Nexus and Cory Doctorow’s Homeland Tie for the Prometheus Award

My novel Nexus and Cory Doctorow’s novel Homeland have tied for the Prometheus Award! The award is given to the best pro-freedom science fiction novel of the year.

I love the Prometheus Award because it’s focused on a particular criteria: Science fiction novels that both examine and advocate for freedom.

I wrote Nexus and Crux to explore the potential of neuroscience to link together and improve upon human minds. But I also wrote them to explore the roles of censorship, surveillance, prohibition, and extra-legal state use of force in a future not far from our own. – where the War on Terror and the War on Drugs have run smack into new technologies that could improve people’s lives, or which we can treat as threats.

Science and technology can be used to lift people up or to trod them underfoot. Making those abstract future possibilities real in the present is a core goal in my novels. I’m glad the selection committee saw that, and I’m very grateful to them for this award!

I also love that, while the award is given out by the Libertarian Futurist Society, the committee is extremely evenhanded in who they’ve awarded it to. Looking over the award’s history, it’s gone to roughly as many socialists as libertarians and largely to people who are neither. The common theme is science fiction that advocates for human liberty.

Finally, it’s a huge honor for me to share the award with Cory. As a novelist, a blogger, a columnist, and a speaker, he’s one of the most articulate voices for civil liberties in the digital age that we have. And he’s also been quite generous to me in reading and reviewing Nexus and Crux. I was really delighted just to be on the same shortlist.

From this year’s press release:

Doctorow, Naam tie for Best Novel

There was a tie for Best Novel: The winners are Homeland (TOR Books) by Cory Doctorow and Nexus (Angry Robot Books) by Ramez Naam.

Homeland, the sequel to Doctorow’s Prometheus winner Little Brother, follows the continuing adventures of a government-brutalized young leader of a movement of tech-savvy hackers who must decide whether to release an incendiary Wikileaks-style exposé of massive government abuse and corruption as part of a struggle against the invasive national-security state.

Nexus offers a gripping exploration of politics and new extremes of both freedom and tyranny in a near future where emerging technology opens up unprecedented possibilities for mind control or personal liberation and interpersonal connection.

The other Prometheus finalists for best pro-freedom novel of 2013 were Sarah Hoyt’s A Few Good Men (Baen Books); Naam’s Crux, the sequel to Nexus (both from Angry Robot Books); and Marcus Sakey’s Brilliance (Thomas & Mercer).

You can read the whole thing here.