Award Winning

Although the name and the awarding organization might suggest a narrow list of potential awardees, the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Award has, in its 40-year history, gone to works which could clearly be classified as liberal, progressive or conservative as well as libertarian. The 2018 version of the award, however, went to a book that was very definitely libertarian in outlook and plot action, as well as reminiscent of some earlier works and awardees: Travis Corcoran's The Powers of the Earth.

Powers is set in 2064, some years after a discovery of anti-gravity has allowed a group of settlers to colonize the moon. The technology is jealously guarded by the Lunar settlers, installed on a handful of bulk freighters that retro-fitted to be airtight and maneuverable in vacuum. The national governments of Earth, particularly the vapid former talk-show host in the White House, see the Lunar colony's financial and natural resources as means to prop up their own shaky regimes, while the Lunar settlers see the moon as a place where they can live the way they want: Free from old Earth's stifling and nonsensical mare's nest of laws and regulations. When a supply ship is hijacked by a US military unit a shooting war seems inevitable, and the outnumbered settlers seem bound to lose.

But so did George Washington.

Corcoran seems to have made Powers deliberately similar to Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, down to the inclusion of an artificial intelligence on the side of the libertarian-leaning colonists. He has his own touches, such as a pack of genetically enhanced dogs who can reason and talk, and the considerable narrative space he spends on the terrestrial leaders and their shenanigans. The additional material adds to the page count (Powers is the first of a two-part story; Causes of Separation was published in 2018 and is a 2019 Prometheus nominee) but not much overall to the story. Corcoran is strongest when he's engaging with some of the hits and misses of Heinlein's work; when he's offering commentary on what bugs him about today's world the story tips towards jarringly broad and boring satire.

Powers would benefit from significant tightening of its narrative focus. In the hijacking that starts the conflict the crew tries and bloodily fails to retake control of the ship several times, for example, to no discernible purpose because one or two would have worked. The sequences with the enhanced dogs and their accompanying human wander around the main plot thread with limited intersection and even more limited utility. The Powers-Causes duology is not as didactic and dull as Atlas Shrugged, but it leaves a Randian whiff behind it and presents a very limited case for earning the LFS's top award given it by a vote of the society's members.

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That case gets even more limited when you pick up a couple of the novels Powers beat out for the award, such as Karl Gallagher's Torchship (like Powers, Torchship is a part of a larger work, Gallagher's "Torchship Trilogy"). Even though this first novel of the trilogy is constructed as a series of connnected vignettes about the Fives Full tramp freighter and sometime passenger ship, it still has a coherence Powers lacks. If the other nominees are as much better than the winner as Torchship is, then you could make a good case that 2018's LFS voters should ask for a do-over.

Michigan "Mitchie" Long hires onto the Fives Full as a pilot after demonstrating her math abilities. Humanity's explored worlds are roughly grouped into three categories: those that allow limited networked computers, those that don't and those that have been taken over by artificial intelligence. The interstellar "torchships" need to be able to navigate on the mathematical calculations of their human pilots as well as computers, depending on which planetary system they're in. The Fives' small crew is a colorful group of characters so Mitchie fits in, even though she's concealing her primary role as a spy. She fits in well enough to develop a rapport and then relationship with the ship's mechanic over the course of the three novels, as Gallagher describes humanity's conflicted response to the menace of the artificial intelligence and its own infighting.

But aside from Mitchie's spy work the crew of the Fives Full are just folks trying to keep flying and find a job to enable that -- and in the same way that Powers draws from Harsh Mistress, Torchship draws from Joss Whedon's Firefly. Gallagher writes engaging and likeable characters, and has created an interesting world in which they work. He's set up circumstances to make sliderule-style calculations and wrench-and-spanner ship repairs plausible in a world of faster-than-light travel.

Although Gallagher doesn't entirely stick the landing in the third novel of the trilogy, the world of Torchship is a fun place to visit. It would seem as though he's ended the story as the third novel draws to a close, but there may be room for more stories in this universe -- and they'd certainly be welcome.