The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Our chums at Orbit pass on some cheering news – one of my favourite writers, the excellent Ken MacLeod, has won this year’s Prometheus Award, given for Libertarian fiction, for his last novel, Learning the World. Learning the World was one of my SF book picks and I heartily recommend it to anyone who hasn’t picked it up. If you are not familiar with Ken’s work it makes a good starting point, being a self-contained novel of a very unusual first contact situation, which touches on freedom, knowledge and the possible cost of personal and societal advancement. It is also a damned engrossing read, as all of Ken’s books are and while he does have a reputation for including politics in his work I’ve never found his work preaches to readers, rather they are included as part of the society he is describing (one of the elements which makes Ken’s work so absorbing). This is the third time Ken has won the award.

Congratulations are also due to Alan Moore and David Lloyd as V For Vendetta was inducted into the Hall of Fame as it received the Best Classic Fiction award. Terrific to see the comics genre being treated with such respect, isn’t it? Joss Whedon’s Serenity was the recipient of a special citation; in fact the first time the Prometheus Award has been given to a film and the film’s writer/director, but it was felt that the film (and the preceding series Firefly) fitted the libertarian ethos of the award for its portrayal of “resistance fighters struggling against oppressive collectivism.” Congratulations to all.