On this day in 2003 Terry received a Prometheus Award for Night Watch. An award for libertarian science fiction given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society.
He offered the following remarks on accepting the Award:
"Night Watch was funny, I hope, even if the humour had a dark edge. And it was serious. I didn`t set out to make it so. It just happened.
. . . It lives in the quasi-Renaissance city of Ankh-Morpork, ruled very much on the one-man, one vote system; Lord Vetinari is the Man, and he has the vote. Is he a libertarian? Well, he believes firmly in all freedoms, and particularly in the freedom to take the consequences of exercising all the other freedoms. The city, in a wobbly kind of way, works.
Night Watch is a time travel book, at least in its framework. It centres on a familiar character in the series: Sam Vimes, commander of the City Watch, formerly a street copper and still an honest man (by the standards of street coppers). A magical accident . . . throws him bodily back in time thirty years, to the days when he was a raw recruit . . . He has, in fact, to change the past.
And what can he tell himself? Only that, whoever you fight for, the damn government always gets in; that when lawlessness walks the streets, the authorities will bend all their efforts to keeping honest men unarmed . . .
I like Sam Vimes. But he`d never think of himself as a libertarian—just as a copper . . . am I a libertarian? We don`t have that tradition in England. where just about every politician would classify themselves as a libertarian and each one would mean something different. But currently we have a government that lacks wisdom, perspective, or talents, is centrist, arrogant, talks incessantly about rights while it curtails freedoms, and is led by a man who is passionately devoted to appearing to be passionately devoted to things. I see fragments of Night Watch all around me. So, right now. I`m feeling very libertarian indeed."
— https://www.lfs.org/newsletter/021/03/Acceptance.shtml
🛒 https://bit.ly/Discworld-novel-Night-Watch
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