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Anders Monsen

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Category: prometheus

In April of this year Katherine Mangu-Ward from reason magazine interviewed me as part of a story on the 2008 Prometheus Award finalists. This article appears in the December issue of reason, and has been posted online. Tor published all five finalists, and reason thought this interesting enough to write a long story on the libertarian elements of sf and Tor. Tor should not be considered libertarian, or any -ian/ist, but they have a fearless and independent editorial policy. Tor publishes great fiction, and does not shy away from political books. SF mega-blog site io9 also picked up the story.

A few items I’d like to note: The title of the article actually comes from a speech F. Paul Wilson gave in 1983. I think I attributed those words to Wilson, but if somehow I omitted to do this, my apologies. Also, L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach was published first by Del Rey, and that is the edition that won the Prometheus Award. Tor reprinted the book twice, for which they should be commended, as the book long had been out of print and is a libertarian classic. Many libertarian sf writers failed to get mentioned, especially Vernor Vinge, who has published many books with Tor, and won both the Hugo and Prometheus Awards.

Anyway, hopefully this article reaches more libertarian sf fans out there and gains some attention for the Prometheus Awards.

Will Terry Pratchett’s new novel give Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother some competition for the 2009 Prometheus Award? The synopsis certainly sounds intriguing, and I am reserving judgment on Little Brother until I have read all the other nominees. I enjoyed 95% of Doctorow’s novel, but felt rather let down at the end.

Thursday night I finished writing the first draft of my final review for the Summer Prometheus issue. There’s a lot of good stuff from other contributors, but I had one last obligation that needed to get written.

I was hoping to get this done a week ago, but other things interfered. As I’m heading to Colorado next week, I won’t have time to finish the final edits before WorldCon, but the newsletter will be in the mail the week after WorldCon.

As always, I am looking for reviews, essays, letters, etc. for Prometheus so please feel free to contact me if you are interested.