February 2018 – Prometheus Blog

Review: Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous explores A.I. rights, intellectual property, debt in social satire

Annalee Newitz (Creative Commons photo)

Annalee Newitz has had a successful career as a print and online journalist, and has published several books, but until Autonomous, all of these were nonfiction. It was a happy discovery for me that her first venture into fiction showed real mastery of the craft.

I laughed at her epigraph from “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate,” and promptly tracked the song down and bought it; and the opening page of her narrative hooked me and kept me reading. Both her handling of characterization and plot, and the quality of her prose, were the kind of thing I hope for when I glance at a new book and ask if I want to read it.
Continue reading Review: Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous explores A.I. rights, intellectual property, debt in social satire

Our latest ‘Hall of Fame’ nominees span many decades

The Prometheus Hall of Fame Award honors classic SF that promotes individual liberty, and with our current crop of nominees, we’ve reached across decades of work:

One of the nominations is for a Rudyard Kipling story published in 1912, and we also have work from the 1940s, the 1960s and the 1980s.

Official press release follows.

— Tom Jackson

Continue reading Our latest ‘Hall of Fame’ nominees span many decades

Author Victor Milán has died

Author Victor Milán, who won the Prometheus Award in 1986 for Cybernetic Samurai, died on Feb. 13, age 63.

Locus has posted an obituary, and author George R.R. Martin has posted a warm appreciation.

“I first met Vic not long after I moved to Santa Fe in 1979. Outgoing, funny, friendly, and incredibly bright, he was one of the cornerstones of the New Mexico SF crowd for decades, a regular at Bubonicon in Albuquerque, the perennial masquerade host at Archon in St. Louis, a fan, a lover of ferrets and collector of guns, a gamer (I can’t tell you how many times we stayed up till dawn playing Superworld, Call of Cthulhu, and other RPGs with Vic, and laughing at the outrageous antics of the characters he created). But above all, he was a writer,” Martin writes.

“He wrote all sorts of things, in and out of our genre: westerns, historicals, men’s action adventure, more books than I could possibly list… but it was in science fiction that he did his best work. CYBERNETIC SAMURAI and CYBERNETIC SHOGAN were two of the best known from the old days. More recently, he was finding new readers by the score all around the world with his DINOSAUR LORDS series,” Martin wrote.