This month we are reading and discussing The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert Heinlein:

This is not a novel but a collection of shorter fiction by Robert Heinlein that fall within his loose-knit Future History series. The title story, also the longest, is a novella about businessman D.D. Harriman’s dream of being the first to travel to and possess the moon, his schemes to raise capital in legitimate and semi-legitimate ways, and his efforts to avoid government ownership of the moon. The remaining short stories are “Life Line,” “Let There be Light,” “The Roads Must Roll,” “Blowups Happen,” and “Requiem.”

Moon only available on Amazon in mass market paperback, so order your copy soon. If you buy the book through our affiliate links you’ll be supporting our work here at Prometheus Unbound without costing yourself anything extra.

Join us as we read and discuss The Man Who Sold the Moon.

We’re reading the stories by internal chronological order rather than the order in which they appear in the book. I’ve written a post in the forum listing the stories in proper order and explaining why.

You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

October Recap

We’ve been reading J. Neil Schulman’s classic dystopian science fiction novel Alongside Night, winner of the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award and currently being adapted into a movie starring Kevin Sorbo (Hercules, Andromeda).

Official discussion is still open if you want to chime in before the live author chat with Schulman on November 10th. For more information on this event, see the Google+ event page. The discussion will be retired to the TLR — Previous Reads forum after the event, where discussion can continue without distracting from discussion of this month’s read.

Nominations Open for December

If you want a say in what we will read next month, head on over to November 2012 Nominations thread in the book selection forum and put in a nomination.

Deadline for nominations is Saturday, November 10th. Then voting will be open on the nominees until Tuesday, November 20th, when the winner will be determined.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Do you want to receive the results of the nomination and voting processes in your inbox every month so that you don’t have to remember to check the forum on a certain date? Are you so busy that you sometimes forget when the voting process starts for our next read? If so, then you’ll want to sign up for our email newsletter.

We used to post these updates and reminders directly on our site, but now we send them via email instead — typically on the 11th and 21st of every month. We’ll continue to post more frequent reminders on the major social networks, but there’s no guarantee you won’t miss those.

For up-to-date information about our book club, you can always visit the Lightmonthly Read page.

The date has been set for our live author chat with J. Neil Schulman, whose Prometheus Hall of Fame Award–winning novel Alongside Night is being adapted into a film starring Kevin Sorbo (Hercules, Andromeda).

The event will take place via Google+ Hangout on Air on Saturday, November 10th at 9PM EST (that’s 6PM PST / 8PM CST). It will be streamed live for those who cannot fit into the Hangout and a recording will be uploaded to our YouTube channel afterward. For more details, and to RSVP, visit the official event page on Google+.

Here are the official movie trailer, music video, and Schulman’s talk at Libertopia about bringing the book to film:

I’m a little late with this post and I completely failed to send out the voting results email via our newsletter last month. All I can say right now is that I’ve been rather preoccupied with some momentous events for the site. First, I upgraded from shared hosting to a virtual private server (VPS) at DreamHost even though we’re not yet bringing in enough revenue to cover the significantly added cost. We’d simply outgrown shared hosting; the site was loading slowly and often failed to load at all, especially on the backend while trying to save and publish posts. Second, the new version of the theme I designed this site with, Thesis 2.0, was just released on the 1st. It’s a radically redesigned and powerful theme framework and I’ve been obsessed with scaling its steep relearning curve and redesigning Prometheus Unbound on it. Stay tuned for Prometheus Unbound 2.0. It’s gonna be awesome, if I do say so myself.

But enough with excuses… For the month of October, we are reading and discussing J. Neil Schulman’s classic dystopian science fiction novel Alongside Night, winner of the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award and currently being adapted into a movie starring Kevin Sorbo (Hercules, Andromeda):

The American economy is experiencing a systematic meltdown. The country is turning into a totalitarian police-surveillance state, but bold black-market enterprises use the latest technology to thrive. Anyone declared a terrorist by the administration is stripped of their Constitutional rights and sent to a secret federal prison. Caught in the middle of it all are the brilliant 17-year-old son of a missing Nobel Prize–winning economist (Dr. Vreeland), his best friend from prep school whose uncle was once a guerrilla fighter, and the beautiful but mysterious 17-year-old girl he meets in a secret underground… a girl who carries a pistol with a silencer.

The setting could be next week. But this Prometheus Hall of Fame Award–winning novel was written over three decades ago. And now it is being adapted into a film starring Kevin Sorbo as Dr. Martin Vreeland.

Our book giveaway is over, but if you missed out you can purchase a copy in Kindle or paper format at Amazon.com. Your purchase via our affiliate links will help support our work here at Prometheus Unbound.

Join us as we read and discuss Alongside Night. And stay tuned for the official event announcement of the upcoming live author chat with Schulman, hosted by Prometheus Unbound via Google+ Hangouts on Air.

You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

September Recap

I’ll update this post with a more extensive recap later in the month, followed by a full review, but for now I can say we enjoyed Jack Vance’s Emphyrio. The stylized prose and dialogue might not be for everyone, and the story takes a while to really get going (a lot of time is spent on background and setup), but the book is very enjoyable and worth a read. There is much for libertarians to appreciate in Emphyrio as well. The setting is a planet run as an welfare state by mysterious lords, in which the economy is artisan-based and any mass production or duplication is strictly prohibited and harshly punished. Events lead the protagonist, Ghyl, to rebel against this unjust system.

Discussion has been moved to the TLR — Previous Reads forum if you have more to say about it.

Nominations Open for November

If you want a say in what we will read next month, head on over to November 2012 Nominations thread in the book selection forum and put in a nomination.

Deadline for nominations is Wednesday, October 10th. Then voting will be open on the nominees until Saturday, October 20th, when the winner will be determined.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Do you want to receive the results of the nomination and voting processes in your inbox every month so that you don’t have to remember to check the forum on a certain date? Are you so busy that you sometimes forget when the voting process starts for our next read? If so, then you’ll want to sign up for our email newsletter.

We used to post these updates and reminders directly on our site, but now we send them via email instead — typically on the 11th and 21st of every month. We’ll continue to post more frequent reminders on the major social networks, but there’s no guarantee you won’t miss those.

For up-to-date information about our book club, you can always visit the Lightmonthly Read page.

For the month of September we are reading and discussing Emphyrio by Jack Vance:

“The plot revolves around a young man, Ghyl Tarvoke, who hails from from the city of Ambroy located on the planet Halma. Halma’s ruled by unseen, mysterious Lords who run the planet as a giant welfare state. Workers are paid a stipend for their labor and all forms of mass production or duplication (including printing) are strictly, and I mean strictly, prohibited.” When Ghyl’s father, a wood-carver, is executed for processing old documents with a camera, Ghyl rebels and decides to bring down the system.

A recent edition of the book can be purchased for Kindle at Amazon.com. Your purchase via our affiliate links will help support our work here at Prometheus Unbound. If you prefer, Barnes & Noble has the book as an epub. There don’t appear to be any dead-tree editions in print, but new and used copies of old editions can be found.

Join us as we read and discuss Emphyrio. I’ve already started a thread on Vance’s idiosyncratic prose style.

You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

August Recap

Everyone enjoyed Matthew Alexander’s libertarian science fiction novel Wĭthûr Wē, both for its writing quality and for its uncompromising Austro-Libertarian content. The general consensus seems to be that Matthew did a very good job at the difficult task of incorporating the philosophical, political, and economic elements into the plot without coming across as too preachy. The novel rivals some epic fantasies in length, however, so it does take some courage to begin reading and perseverance to get through.

A couple of forum participants compared Wĭthûr Wē favorably to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. One observed that Matthew presented the other side’s arguments more fairly. Another liked that, unlike Rand, Matthew illustrated how our ideals could be realized and that the main protagonist in Wĭthûr Wē is a more fully realized human being than Rand’s concretized ideals, such as John Galt.

Last month we held our first ever Lightmonthly Read Author Chat via Google+ Hangouts on Air with Matthew. For more information and the video recording of the event, check out my recap post. It was a successful launch and we look forward to doing more of these with other authors.

Jeremiah Dyke reviewed Wĭthûr Wē on Prometheus Unbound a while back, so there won’t be a new review of it coming out this month.

Discussion has been moved to the TLR — Previous Reads forum if you have more to say about it.

Nominations Open for October

If you want a say in what we will read next month, head on over to October 2012 Nominations thread in the book selection forum and put in a nomination.

Deadline for nominations is Monday, September 10th. Then voting will be open on the nominees until Thursday, September 20th, when the winner will be determined.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Do you want to receive the results of the nomination and voting processes in your inbox every month so that you don’t have to remember to check the forum on a certain date? Are you so busy that you sometimes forget when the voting process starts for our next read? If so, then you’ll want to sign up for our email newsletter.

We used to post these updates and reminders directly on our site, but now we send them via email instead — typically on the 11th and 21st of every month. We’ll continue to post more frequent reminders on the major social networks, but there’s no guarantee you won’t miss those.

For up-to-date information about our book club, you can always visit the Lightmonthly Read page.

If you missed the Google+ Hangout for whatever reason, you can watch the YouTube recording below:

The Preferred Observer will be another science fiction novel for Matthew. The libertarian elements will not be quite so pervasive, but you will nevertheless have no trouble telling that it was written by a hardcore Austro-Libertarian. The theme of this new work will be minority viewpoints and preconceptions.

The Q&A portion of the chat starts at 30:15. We had quite a good time and our conversation ranged from Matthew’s influences to Wĭthûr Wē and The Preferred Observer and the difficulty of writing good libertarian fiction that isn’t too preachy to more tangential subjects. We talked about science fiction subgenres and Star Wars. Took jabs at Lucas. The discussion even turned to the Industrial Revolution, Somalia, and comparative anarchism.

If you watch the whole video, you’ll even catch a brief teaser for Matthew’s planned third novel.

We’ve got some improvements planned for our next author chat — like, you know, a proper introduction, better lighting and camera placement, locking my chair in place, getting me to talk slower, and whatnot. ;o)

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for future updates on our original video content.

For the month of August we are reading and discussing Wĭthûr Wē, a science fiction novel influenced by anarcho-capitalism and Austrian School economics, written by our own Matthew Alexander.

Centuries hence, Man, seemingly alone in the universe, slowly spreads his civilizations across his corner of the galaxy. Tyrants vie for power, and in their fierce grip the colonies of the Milky Way are suffocating. In this society of many billions, a young marine, a highly trained war hero, returns home from his tour of duty. Physically powerful yet shy, awkward and unable to sway the masses with pretty speeches, Alistair Ashley 3nn makes a decision to strike at the hierarchy the only way he can. His decision starts him on a grand adventure, and as he is carried along by forces beyond his control, he comes to confront an ancient secret, one which may reveal humanity’s future.

You can get a free PDF copy at the author’s website. The book can be purchased for Kindle or in trade paperback at Amazon.com. Your purchase via our affiliate links will help support both Matthew’s writing and our work here at Prometheus Unbound.

Join us as we read and discuss Wĭthûr Wē.

You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

Book Giveaway / Newsletter Signup Results

Last month we gave away free Kindle (mobi) copies of Wĭthûr Wē in exchange for signing up for our email newsletter. We think the campaign was a big success. We attracted more than 80 new subscribers, more than quintupling our mailing list, and gave away at least that many copies of Matthew’s novel.

Congratulations to Garret Myhan, the winner of a signed paper copy of Wĭthûr Wē.

Thank you to all of our new subscribers and those who helped promote this campaign. We hope you all enjoy reading Wĭthûr Wē and the content we provide here at Prometheus Unbound. Please join us in the Lightmonthly Read forum to read and discuss Matthew’s novel. And don’t forget the live author chat with Matthew, via Google+ Hangouts on Air, coming up on August 26th at 4 PM EST.

We hope work with other authors to give away more books in the future. Authors, if you are interested in collaborating with us to promote your work, check out our Wĭthûr Wē giveaway campaign and contact us.

July Recap

Last month, we read Snuff by Terry Pratchett. There seemed to be a mix of opinions. The writing was clever, but the pacing affected readers in different ways. I felt that it took too long to get started, breaking a promise to the reader made at the very beginning. The slow build up was well done, according to Matthew, but when the story did get under way it did not take off like it needed to, especially after such a long preamble.

It was agreed upon that the hook that brought the protagonist into the plot strained credulity. Pratchett tells the reader repeatedly in the beginning of the novel through the protagonist that something was setting off his Spidey-sense … er, crime-dar … but we were never actually shown anything that might be the culprit.

Once again, Matthew thought the libertarianism in this nominee for a libertarian award was a little difficult to find. The story is mainly about fighting bigotry, which fits in well with libertarianism but is not essentially libertarian. A comment about a person having the right to put what they want in their own bodies is somewhat counterbalanced by yet another portrayal of a heartless business owner underpaying his labor.

To play Devil’s Advocate, the goblins in the story are not merely facing social discrimination stemming from bigotry against their race.  They are treated differently in the eyes of the law, making it easier for humans to abuse them, enslave them, and kill them. They are treated as little more than vermin by most. This legal inequality ultimately goes back to a lack of respect for the goblins’ equal rights to liberty and property, which is very much a libertarian concern.

I also didn’t have such a negative reaction to Pratchett’s portrayal of the “heartless” business owner. As the businessman himself makes clear, while he is underpaying his goblin labor, at least he’s willing to hire them. No one else will. If more people were able to overcome their prejudices and hire goblins, their labor would be in greater demand and there would be increasing pressure to pay them equal wages. In the meantime, the “heartless” business owner is a benefactor to some goblins and has an advantage over his competition. Market forces can help erode bigotry by penalizing it, but I think it would take a more purposeful voluntary campaign of moral education and suasion (but not government laws and regulations) to really eradicate it.

All in all, there was less agreement on this book than with the others, though good qualities were found by all.

Check out the full review by Matthew.

Discussion has been moved to the TLR — Previous Reads forum if you have more to say about it.

Nominations Open for September

If you want a say in what we will read next month, head on over to September 2012 Nominations thread in the book selection forum and put in a nomination.

Deadline for nominations is Friday, August 10th. Then voting will be open on the nominees until Monday, August 20th, when the winner will be determined.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Do you want to receive the results of the nomination and voting processes in your inbox every month so that you don’t have to remember to check the forum on a certain date? Are you so busy that you sometimes forget when the voting process starts for our next read? If so, then you’ll want to sign up for our email newsletter.

We used to post these updates and reminders directly on our site, but now we send them via email instead — typically on the 11th and 21st of every month. We’ll continue to post more frequent reminders on the major social networks, but there’s no guarantee you won’t miss those.

For up-to-date information about our book club, you can always visit the Lightmonthly Read page.

For the month of July we are reading and discussing another Prometheus Award finalist,

Snuff — A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett (winner of a Prometheus Award for Night Watch, also set in Discworld), Snuff blends comedy, drama, satire, suspense, and mystery as a police chief investigates the murder of a goblin and finds himself battling discrimination. The mystery broadens into a powerful drama to extend the world’s recognition of rights to include these long-oppressed and disdained people with a sophisticated culture of their own.

It’s currently available on Amazon in hardcover and Kindle ebook and Audible audiobook formats. Buy your copy today, via the affiliate links above, and help support our work here at Prometheus Unbound.

Join us as we read and discuss Snuff.

You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

May Recap

We enjoyed reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It’s fairly well-written. The protagonists are likeable. The worldbuilding is fascinating and, if you grew up in the 80s, nostalgia-inducing. Characterization does suffer at the expense of that worldbuilding, however, and the story opens with a very long infodump that some might find engaging and others tedious. I personally think that the first-person point of view helps the author get away with it.

Ready Player One is not, however, libertarian science fiction. There are things to be found within that will make a libertarian smile and nod knowingly (vending machines for weapons and body armor; ineffectual government security; a school system far superior to any government’s, funded entirely by private charity) and things that will induce eye-rolling (the tired leftist trope of the evil corporation as villain). Some may be put off by the story being set in a post–energy crisis and post–global warming future. But government does not step in to save the day. The protagonists and their cohorts spontaneously organize to engage in self-help. We struggled to find an evolved stateless order, however. So the description of the novel that accompanied the Prometheus Award finalists announcement is a bit misleading.

All in all, Ready Player One may be well-written enough to qualify for the Prometheus Award, but it is not unambiguously libertarian enough.

Stay tuned for a full review.

Discussion has been moved to the TLR — Previous Reads forum if you have more to say about it.

Nominations Open for August

Nominations are now open for the book we will read next month (August). Head on over to the August 2012 Nominations thread in the book selection forum to put your choice in the running.

Deadline for nominations is Tuesday, July 10th. Then voting will be open on the nominees until Friday, July 20th, when the winner will be determined.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Do you want to receive the results of the nomination and voting processes in your inbox every month so that you don’t have to remember to check the forum on a certain date? Are you so busy that you sometimes forget when the voting process starts for our next read? If so, then you’ll want to sign up for our email newsletter.

We used to post these updates and reminders directly on our site, but now we send them via email instead — typically on the 11th and 21st of every month. We’ll continue to post more frequent reminders on the major social networks, but there’s no guarantee you won’t miss those.

As a bonus, new subscribers to our email newsletter this month are receiving a free Kindle (mobi) ebook copy of Matthew Alexander’s libertarian science fiction novel Wĭthûr Wē. You’ll also be entered for a chance to win a signed paperback copy. See the book giveaway page for details.

For up-to-date information about our book club, you can always visit the Lightmonthly Read page.

The second Lightmonthly Read hosted by Prometheus Unbound has begun!

For the month of June we will be reading and discussing another Prometheus Award finalist,

Ready Player One — Ernest Cline’s genre-busting blend of science fiction, romance, suspense, and adventure describes a virtual world that has managed to evolve an order without a state and where entrepreneurial gamers must solve virtual puzzles and battle real-life enemies to save their virtual world from domination and corruption. The novel also stresses the importance of allowing open access to the Internet for everyone.

It’s currently available on Amazon in hardcover and Kindle ebook. The paperback version is available for pre-order with a release date of June 5th, so I recommend going with the Kindle version. Buy your copy today, via the affiliate links above, and help support our work here at Prometheus Unbound.

Join us as we read and discuss Ready Player One.

You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

May Recap

We enjoyed reading In the Shadow of Ares by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson. While it suffers from some of the flaws common to first novels, it features a sympathetic protagonist on a quest to unravel a compelling mystery. The plot drags in places, particularly in the first third of the novel and after the climax, but significant stretches are page turners.

I do not know the authors, but they may be libertarians. At the very least, they seem to be fellow travelers. The good guys in the novel exhibit an appreciation for free markets and private enterprise and distrust of what the bad guys stand for. The main antagonists are a bunch of elitist, meddling, central-planning bureaucrats out to squash the independent settlers of Mars and bring them to heel under the control of the Mars Development Authority. Unfortunately, they come off as rather cartoonish. Part of the problem here is too much tell and not enough show, a problem from which other parts of the book suffer as well, along with a lack of subtlety and not enough trust in the intelligence of the reader.

The conclusion is more radically libertarian than some past Prometheus Award winners, albeit still not as radical as we would like. However, the writing quality leaves something to be desired. All in all, while the book is enjoyable and we look forward to the authors’ next novel (as we see their potential and expect them to improve as writers), In the Shadow of Ares is not quite Prometheus Award material.

Stay tuned for a full review.

Discussion has been moved to the TLR — Previous Reads forum if you have more to say about it.

Nominations Open for July

Nominations are now open for the book we will read next month (July). Head on over to the July 2012 Nominations thread in the book selection forum to put your choice in the running.

Deadline for nominations is Sunday, June 10th. Then voting will be open on the nominees until Wednesday, June 20th, when the winner will be determined.

IMPORTANT NOTE

We don’t want to clutter up the site with three posts per month about our book club, so we’re scaling back to just one post like this one on the first of every month. We will no longer be publishing the mid-month update-and-reminder posts on the site.

If you want to continue receiving mid-month updates and reminders, sign up for our mailing list. We’ll let you know via email on the 11th and 21st of every month when it’s time to vote and what the nomination and voting results are . We’ll continue to post more frequent reminders on the major social networks.

For up-to-date information about our book club, you can always visit the Lightmonthly Read page.

Next month (June) we’ll be reading and discussing another Prometheus Award finalist:

Ready Player One — Ernest Cline’s genre-busting blend of science fiction, romance, suspense, and adventure describes a virtual world that has managed to evolve an order without a state and where entrepreneurial gamers must solve virtual puzzles and battle real-life enemies to save their virtual world from domination and corruption. The novel also stresses the importance of allowing open access to the Internet for everyone.

It’s currently available on Amazon in hardcover and Kindle ebook. The paperback version is available for pre-order with a release date of June 5th, so I recommend going with the Kindle version. Buy your copy today, via the affiliate links above, and help support our work here at Prometheus Unbound.

We’ll begin discussing the book on Friday, June 1st. Mark the date on your calendar!

You need not have voted to participate in the Lightmonthly Read discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

It’s never too soon to start thinking about our July Lightmonthly Read. Nominations for it start on Friday, June 1st as well, so be prepared!

~*~

IMPORTANT NOTE: This may be the last mid-month Lightmonthly Read post. I don’t want to clutter up the site with three posts per month about our book club, so we’ll probably be scaling back to just one on the first of every month. It will include a recap of the previous month’s discussion, a reminder of the current month’s book, and an announcement that nominations are open for the coming month.

If you want to continue receiving these mid-month updates and reminders, sign up for our mailing list. We’ll let you know when it’s time to vote and what the nomination and voting results are via email on the 10th and 20th of every month. We’ll continue to post more frequent reminders on the major social networks.

For up-to-date information about our book club, you can always visit the Lightmonthly Read page.

Nominations are now closed for our June read. It’s time to vote on the book we’re going to read next month.

Here are the candidates:

Shadow and Claw is comprised of the first two books of Gene Wolfe’s four-volume The Book of the New Sun (1980–83), which is a critically acclaimed work of far-future science fantasy in the Dying Earth tradition of Jack Vance. The Shadow of the Torturer is the tale of young Severian, an apprentice in the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession — showing mercy toward his victim. The Claw of the Conciliator continues the saga of Severian, banished from his home, as he undertakes a mythic quest to discover the awesome power of an ancient relic, and learn the truth about his hidden destiny.

Farnham’s Freehold by Robert Heinlein — It’s a cross-time fight for freedom as a family retreats to a bomb shelter during a nuclear attack — only to emerge hundreds of years in the future, thrown forward in time by the blasts. There lifeboat ethics rule as they struggle to survive … until they’re discovered by up-time humans, the survivors of the apocalypse. These survivors are of African descent.  Down-time humans — in fact, all of the European-descended — are held guilty for the state into which the world has fallen and designated as automatic slaves.  The only escape is to find a way back down-time, to change events sufficiently to make absolute certain this nightmare future never get a chance to happen in the first place!

The Freedom Maze — Delia Sherman’s young-adult fantasy novel focuses on an adolescent girl of 1960 who is magically sent back in time to 1860 when her family owned slaves on a Louisiana plantation. With her summer tan, she’s mistaken for a slave herself, and she learns the hard way what life was like.  In the process, she comes to appreciate the values of honor, respect, courage, and personal responsibility.

Ready Player One — Ernest Cline’s genre-busting blend of science fiction, romance, suspense, and adventure describes a virtual world that has managed to evolve an order without a state and where entrepreneurial gamers must solve virtual puzzles and battle real-life enemies to save their virtual world from domination and corruption. The novel also stresses the importance of allowing open access to the Internet for everyone.

Snuff — A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett (winner of a Prometheus Award for Night Watch, also set in Discworld), Snuff blends comedy, drama, satire, suspense and mystery as a police chief investigates the murder of a goblin and finds himself battling discrimination. The mystery broadens into a powerful drama to extend the world’s recognition of rights to include these long-oppressed and disdained people with a sophisticated culture of their own.

The last three are 2012 Prometheus Award finalists.

Deadline is Sunday, May 20th, but the sooner you vote the better.

As a reminder, this month we’re reading In the Shadow of Ares. It’s not too late to purchase and download a copy of the book, start reading, and join the discussion!

The first Lightmonthly Read hosted by Prometheus Unbound has begun!

For the month of May we will be reading and discussing,

In the Shadow of Ares (Kindle, Nook) — This young-adult first novel by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson focuses on a Mars-born female teenager in a near-future, small civilization on Mars, where hardworking citizens are constantly and unjustly constrained by a growing, centralized authority whose excessive power has led to corruption and conflict.

It appears to be available only as an ebook, so there’s no need to worry about delivery times. You can download your copy today and start reading right away. If you don’t own a Kindle or a Nook, there are free Kindle and Nook reading apps available for almost all major platforms.

Join us as we read and discuss In the Shadow of Ares.

You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

Nominations are now open for the book we will read next month (June). Head on over to the June 2012 Nominations thread in the book selection forum to put your choice in the running.

Deadline for nominations is Thursday, June 10th. Then voting will be open on the nominees until Sunday, June 20th, when the winner will be determined.

One last thing: We now have a special page dedicated to the Lightmonthly Read, where you’ll always find a reminder of the book we are currently reading, the book we will be reading next month or a link to the nomination/voting thread, links to the Lightmonthly Read forums, and an archive of past reads.

The unanimous winner of our vote for the first-ever Lightmonthly Read on Prometheus Unbound is:

In the Shadow of Ares (Amazon Kindle edition) — This young-adult first novel by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson focuses on a Mars-born female teenager in a near-future, small civilization on Mars, where hardworking citizens are constantly and unjustly constrained by a growing, centralized authority whose excessive power has led to corruption and conflict.

It’s available as a Kindle ebook only, so there’s no need to worry about delivery times. But there’s no reason to procrastinate either. Buy and download your copy today, via the affiliate link above, and help support our work here at Prometheus Unbound.

We’ll begin discussing the book on Tuesday, May 1st. Mark the date on your calendar!

You need not have voted to participate in the Lightmonthly Read discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

It’s never too soon to start thinking about our June Lightmonthly Read. Nominations for it start on Tuesday, May 1st as well, so be prepared!

Earlier this month I floated the idea of starting a reading group or book club feature called The Lightmonthly Read. I think we’ve received enough interest to justify going ahead with it. The more the merrier — so if you are among those who expressed interest,  please spread the word, bring a friend.

To refresh everyone’s memory, the idea is that every month we’ll read and discuss a book that we selected the previous month. Generally I think we’ll have a nomination phase starting on the first of every month and then hold a vote, allowing a week for each phase. That should give everyone at least two weeks to acquire a copy of the book after voting is closed.

This time around, however, since next month will be the inaugrual Lightmonthly Read and we’re already 10 days into April, we’ll skip the nomination phase and go straight to voting on a short list.

Since the Prometheus Award finalists were just recently announced, we’ll choose our May read from the list of finalists — sans The Children of the Sky, because Matthew Dawson has already reviewed it, and The Restoration Game, because we’ve received a copy from Pyr that Matthew Alexander is going to review soon. That leaves the four finalists listed at the end of this post.

Discussions will take place mostly in the Prometheus Unbound forums. I’ve created a set just for the Lightmonthly Read: one forum for discussing the current month’s read, one subforum for voting on future reads, and another subforum to archive the discussions of previous month’s reads. Old threads on previous reads won’t be closed; this setup is meant to place focus on the current month’s read. To create and maintain a reading group or book club atmosphere, the Lightmonthly Read forums are members-only; you’ll have to register an account on Prometheus Unbound and be logged in to read and post in them. Anyone can register, and it’s easy.

We may occasionally hold live voice and video discussions using Google+ Hangouts or Skype.

One of the participants may be invited to write an official review of the selected book for Prometheus Unbound at the end of the month. If you’re interested, let us know at some point before the month is out. Otherwise, one of the staff will write the review.

We hope eventually to get authors involved in discussions of their work, whether they can only spare an hour in a Google+ Hangout or have time to participate in the forum over the course of a few days or even the entire month.

Authors, this is a great way to promote your work and to interact with your current and potential fans. It’s also a good opportunity for book giveaways. If you’re interested in participating in the Lightmonthly Read, let us know.

~*~

Which of these four Prometheus Award finalists do you want to read and discuss in May? Cast your vote in the May Lightmonthly Read selection thread in the forums. Deadline is Monday, April 16th at midnight eastern time. (Reminder: You must be registered and logged in to read and post in the Lightmonthly Read forums.)

The Freedom Maze (Small Beer Press) — Delia Sherman’s young-adult fantasy novel focuses on an adolescent girl of 1960 who is magically sent back in time to 1860 when her family owned slaves on a Louisiana plantation. With her summer tan, she’s mistaken for a slave herself, and she learns the hard way what life was like.  In the process, she comes to appreciate the values of honor, respect, courage, and personal responsibility.

In the Shadow of Ares (Amazon Kindle edition) — This young-adult first novel by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson focuses on a Mars-born female teenager in a near-future, small civilization on Mars, where hardworking citizens are constantly and unjustly constrained by a growing, centralized authority whose excessive power has led to corruption and conflict.

Ready Player One (Random House) — Ernest Cline’s genre-busting blend of science fiction, romance, suspense, and adventure describes a virtual world that has managed to evolve an order without a state and where entrepreneurial gamers must solve virtual puzzles and battle real-life enemies to save their virtual world from domination and corruption. The novel also stresses the importance of allowing open access to the Internet for everyone.

Snuff (Harper Collins) — A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett (winner of a Prometheus Award for Night Watch, also set in Discworld),  Snuff blends comedy, drama, satire, suspense and mystery as a police chief investigates the murder of a goblin and finds himself battling discrimination. The mystery broadens into a powerful drama to extend the world’s recognition of rights to include these long-oppressed and disdained people with a sophisticated culture of their own.

We’re thinking of launching a new feature here at Prometheus Unbound and want to gauge reader interest before doing so.

The feature will likely be called The Lightmonthly Read — a geeky name for a rather familiar concept: a reading group or “book of the month” club.

The idea is that each month readers of Prometheus Unbound will nominate stories and vote on the one they want to read in the following month. We’ll all read and discuss the story, including Prometheus Unbound staff, in one of our forums. We might also make use of Google+ Hangouts on occasion. At the end of the month, someone (either one of you or one of us) will get a chance to officially review the story for Prometheus Unbound.

That’s just for starters.

If The Lightmonthly Read proves to be a success, we plan to solicit author involvement. We could get authors to participate in the forum discussions for a day, or a week, or even the entire month — whatever the author is up for. You might get a chance to participate in a Google+ Hangout or Skype chat with your favorite author. We might even be able to coordinate some book giveaways.

Does this new feature interest you? Let us know in the comments.