“He lived exactly the life he wanted to live.”
– Kevin Flynn, about his brother Michael
Michael Flynn won his third Prometheus Award for Best Novel for his posthumously published In the Belly of the Whale.
Here is the text of the eloquent, poignant and very personal acceptance speech by Kevin Flynn, brother of the late novelist, who died in 2023 at 75. The speech was recorded and presented Aug. 30, 2025, during the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
By Kevin Flynn
On behalf of Michael Flynn’s family, his daughter Sara, his son Dennis, his grandchildren Noelle, Zaid, and Adam, and his brothers Sean and Patrick, it is my privilege to be chosen by them to speak here today and accept this award. I know that Michael would be deeply moved by this recognition, which will serve as the capstone of his distinguished science fiction bibliography. Thank you so much for recognizing our brother’s work.
As Michael was nominated for the Prometheus Awards nine times, chosen as a Best Novel finalist eight of those times, and won the Best Novel award now for the third time, you know well of Michael’s passion for learning, for liberty, for liberation of the mind and pushing back on authority in pursuit of freedom of thought and expression.
For those of us who knew him so well, we know he would be reluctant to display his pride as publicly and shamelessly as I am going to do on his behalf. That was simply who our big brother was. But he was so much more, and I hope to use this short time to tell you what kind of human our brother was.
My name is Kevin Flynn. I was a journalist for 35 years and author of two non-fiction books. I often told Michael that I could never be a novelist like him. As a non-fiction writer, I knew my book was hiding somewhere out there and I had to uncover the real story.
But you, I said, as a fiction writer, you don’t even know what happened because you still have to conceive it inside of you. In my training, that would be harder.
And that’s why my big brother’s works are so much deeper and broader than mine, because they are limited only by the reach of his imagination and knowledge, which we in the family knew were limitless. Anything could have happened and often did. And with Michael, as you all have read, his works were still always rooted in real science and history, yet more creatively arranged around his plot, his theme and his characters.
He explored sociological themes while constructing a fantasy science, such as the cliological masters controlling world events behind the scenes in his first novel, In the Country of the Blind, for which he won his first Prometheus Award in 1991.
He introduced dizzying arrays of personalities in order to explore how different people in different ages and different circumstances might respond to adversity and challenges. Reading his books, I sometimes had no idea how he could keep them all in a straight line through the story. One of my two true-crime books had 27 essential characters for readers to follow. Michael could introduce more characters in just his first chapter. In fact, in In the Country of the Blind, my youngest brother Patrick and I ARE among the characters.
It sounds odd to say but I am so happy for Michael even though he’s left us, because he lived exactly the life he wanted to live.
THE YOUTH AND DEATH OF MICHAEL FLYNN
From his youngest days, he wanted to be a science fiction author, in collaboration with his Irish twin brother Dennis. Dennis was three days less than one year younger than Michael and they were inseparable playmates. He quite obviously excelled at that professional goal.
He married the Incomparable Marge, whom he met in grad school in Milwaukee, and they remained together as a well-matched pair for just two months short of 50 years. He certainly excelled at this personal goal. When our dad remarried and moved to his new wife’s house, Mike and Marge bought the much beloved little 3-bedroom stone house our father built for us in the early ‘50s and in which he and our mom raised their five sons. Michael’s daughter Sara now lives there with two of her children.
And then, in declining health and handling those difficulties with as much dignity as he could muster, he passed away peacefully in his sleep in the living room recliner where he spent his last year and more writing In the Belly of the Whale. I could not have wished for Michael to write a better finish to a life well lived, and to leave behind his pains and afflictions that could only grow worse. I was happy for him. The first Christmas after Margie died two years earlier, my wife and I asked him what he wanted. He said, “I want Margie back.” A lifelong Catholic, he is now reunited with her.
GROWING UP WITH MORE FREEDOM
Michael and Dennis grew up in the mid-50s at a time when kids enjoyed significantly more freedom than kids seem even to want these days. They don’t know what they’re missing.
With the neighborhood gang they named The Adventure Club, complete with their self-designed “AC” flag, they explored the nearby woods and hillsides, roasting crabapples by a mountain spring, making up scary stories and coming home only when the lightning bugs appeared. You couldn’t call them latchkey kids because in those days, no one locked their doors anyway.
Michael was a voracious reader, which in a small house with one bathroom serving as our library, can be challenging. Our mother always said she was glad she never had daughters because then no one would get time in there.
READING SCIENCE FICTION – AND EVERYTHING ELSE
Michael read everything he could get his hands on. He was encouraged by our father, who introduced Dennis and him to science fiction. They had matching spaceman suits and helmets for Christmas. Our father scripted an 8mm home movie called “Around the World in 80 Frames,” in which Michael and Dennis played astronauts and I, as a five year old, played the bit part of citizen of several countries the astronauts spied on.
Beyond reading and writing, they did other things kids wouldn’t be likely to do today. Dennis invented his own language complete with its own vocabulary and system of declension; Michael wrote a short symphony and mailed it off to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic, and was pleased that he got a brief critique in reply. After they’d finished reading all fantasy books on the children’s shelves, they begged the librarian to let them check out real science fiction books from the adult shelves. They planned to write novels together.
They read for the pleasure of reading and learned for the pleasure of learning.
But when Michael was 16, our brother Dennis passed away from cancer. It was devastating to our family, but especially to Michael, who because they were so close in age had no memory of ever being without Dennis at his side. There would be no science fiction co-authorships.
You might know that the dedication page for In the Country of the Blind reads “To Dennis Harry Flynn, 1948 — 1964, who would have been co-author.” We can never talk about Michael without thinking of Dennis and how much they could have done together.
USING LIBERTARIAN LEANINGS LIKE A MATADOR’S MULETA
Some fans of my brother’s could feel that he was brusque or curt and always liked to argue from another point of view, even if it was not necessarily his own viewpoint at the time. In his blog The TOF Spot, TOF standing for The O’Floinn, Michael frequently used his libertarian leanings like a matador’s muleta, and he would enjoy the engagement no matter which ox – or bull – was gored.
Daughter Sara remarked that her father would argue positions in which he had no stake, just for the intellectual exercise. Some people would find that upsetting but in fact he was simply trying to learn more. He didn’t have a malicious bone in his body. Sara told me “It was never his intention to be malicious; he simply liked debating for the sake of debating.”
Sara explained it this way on Michael’s blog when she announced his passing the day before: “If you met or corresponded or conversed with Dad then you know that he was interested in a great many things in the world. If he asked you a question about something, it was because he really wanted to know, he wasn’t just being polite. He liked to take the “devil’s advocate” position in debates and arguments, especially political ones, much to the annoyance of my mother and probably many others. Dad was looking for a robust exercise in intellectual and rhetorical swordplay.”
“THE ROUND MOUND OF PROFOUND”
While in fact though, to his kids he was more like an absent-minded professor. When he worked at Coors in Golden, Colorado, in the late ‘70s, Marge assigned him the duty of driving the kids to preschool and kindergarten. On one occasion Sara vividly recalled, he pulled into his spot in the employees parking lot at Coors, turned the car off, and then heard a tiny voice in the back seat, “Aren’t you going to take us to school?”
Because he was the intellectual heavyweight in the family, we would often tease him to get a rise out of him. He would come home from college and immediately march Sean and Patrick over to the blackboard in the corner of the kitchen to try to teach them something he’d learned. Once when all the brothers were visiting the homestead, and we were watching Jeopardy on TV, Michael walked in the door and Sean proclaimed, “Never mind, here comes Kong.” With deference to the chunky Philadelphia 76ers basketball star Charles Barkley, whose nickname was the Round Mound of Rebound, Sean once dubbed Michael the Round Mound of Profound.
FLYNN’S FIRST PUBLISHED STORY
His first work to be published was “Slan Libh” (pronounced Slawn Liv), about an Irishman who uses a time machine to return to Ireland with a fungicide to feed his ancestors during the Potato Famine. It was to be published in a startup magazine called Genesis, and Michael would be paid on publication. But the magazine folded before the short story could be published. Many years later Michael told an interviewer, “My brothers, ever willing to offer encouragement, suggested the magazine folded because they had been reduced to the desperation of buying my story.”
“Slan Libh” eventually was Michael’s first published short story, in Analog in 1984, his first steps on a brilliant career.
When his planned Firestar trilogy led to a fourth novel, Falling Stars, I kidded Michael that he didn’t quite nail the definition of trilogy.
Brother Sean when in sixth grade in Catholic school took Michael in for show and tell. He tells it like this: “I brought him in for show and tell, and he would just riff on stuff in front of the class. He was talking about the way things are pronounced in other parts of the country. He said in Boston: Cork would be cock and fork would be fock. That brought a quick end to his presentation.”
As I recall, we were able to one up him on rare occasions. During one of our fiercely fought family games of Scrabble, Michael tried to use his remaining letters to spell the word “encod,” which he defined as the process of wrapping a thing with a whitefish. We made him take the letters off the board.
He offered to co-write a short story with any family member. Our youngest brother Patrick was a letter carrier for 35 years. Michael suggested that they might write about something weird at the post office. Patrick responded that was too broad because everything was weird at the post office.
One family member did take Michael up on his offer to co-write a short story. That was his son Dennis. I want to read some of what Dennis sent me about his dad.
HIS SON DENNIS’ MEMORIES OF HIS DAD
“I cannot recall how the story idea came to fruition because it was not a pleasant era in my life, but the story was simple: Two guys who labor at cleaning up bodies that have been infected by a fungus. The zombie fungus is not a new idea, but this was a story to show how something like that can affect a population and eventually become mundane.
“The story was published in a 2017 issue of Analog and after reading it, it was pretty clear who had done the heavy lifting for the story. I received a check from Analog, and my father sent me his check because, as I said, it was not a pleasant time in my life.
“Thankfully, a lot of who he was remains with us in those books and stories he wrote. I am at an age when I finally understand the importance of what he’d tried to tell me. One of those lessons was to learn. It is normal to have passion and opinions and passionate opinions, but most people become passionate and voice their opinions without truly understanding the WHY. They never stop to consider a different perspective or question if their opinions are based solely on passion with very little objective thought.
“One of his lessons, which he’d shared as an afterward in his collection of short stories The Forest of Time and Other Stories, was that information may, at times, seem irrelevant or useless. My gripe was that I had to do homework about the Inca empire and said something along the lines of “What do I need to do this for? I’ll never need to know this!” So Michael wrote a story about the Inca empire, got it published, received a check, showed it to me and said, “This is what you can use it for”.
“His stories may have characters or themes that people don’t agree with. They may depict scenarios or worlds that result from the growth of a political ideology we may not like. If the reader did not like the story or did not agree with certain elements of it, my father would appreciate that the reader READ the story and that there WAS something in it that ignited debate and passion.”
And that is what the science fiction community will miss from our brother. We, his family, will miss him in so many other ways beyond that. Thank you for believing in our brother’s work and for honoring him with this award.
THE IMPORTANCE OF HONORING YOUR MUSE
During the awards ceremony, Sara Flynn, daughter the late author Michael Flynn, shared a text message via Zoom following the eloquent and very personal and family-oriented acceptance speech of her uncle, Kevin Flynn, for Flynn’s In the Belly of the Whale, the 2025 Prometheus winner for Best Novel.
“Just as a comment on what my uncle said about Dad offering to write a story with ppl – I just drove past the place that always gave me the idea of a story,” Sara wrote.
“But SF is not my forte, so I never followed up with Dad on that. My takeaway is – follow up on it and figure it out.”
“I wish I had.”
That’s a wise take-away to take to heart.
WATCH THE 45TH PROMETHEUS AWARDS CEREMONY
* Watch the full 45-minute video of the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony, which was recorded, posted on YouTube and is available to see here.
READ MORE ABOUT MICHAEL FLYNN
Read the Prometheus Blog reviews of Michael Flynn’s three Best Novel winners: In the Country of the Blind, Fallen Angels and In the Belly of the Whale.
Read a recent post about Flynn’s literary legacy and re-evaluation, sparked by a recent rave review in Locus magazine.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS
* 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 understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and 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, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in 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. This page 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.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* 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.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
