The answer is a resounding yes, and two examples spring immediately to mind: Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky (the 2000 Prometheus Award winner) and the works of Ken Macleod (who won in 1996 for The Star Fraction, and again in 1998 for The Stone Canal). If I had to summarize my objections to the majority of the Prometheus Award winners, there would be three: they repeat the past, thinly disguised, in the future; they assume that the nature of freedom is unchanging; and they naturalize the social contexts in which classical liberalism arose (assuming the family, heterosexuality, etc.).
The joy and wonder of books such as A Deepness in the Sky and The Stone Canal is precisely the sweeping zest with which they reverse all three of these characteristics. As perhaps should be obvious, both books change the very nature of humanity, by changing the physical limits on the free minds that libertarianism celebrates. Vinge does this twice over. First, he creates a convincing alien race with different physical constraints upon their mental functions. They live on a planet warmed by a unique star known as the OnOff star which, as its name suggests, goes dark periodically, then re-lights. This means that the aliens are regularly cast into a crisis situation similar to wartime, which often demands collective action, and that as they enter a technological era, they are still fighting their biological instincts that urge them to seek “deepnesses” in which to hibernate. Second, and more startling, Vinge concocts a viral poison referred to as Focus that turns humans into engines of creation. When infected, people focus fiercely on their selected area—and biologically surrender their larger judgment. The result is a biological hierarchy that is more productive in basic inquiry than the free society opposing them. The result is a set of truly complex moral questions, to which there are few easy answers. One reason for this is that Vinge takes economics seriously. Rather than being a place for easy answers, his characters repeatedly face tough moral decisions akin to the core problem in Tom Godwin’s story “The Cold Equations” (1954): what do I have to do to survive, and be the person I want to be, in a universe of limited resources?
Macleod’s The Stone Canal offers a very different perspective on the problem of freedom, but among other things, admits a commonality among all revolutionary doctrines (left, right, anarchist, et al.), documents the intensely learned political action necessary to bring an anarchist society into being, and, most fundamentally, documents how the moral choices that define freedom will morph almost beyond recognition as the human form does. If a body is cloned, who owns it? The original living embodiment of the genotype? Classical liberalism would say yes. Or, rather, he who mixed his labor with it, fed it, raised it? Classical liberalism would also say yes, and break down into a Zen-like state of confusion. More profoundly than any of the other winners, Macleod shows why libertarian science fiction must be science fiction first, libertarian second, in order to succeed at being either. To restate that more positively, Macleod writes good libertarian science fiction because he takes change seriously. He looks first at what it will do to us to conquer death, to create AIs, to download consciousness into machine bodies, and then asks, “What will freedom look like?” If you’re interested in the answer to that question, I urge you to pick up Macleod’s novel The Stone Canal—and to keep a close watch on the future winners of the Prometheus Award.
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Greg Beatty recently completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa, where he wrote a dissertation on serial killer novels. He attended Clarion West 2000, and any rumors you’ve heard about his time there are, unfortunately, probably true. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
Works Cited
Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Gunn, James, ed. The Road to Science Fiction: From Gilgamesh to Wells. New York: New American Library, 1977.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York: New American Library, 1969.
Koman, Victor. The Jehovah Contract. New York: Avon Books, 1987.
Macleod, Ken. The Stone Canal. London: Legend, 1997.
Milan, Victor. The Cybernetic Samurai. New York: Arbor House, 1985.
Niven, Larry, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. Fallen Angels. New York: Baen Books, 1991.
Schulman, J. Neil. The Rainbow Cadenza. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.
Smith, L. Neil. Pallas. New York: Tor, 1993.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1973.
Varley, John. The Golden Globe. New York: Ace Books, 1998.
Vinge, Vernor. A Deepness in the Sky. New York: Tor, 1999.
—. Marooned in Realtime. New York: Bluejay Books, Inc., 1986.
Wilson, F. Paul. Wheels Within Wheels. New York: Doubleday, 1978.
How The Stirrup Changed Our World
By Dan Derby
9/24/01
A stirrup is such a small thing—a bit of metal and leather weighing in around 600 grams—but some scholars think it changed the world, or at least some important pieces of the world. Typically a ring with a horizontal bar to receive the foot, it is attached by a strap to a saddle. Certainly it is handy for the vertically challenged. Don’t laugh; Cambyses, the king of Persia, stabbed himself to death around 500 BC while leaping onto his horse fully armed without stirrups. But this is not a story about safety, it is a story about competitive advantage.
Tarth the Boaster
The horse was domesticated around 6000 BC in southern Russia. It was a food animal long before it was a pack animal. It evolved in the Americas 20 million years ago but with the coming of humans was eaten into extinction by 5000 BC. Only its fortuitous prior expansion into Asia saved it from total extinction. Around 4000 BC our ancestors were raising and eating smallish horses out on the grasslands of the Eurasian steppes. One can imagine some young buck, we’ll call him Tarth the Boaster, deciding to show off by riding one. You know how it worked; his long haired friends dared him while the girls giggled. So off he went, hanging on for dear life, the first ever to ride this semi-wild food beast.
Eventually, being young and athletic, Tarth becomes an accomplished, although not very controlled, bareback rider. Soon, one of his friends invents a horse steering wheel: the bridle. This happened, according to Dr. David Anthony, Director of the Institute of Ancient Equestrian Studies at Hartwick College, somewhere in Kazakhstan. Then, with these new skills and tools, young Tarth could sneak out to the next village late at night. Why he might want to do this is lost in history, but he and his friends could then cover distances in hours that had taken days before. And because of this, Tarth unknowingly created a major new weapon: the high speed retreat.
Retreat as a weapon
A person can run long distances at, tops, fifteen miles per hour. On horseback a man can retreat at upwards of 45 mph, triple his speed on foot. Equally important, he can do it with a payload like a spear. Not only could our boy from the steppes outrun most of his jealous rivals, he and his friends could outrun the neighborhood bad guys. That turned out to be really important. According to Dr. Anthony, the most dangerous part of primitive warfare was getting away. Tarth, one can imagine, would usually sneak in and attack, winning a temporary victory. However, once things started to heat up, he would best be on his way. Enter Tarth’s horse. With hit and run tactics, the run part is the most important and a horse can run. With this rapid means of escape it’s possible to reduce retaliation significantly.
With practice and the application of youthful athletic skills, Tarth’s gang developed the ability to use arms while hanging on to their running beasts. This begat mounted soldiers, and they would reign over the steppes for the next several thousand years. Tarth, one can imagine, became a hero and his long hair became fashionable. What Tarth did not know was that the potential for this weapon was far, far greater. But it took the stirrup to make that happen, and the stirrup took another three thousand years to invent and adopt.
Competitive advantage
In the case of these horsemen, the horse-enabled fast attack and retreat was a critical competitive advantage, allowing a village to prosper at the expense of its neighbors. The adoption of new technology often spells the difference between extermination and domination. Such was the case with the horse. Expensive to maintain, it none the less was a “must have” in its society. Over the next centuries, the horse would give speed and mobility to the people of the steppes. It is conjectured that only the horse’s ability to cover distances allowed civilizations to exist at all in the huge expanses of grass lands of the steppes. Archaeological remains show that tribes with horses became larger, with greater wealth and larger households. Horses enabled them to exploit the resources of the steppes, trade with distant lands, and bring sudden, ferocious warfare on their less mobile neighbors. Tarth’s family prospered. Of course, eventually everybody got horses. It was another step in an arms race as old as humanity.