Saturday, July 26, 2008

Walton reacts to her Prometheus

Author Jo Walton, author of the Prometheus Award winning novel "Ha'Penny," has reacted to the victory on her blog.

"I'm delighted, amused and honoured to announce that Ha'Penny has won the Prometheus Award -- actually, it's better than that, because it's co-won with Harry Turtledove's The Gladiator and you can't imagine how lovely it is to co-win something with a splendid book by an author you've loved for years," she writes.

She adds, "I'm amused because of all my online arguments with Libertarians. I am so not a Libertarian. Ask [info]zsero. But I am anti-authoritarian and I suppose I have written a book about the moral corruption of an authoritarian society, and if they think that's good enough to give me an ounce of gold (an ounce of gold, how cool is that?) then good for them. As they've given it to Ken MacLeod and Charlie Stross before, they're obviously looking at the book, not the author."

The insistence that she's not a Libertarian (she also noted that when she was nominated) seems odd; as she herself notes, the award lately has gone to other non-Libertarians such as MacLeod and Stross.

Perhaps people haven't noticed yet that the nature of the award has changed a bit over the years. If you look at the list of winners posted by the Libertarian Futurist Society, the earlier awards tended to go to doctrinaire libertarian writers such as L. Neil Smith, J. Neil Schulman and Victor Milan. That seems to occur less often in the last few years. I can't comment on whether there has been shift in the quality of the award-winners, as I haven't read enough of them; one of my reading projects this year will be to read as many past Prometheus Award winners as possible.

2 comments:

permakent said...

As co-author with Brad Linaweaver of Anarquia (a Prometheus finalist in 2005) I was pleased that the novel received good reviews from non-libertarians. This seemed to be in the tradition of Brad's two Prometheus award winning books, the novel Moon Of Ice and the anthology he co-edited with Ed Kramer, Free Space. There were many positive reviews of those books from non-libertarians.

Yet Brad tells me he has often been accused of being doctrinaire, but only by other libertarians. If you're reading the Prometheus backlist, let me know if you think Moon Of Ice and Free Space suffer from dogmatism. Even though Anarquia didn't win, if you read it, please let me know what you think about it.

Cleveland Okie (Tom Jackson) said...

Thanks for dropping by Kent....when I read your book I'll get back to you.