By Michael Grossberg
Acclaimed fantasy author Howard Andrew Jones has passed away.
Jones, a Prometheus Best Novel finalist last year for Lord of a Shattered Land, died five months after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in September 2024, according to the Fandom Pulse blog.
Continue reading Acclaimed fantasy writer and Prometheus finalist Howard Andrew Jones, R.I.P.
Editor’s note: To kick off a new year of judging and for the sake of greater transparency about the Prometheus Awards, the Prometheus Blog is posting an occasional series of essays by LFS awards judges about how they view our distinctive award standards and how they apply them to weigh candidates and nominees.
The Libertarian Futurist Society has long had a hybrid process for choosing its annual award winners.
First the members nominate books for Best Novel, and books or other works for Hall of Fame. Then committees of judges review the nominees and select the best five in each category (or sometimes four or six) as finalist. The members read these finalists and rank them from best to worst, and their votes are totaled to select the winners.
But what does “select the best” mean?
What do Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, James P. Hogan, Sarah Hoyt, Victor Koman, Ken MacLeod, George Orwell, Ayn Rand, L. Neil Smith, Neal Stephenson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Vernor Vinge and F. Paul Wilson have in common?
Some rank high among bestselling and even world famous authors; some are not quite as well known but still have sold millions of copies of their books, and a few are lesser-known writers who deserve a wider readership.
Yet they’re all writers who have written notable speculative fiction (generally science fiction and/or fantasy) that in different ways championed freedom-loving themes and exposed the evils of authoritarianism.
And all of the above have been recognized for such works by winning Prometheus Awards – some for Best Novel, some for Best Classic Fiction and several for both annual award categories.
By Michael Grossberg
Sometimes, a review of a good novel can have a lasting impact, even more than an award or award nomination – something to ponder as we begin a new year of the blog and of the Prometheus Awards.
Perhaps that might seem counterintuitive or even heretical, when it comes to the Prometheus Awards and its 45-year-old track record of more than 100 winners – 106 at last count, including 46 in the Best Novel category, 48 in the Best Classic Fiction category and 12 Special Awards.
Yet, that thought was sparked recently by what happened when I was rereading Rudyard Kipling’s 1912 story “As Easy as A.B.C.” – one of four classic works selected as finalists for the Prometheus Hall of Fame – and decided to research it further via Google.
When I googled the words “Rudyard Kipling and “As Easy as A.B.C.,” guess what popped up rather high on the Google web links?
As 2025 gets underway, the Libertarian Futurist Society has a lot of remember and much to celebrate.
Our non-profit international association of liberty-loving sf/fantasy fans is the midst of our annual cycle nominating eligible works and selecting finalists for the Prometheus Awards, now entering their 46th year and with a solid track record of 50 years within sight.
Reason magazine’s Bob Poole and three-time Prometheus winner Victor Koman added to the luster of our annual Prometheus Awards ceremony, which included an eloquent acceptance speech by two-time Prometheus winner Daniel Suarez, who won his second prize for Best Novel for Critical Mass.
The LFS continued to receive excellent media coverage about our annual Prometheus Award finalists and winners in our two annual categories for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (the Prometheus Hall of Fame) – especially from the SF/fantasy field’s two leading trade publications, Locus and File 770.
With an attractive new logo, a new series of outreach display ads to reach out to potential new members, and other outreach efforts, the LFS and the Prometheus Awards continue to raise our visibility and enhance our influence.
Although the Prometheus Blog focuses primarily on posting reviews, essays, and updates newly written for timely publication, occasionally we have the honor of reprinting an older article or speech that remains timeless.
One of the best highlights of 2024 on the blog was our reprint, as a timely Fourth of July remembrance, of a 1978 Leprecon speech by the late great Poul Anderson, one of the greatest libertarian SF/fantasy authors and a frequent Prometheus Awards winner.
Another blog highlight was an insightful addition to our occasional series on Economics in Science Fiction: LFS President William H. Stoddard’s essay on Aladdin’s Lamps, technocracy and “post-scarcity.”
Finally, sparked by the passing last year of the major and widely beloved SF writer Vernor Vinge, the Prometheus Blog devoted more than one post to honoring the legacy of this brilliant and visionary author, one of only four writers to receive recognition (as Anderson did before he passed) with a Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime achievement.
As we begin a new year, with high hopes for a better and freer world, we include convenient links to all of the above stories, lest we forget.
While most reviews published on the Prometheus blog tend to focus on our Best Novel or Best Classic Fiction finalists or winners, other works deserve attention, too.
As time permits, and when nominated (or nominatable) works capture our attention and stimulate both enjoyment and further thoughts, we strive to bring it to the attention of Libertarian Futurist Society members and the wider public by writing about it – hopefully, in ways that make it clear how the work is relevant to Prometheus Award themes.
Here are excerpts from four such novels of note that we reviewed in 2024 – and that continue to deserve recognition and wide readership:
By Michael Grossberg
By the end of 2024, just a few days from now, the Prometheus Blog will have posted a record number of articles, essays, reviews, updates and news.
For the first time since the blog began seven years ago, Libertarian Futurist Society members and Prometheus judges wrote, edited and published 100 posts, or an average of roughly one article every three and a half days.
That’s a notable increase over the previous year, which also reached a new high of 77 articles, up from 67 in 2022 and 59 in 2021.
Of this past year’s 100 articles, more than one-fourth (28) were full-length or capsule reviews, often but not always of Prometheus Award nominees and finalists.
Looking back at a year rich with interesting, illuminating and just-plain entertaining reviews, here are excerpts from (and convenient links to) five of the best.
By Michael Grossberg
For the first time, the Prometheus Blog was able to post timely reviews of all five Best Novel finalists and all four Prometheus Hall of Fame finalists for Best Classic Fiction this past year.
Thanks to all the LFS members and Prometheus judges who took the time and effort to write thoughtful, insightful and illuminating reviews, just as Libertarian Futurist Society members were seriously considering the merits of the nominees and finalists and reading and ranking their favorites to help choose the 2024 Prometheus Award winners.
This enormous effort and success fulfills a long-term goal for the Prometheus Blog, established in mid-2017 as a replacement for Prometheus, the LFS’ former printed quarterly.
Our purpose in soliciting more full-length, in-depth reviews of our awards winners and contenders was twofold:
* to increase the substantive content of the blog, for both our membership and our wider public readership,
* to further enhance our annual awards-judging process by offering members more food for thought as they read and ranked the 2024 Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction finalists.
The four works selected as finalists for the next Prometheus Hall of Fame award span almost a century.
From a Rudyard Kipling story published in 1912 to a Charles Stross novel published in 2003, the 2024 slate of finalists reflects a broad range of different eras, themes and literary styles.
Of the four Hall of Fame finalists for Best Classic Fiction, two are novels, one a story and one a song – demonstrating the wide variety of narrative or dramatic forms eligible for consideration each year among works that were first published, performed, recorded or aired at least 20 years ago.
One work appears on the Hall of Fame shortlist for the first time: Stross’ Singularity Sky, previously a write-in candidate for Best Novel after its initial publication by Ace Books in 2003. (Because of the 20-year rule, the novel only became eligible this past year for Hall of Fame nomination.)
