Editor’s note: Veteran LFS member Robert Poole, who co-founded the Reason Foundation and has voted for the Prometheus Awards annually as one of the earliest LFS members, presented the Prometheus Hall of Fame category at the 44th annual Prometheus Awards ceremony. Here is the transcript of his remarks:
By Robert Poole
I’m honored to introduce the winner of the 2024 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.
My Libertarian Futurist Society involvement dates back to the very first Prometheus Award ceremony.
In September 1979 at the Libertarian Party national convention in Los Angeles, I fought and won a battle with conference director Ed Crane who thought honoring “space cadets” was out of place at a political convention and tried to cancel the ceremony at the last minute .
The 2024 Prometheus Hall of Fame finalists were all worthy of note.
They are:
• Orion Shall Rise, by Poul Anderson
• “The Trees,” a song by Canadian rock group Rush
• Between the Rivers, by Harry Turtledove, and
• The Truth, by Terry Pratchett, the 2024 winner
I’m pretty sure I first discovered Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series by reading The Truth, which was a finalist for Best Novel in 2001.
It introduced me to the imagined city of Ankh-Morpork, where I have subsequently enjoyed many other amazing tales. I’m not generally a fan of fantasy, as opposed to pure science fiction, but I make a huge exception for Pratchett’s brilliant political satire.
Every DiscWorld novel provides new ways in which Pratchett slyly critiques aspects of statism and politics. The Truth is a great example, presenting a story about the protagonist’s painful learning experience in introducing the first-ever newspaper in Ankh-MorPork, facing and eventually triumphing over a great many obstacles.
Pratchett is a wonderful wordsmith.
In telling a story, he plays games with language and the assumptions which are sometimes embedded into what people don’t realize they are saying.
As a long-time writer and editor myself, discovering those little gems is part of the fun of reading Pratchett.
Over the years, I confess to have bought and read fewer than a dozen DiscWorld books. But that means I have many more adventures in store, as I acquire and read the dozens of others.
Needless to say, I voted for The Truth, and I’m delighted that it is our 2024 Hall of Fame winner.
Biographical note: Robert (Bob) Poole, who votes each year to help select our Prometheus Award winners in the two annual categories for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (the Prometheus Hall of Fame), has been a lifelong SF fan, libertarian policy expert, writer and editor.
Bob co-founded the Reason Foundation, a leading think tank that publishes Reason, the leading libertarian magazine.
According to his Reason Foundation bio, Poole is credited as the first person to use the term “privatization” to refer to the contracting-out of public services and is the author of the first-ever book on privatization, Cutting Back City Hall, published by Universe Books in 1980.
Poole, an MIT-trained engineer who has advised four U.S. federal administrations (including President Reagan and Clinton’s administrations) on infrastructure, civil aviation and surface transportation issues, currently serves as director of transportation policy and Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow at the Reason Foundation.
Poole also served as editor of the books Instead of Regulation: Alternatives to Federal Regulatory Agencies, Defending a Free Society, and Unnatural Monopolies. He also co-edited the book Free Minds & Free Markets: 25 Years of Reason.
Poole has written hundreds of articles, papers, and policy studies on privatization and transportation issues. His popular writings have appeared in national newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Forbes. He has also been a guest on network television programs such as Good Morning America, NBC’s Nightly News, ABC’s World News Tonight, and the CBS Evening News.
For more about Poole, Reason and the Reason Foundation, visit https://reason.com.
Note: The 44th Prometheus awards show was recorded by LFS Webmaster Chris Hibbert and has been posted on Youtube and on the LFS website’s Video page.
Meanwhile, the Prometheus Blog continues to publish a series of reports on the ceremony with the full texts of the speeches by Best Novel presenter Victor Koman, a three-time Prometheus-winning novelist; 2024 Best Novel winner Daniel Suarez (Critical Mass); LFS President William H. Stoddard, who emceed the Zoom event and accepted the Hall of Fame award for the late great Terry Pratchett; and LFS co-founder Michael Grossberg, who chairs the Best Novel finalist judging committee and introduced the Best Novel category and Koman.
* Read Victor Koman’s 2024 Best Novel presenter speech on mortality, the award’s longevity, the diversification of publishing and the future of liberty.
* Read 2024 Best Novel winner Daniel Suarez’s acceptance speech for Critical Mass on “How SF offers a critical forum to imagine new ideas and futures”
* See the video of the 44th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS:
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies (including the recent 2023 ceremony with inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freer and Sarah Hoyt), Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters! We understand that the arts and literature can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future – and in some ways can be even more powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, liberties, individuality, moral autonomy and human dignity.
