Free Space by Brad Linaweaver, Edward E. Kramer (.ePUB)
File Size: 5.4 MB
Free Space by Brad Linaweaver, Edward E. Kramer (see all authors below)
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 5.4 MB
Overview: Free Space can refer to many things. A rent-free park. Elbow room. A sign on a kid’s room saying parents keep out. In this book, it refers to the life mankind will make for itself in outer space.
Free Space raises the question, Free to do what, and with what? A free human being must have some kind of property as a condition for making and keeping contracts. In libertarian circles, the debate always comes around to the land question. Political radicals of every variety have wrestled with this problem as far back as anyone cares to go.
Free Space is a science-fiction answer to the historical problem. Is it possible to own the scenery? Well, no one should object if the land you occupy was created by you! With access to energy and resources on a scale that inspires exaggeration, the frontier of the future is something very different from frontiers past. There are no native peoples in the asteroid belt. No aborigines on Mars. No troublesome animal species grazing on the moon. This time, there’s nothing to get in the way. The solar system is easy pickings.
Free Space is a state of mind, and a metaphor, and lots more. Humans who live in space will have a different perspective from what Heinlein called the groundhogs. The Firesign Theater used to say the opposite of gravity is comedy. Let’s take the joke seriously. I think that people who don’t live at the bottom of gravity wells may be healthier and happier and smarter. Dare we commit the unpardonable thought crime of imagining they might be better than groundhogs? This book suggests that the kind of person who prefers living under tyranny is more at home at the bottom of a gravity well. But if people with this kind of mentality ever manage to function in space, we have a ready-made term for them: the Federation.
Free Space started out as Ed Kramer’s proposal that we could put together a different kind of science-fiction anthology. It seemed to me that I could get things started by contacting a number of writers who had won the Prometheus Award (given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society). Some of these writers had won Hugos and Nebulas; some had not. But it made sense to focus on the Prometheus Award because it honors science fiction that takes politics and economics seriously. That’s how we began. By the time we were finished, we had attracted a wide variety of writers—including those who will be taking prizes home in the future.
Genre: Fiction > Sci-fi/Fantasy/Horror
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