My husband is on the nominating committee for the Libertarian Futurist Society, which provides a literary award called the Prometheus Award, for science fiction which exemplifies libertarian thought. He’s been reading science fiction for months to find the best titles to nominate. Near the end of March the finalists were announced. Here is the press release: 

The Libertarian Futurist Society has announced finalists for this year’s Prometheus Awards, which will be presented during Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, August 6-10, 2009, in Montréal, Quebec, Canada.

The Prometheus finalists for Best Novel recognize pro-freedom novels published last year:
* 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.
* 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. 

In addition, there is an award for the Hall of Fame titles.

Here are the 2009 Prometheus finalists for Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame), a category that honors novels, novellas, stories, graphic novels, anthologies, films, TV shows/series, plays, poems, music recordings and other works of fiction first published or broadcast more than five years ago:
* Falling Free,a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold (1988);
* Courtship Rite,a novel by Donald M. Kingsbury (1982)
* “As Easy as A.B.C.,” a short story by Rudyard Kipling (1912)
* The Lord of the Rings, a three-volume novel by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955)
* The Once and Future King, including The Book of Merlyn, a novel by T. H. White (1977)
* The Golden Age, a novel by John C. Wright (2002). 

                                                                        ~Ann

On Sunday, I went to the Cleveland Public Library’s Writers and Readers Series to hear Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Diaz was funny, engaging and thoughtful and if you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. One thread of his discussion was about the role of post-memory in our lives and in his novel. Post-memory, according to Diaz, is how the memories of our parents and grandparents shape and transform our lives, though they are not our direct memories. In Oscar Wao’s case, his mother’s abuse at the hands of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo resonates throughout her childrens’ lives.

One of the things I look for when choosing books to read are diverse settings and characters. It may sound simplistic, but reading books like this one help me to think outside my own experiences. Diaz singled out the National Book Critics Circle Award as nominating books that are representative of the diversity of American culture. Among books nominated in fiction this year are Diaz’s novel, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men, Joyce Carol Oates’ The Gravedigger’s Daughter and Marianne Wiggins’ The Shadow Catcher. I, for one, am thrilled that more and more books offer up the whole of the American experience. What do you think?

~ Dori