Making ‘em laugh for the sake of liberty: Which Best Novel winners best incorporate comedy?

By Michael Grossberg

If beauty is proverbially found in the eye of the beholder, then a sense of humor may be located in our funny bones.

Yet everyone’s sense of humor is a bit different. What you find hilarious may leave me cold (or at least lukewarm), while what fills some bellies with laughs may leave others with barely a smile on their faces.

Given how personal a sense of humor tends to be, it may be provocative but should be interesting to ask: Which Prometheus Award winners do you find most amusing?

Which are designed to make you smile, and laugh out loud – and achieve their goal?

Continue reading Making ‘em laugh for the sake of liberty: Which Best Novel winners best incorporate comedy?

Funny is funny: How two Best Novel finalist authors have responded to Prometheus recognition

By Michael Grossberg

When life gets you down, there’s nothing better for renewing your spirit or gaining perspective than having a good sense of humor.

Receiving recognition in the Prometheus Awards usually sparks a more serious response blending pride and gratitude.

But funny is funny – and anyway, if your novel is already satirical, then why not respond in that spirit with both pride and humor to such recognition?

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A poet of liberty? How Shakespeare upheld and advanced our appreciation of liberty and wariness about unlimited authority

By Michael Grossberg

Does Shakespeare still matter?

And does the world’s greatest playwright have important things to say to libertarians, other freedom lovers and those millions still wrestling in the 21st century with tyranny, war, slavery and other poisonous fruits of statism?

As a veteran theater critic, I’d argue yes on both counts!

So does a thoughtful essay by Michael Lucchese reviewing and comparing two recent books about Shakespeare and his views on liberty and authority in the Law and Liberty journal.

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A 2022 Prometheus Best Novel finalist heads to the silver screen

Prometheus Award winners or finalists don’t make it to the screen that often, so it’s promising news when another is reported to be on its way.

Director Taika Waititi (Creative Commons license)

Deadline.com recently reported that Oscar-winning film director Taika Waititi is is in talks to direct a film adaptation of Klara and the Sun, by Nobel-prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro.

Klara and the Sun, a poignant near-future fable about an A.I. robot tasked with caring for and befriending a human child, was one of five Best Novel finalists for the 2022 Prometheus Award.

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Check out (and share!) the new LFS introductory flyer

The Libertarian Futurist Society has created an attractive new introductory flyer.

The new flyer, available to download and print out from the LFS website, incorporates updated wording to explain our mission and the distinctive focus of the Prometheus Awards.


The flyer also adds the names of several recent Prometheus-winning authors and some of their winning fiction titles as examples of the award’s track record and focus.

Perhaps most notable: the replacement of older “endorsement” quotes with excerpts from more-recent articles in publications that have taken a positive look at the LFS and our four-decade-old awards program.

The flyer also boasts a new illustration: the LFS/Prometheus logo of a hand cradling fire.

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Appreciating sf author Nancy Kress, her Beggars trilogy and other Prometheus-nominated novels

By Michael Grossberg

Prolific sf author Nancy Kress has won Hugos and Nebula awards but she’s never won a Prometheus Award. Not yet, anyway.

Nor was Kress nominated for The Eleventh Gate, an interesting 2020 novel (recently reviewed in the Prometheus blog) that pits libertarian planets against more authoritarian worlds.

Nevertheless, Kress has been frequently recognized within the history of the Prometheus awards.

In fact, she has been nominated four times for Best Novel – and one of her novels (Beggars in Spain) was voted a Best Novel finalist.

Continue reading Appreciating sf author Nancy Kress, her Beggars trilogy and other Prometheus-nominated novels

Review: Nancy Kress novel The Eleventh Gate imagines pros, cons & conflicts of future libertarian, authoritarian worlds

By Michael Grossberg and Adam Tuchman

Many sf and fantasy novels imagine different visions of free societies and how they might function in the future – including quite a few Prometheus Award finalists and winners.

In recent years, more authors seem to be incorporating future libertarian worlds into their novels, so many that it’s becoming harder to keep track of them all.


While few of these sf authors may be outright libertarians, they appear to be curious about exploring in fiction how future societies might be based on libertarian principles, in full or in part. They appreciate how that can provide fresh and interesting sf scenarios to explore dramatically – especially given inevitable human flaws and conflicts that tend to occur, no matter what kind of laws, customs and norms define different cultures.

One illustrative recent case in point: The Eleventh Gate, by Nancy Kress, an award-winning sf author known for space opera who previously has been nominated four times for a Prometheus Award for Best Novel.

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Lord of the Rings: Economist uses Prometheus Hall of Fame classic to expose false complaints about capitalism – and about Tolkien’s underappreciated Eagles

Why didn’t the Eagles fly the ring to Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings?

Even if you haven’t heard fans argue over the alleged “eagle plot hole” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic Prometheus-winning trilogy, you should find economist Bryan Caplan’s recent blog post illuminating – as well as Ilya Somin’s Reason posting about it.

An economics professor at George Mason University and a New York Times bestselling author, Caplan finds many parallels – and similar flaws – between such fan criticisms of Tolkien’s classic fantasy trilogy and socialist criticisms of free markets.

Thanks to Reason magazine, which published constitutional lawyer Ilya Somin’s column highlighting Caplan’s intriguing arguments (and some of his own) on Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy legal blog.

Continue reading Lord of the Rings: Economist uses Prometheus Hall of Fame classic to expose false complaints about capitalism – and about Tolkien’s underappreciated Eagles

Orwell’s 1984 vs Huxley’s Brave New World: Which fictional dystopia seems more timely today?

Who had the more prophetic and realistic vision of a dystopian future?

George Orwell? Or Aldous Huxley?

Orwell, most famous for Nineteen Eighty-Four (one of the earliest works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame), was inspired by Stalinist communism in imagining his “hard tyranny” of brute dictatorship.


Huxley, best known for Brave New World, worried that a softer tyranny would ultimately prevail, one more insidious partly because it was more enveloping of both politics and culture and more seductive via a future of mindless pleasures.

Writing for the Institute for Art and Ideas, a British philosophical organization founded in 2008, British university instructor Emrah Atasoy compares Orwell and Huxley’s different dystopian visions in an informed and provocative essay: “Orwell, Huxley and the path to truth: How fiction can help us to understand reality.”

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Eris, the dwarf planet and goddess, and Illuminatus!

Robert Shea and his son, Michael. (Photo from Bobshea.net, maintained by Michael Shea.)

If you are reading this blog, there is a reasonable chance you have read Illuminatus!, the literary work originally published as an original paperback trilogy by Dell books and later collected into a one volume omnibus. It was written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, and it was awarded the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1986. (Robert Shea was actually a member of the Libertarian Futurist Society. Shea’s acceptance speech is available here.)


The role that the invented religion Discordianism plays in Illuminatus!, and the part that the Greek goddess of discord Eris plays in Discordianism, is explained in a new article, “Kerry Thornley: Dwarf Planet Eris, Discordianism and the John F. Kennedy Assassination,” by Alden Loveshade.

The article also explains the role Discordianism played in the naming of the dwarf planet, Eris. (Kerry Thornley, also mentioned in the article, was the co-founder of Discordianism).

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