaphoric base for all property rights. The argument used in this tradition is that which John Locke developed in his Second Treatise on Government; by mingling one’s energies with the world via labor, and causing the earth to bring forth new produce by means of this combination, one deserves to own that land and those goods. Since one consumes the results, one’s property becomes, functionally, an extension of one’s own body. Railing against agriculture itself undercuts the philosophical justification for a libertarian society.
Justifying Libertarianism
There are three arguments in libertarian thought against government action. These arguments justify overthrowing a government and creating instead a society defined by private action and organized through market action: the essential, the ethical, and the practical arguments. Though these arguments intertwine, they can be separated into distinct strands for the purpose of discussion. The essentialist argument says that societies should be organized around individuals because that’s who we essentially are, and that all larger groupings are fictional and/or must consist of voluntary associations of these individuals. As the examples above indicate, this is taken to such an extreme in these novels that it becomes an ahistorical truth, and is such an absolute good that no cause, however lofty, is worthy enough to allow another to impinge on the rights of the individual, even, as threatened in Marooned in Realtime, the complete extinction of the human race.
In classical liberal political philosophy, the primacy of the (male) individual is based on residual claims about the divine source of human nature; this is most evident in Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, the single most influential source for the designers of The Declaration of Independence. However, there is a crucial difference between Locke’s theories and contemporary libertarian thought as expressed in these novels. These novels place man at the center of creation, and reject God, either explicitly or implicitly. This is most clearly the case in Victor Koman’s The Jehovah Contract, in which an assassin is hired to kill God (he does so by combining magic, extrasensory perception, drugs, and mass hypnosis), but it’s a common thread found throughout the award winners.
The Secular/The Mystic
Science fiction has always had a strong inclination towards the secular. Indeed, some have argued that science fiction and religious faith cannot coexist, because reason and faith are innately contradictory. However, religion has at times been treated at least anthropologically, as a defining element of culture. Many of Arthur C. Clarke’s works do this. Other works have tried to find an explanation in physical reality for specific religious beliefs (again, Clarke did this in Childhood’s End). However, writers of libertarian science fiction seem to draw on the writer which one survey identified as the single strongest influence on formal members of the Libertarian political party, the philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand. In all of her works Rand equates religion with mysticism, and mysticism with the irrational, qualities which are then attributed ahistorically to the supporters of the state. Supporting statist government and believing in religion are treated both as transgressions on man’s essential nature, which is that of a rational (empiricist) being.
The debt these novels owe to such a position is most explicit in Fallen Angels, in which Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn fuse the worst aspects of ecological concern and spiritual inquiry, and attribute both to a desire to have power over others. Time and again in these novels, reason is used as a synonym for proper mental behavior, and is equated with goal-oriented behavior; these goals are specific, take material form, and directly benefit the individuals involved. Altruistic behavior of the kind that directly benefited mankind in the Prometheus myth is always suspect. At best it is inaccurate, because no one can know what another individual desires; at worst and most common in these novels, expressions of compassion are a thin cover for the desire to control others.
The ethical argument for the libertarian societies has two branches. The first argues that since we are fundamentally individuals, government action that restricts individual action in any way, except to protect other individuals, is simply wrong. The second fork of the argument is that used by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, namely that the good of the whole is best served by the selfish actions of individuals, through the “invisible hand of the market” which yokes private desire to public good and makes a society more productive. Since in these books concern for others in a generalized or collective fashion is suspect, this second branch of the ethical argument is driven underground, so that private action is explicitly championed as the primary good above all else—but is also shown to “just happen” to be more effective at producing those economic goods.
Libertarian “Ethics”
However, these novels also stack the deck and simplify the issues involved in ethical questions. Individuals who serve the state are never misguided, following a different path that they believe will produce a good end. They are instead lying monsters, whose perversion emerges in a variety of ways, sexuality prominent among them. The primary voice of collectivist thought in The Rainbow Cadenza is fond of rape, and is most spontaneously aroused sexually by degradation. He has a spontaneous orgasm when he forces the novel’s heroine to shit herself. The collectivist leader in Pallas responds primarily to women considerably younger than himself (well under the age of consent), and so on.
The deck is stacked, because apparently in a free world no one has to make difficult ethical choices. Literally no one has to choose between fulfilling a dream and earning a living in these books, or, more to the point, no one has to consider the side effects of their own actions on anyone else, as might be the case in a sweatshop environment or a highly toxic industrial concern. Only a few novels are honest enough to produce superscience advanced enough to make this premise in any way logically viable. Vinge, for example, with his wonderful technology of “bobbling,” enables individuals to enter a condition of stasis, in which no time passes, for as long as is needed for the ecology to heal itself and the toxic substances to decompose. In the rest of the novels concern about pollution is absent, ridiculous, or a thin cover for government desires to interfere with industry, as in Fallen Angels, which suggests that not only are concerns about global warming fallacious, but also that atmospheric pollutants produced by heavy industry are the only thing holding back an ice age.