Ramez Naam’s 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.

 

Naam wrote Nexus and Crux to explore the potential of neuroscience to link together and improve upon human minds. But he 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 his novels.

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.

Naam stated on his blog: "It is 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."