Eleven 2024 novels have been nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Broadly embracing many forms of speculative fiction including science fiction, fantasy, dystopian cautionary tales and near-future political-tech thrillers, the diverse slate offers a wide variety and blends of genres, styles and themes – from the serious to the darkly satirical.
Most poignantly, this will be the last time that two authors are nominated for Best Novel because they’ve sadly passed away: Michael Flynn and Howard Andrew Jones.
Flynn, a two-time Prometheus winner for Best Novel, died in 2023 at 75.
Jones, a Best Novel finalist last year, died in January 2025 at 56.
Flynn was nominated for In the Belly of the Whale, his posthumous novel about the social, political and technical challenges facing 40,000 people on a large colony ship two centuries into their long interstellar trip to settle a planet in another solar system.
Jones was nominated for Shadow of the Smoking Mountain, the third volume in his Chronicles of Hanuvar series. Lord of a Shattered Land, the first work in the ancient-Rome-inspired historical-mythological fantasy series about a Hannibal-like general striving to find and free the enslaved remnants of his conquered people, was selected as a 2024 Prometheus Best Novel finalist.
A PERENNIAL SEARCH FOR WORTHY NEW WORKS AND WRITERS
The Prometheus Awards judges and other Libertarian Futurist Society members, who consider and have the right to nominate eligible works for all three categories of our 45-year-old awards, are constantly on the lookout for new writers, emerging talents and other authors who might be in mid-career but who have never been nominated before for our award.
This year, five of the 11 nominated novels represent authors nominated for the first time for a Prometheus Award.
So a hearty congratulations and welcome to Peter Grose, Danny King, Alastair Reynolds, J. Michael Straczynski and Stuart Turton.
Overall, this year’s slate of nominees offers a nice mix of the new and the old.
Four of the 12 authors* are past Prometheus Best Novel winners, while two others previously were recognized for works selected as Best Novel finalists.
(* One nominee, Alliance Unbound, was co-written by two authors: C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher.)
THE 2024 BEST NOVEL NOMINEES LIST
Here are the 2024 novels, listed in alphabetical order by author, nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel, to be presented as part of the 45th annual Prometheus Awards in an online ceremony tba and likely to be scheduled in mid-August:
Alliance Unbound, by C.J Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher
(DAW Books, 352 pages)
Set within Cherryh’s Alliance-Union future history series, Alliance Unbound dramatizes the conflict over control of key star stations between an increasingly militaristic Earth Company and an independent cluster of interstellar traders and colonies eager to expand after Cyteen has opened up faster-than-light travel.
Book 2 of The Hinder Stars projected trilogy, Alliance Unbound is the direct sequel to Alliance Rising, the 2020 Prometheus Best Novel winner.
In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn
(CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, 366 pages)
Completed before his death, this is the final novel by Flynn, a previous Prometheus Best Novel winner for In the Country of the Blind and Fallen Angels.
In The Belly of the Whale explores the formidable challenges of sustaining both the technology and the liberty of people amid conflicts, bureaucracy, decay and abuses of power over generations of an interstellar voyage under the traditional command structure of a ship.
Time: A Novel, by Peter Grose
Merriam Publishing, 305 pages)
A first-time Prometheus nominee, Grose conceived his first novel as a time-travel story about a young libertarian, concerned about an Orwellian new law in America, who goes back in time to try to help the Founding Fathers better safeguard the Constitution against abuses of federal power.
Shadow of the Smoking Mountain, by Howard Andrew Jones
(Baen Books, 512 pages)
A sequel to the Best Novel finalist Lord of a Shattered Land and The City of Marble and Blood, continues to chronicle the varied efforts of Hanuvar and his allies to infiltrate enemy territory and free their enslaved countrymen amid dangers and evils both human and supernatural.
Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King
(Annie Mosse Press, 476 pages)
A first-time Prometheus Best Novel nominee, the British novelist and screenwriter has written more than 20 novels including The Burglar Diaries, basis for the BBC sitcom Thieves Like Us, and screenplays for the films Wild Bill and Eat Locals.
Set in a dystopian future United Kingdom where progressive politics enforces social justice in an authoritarian regime, Cancelled is a darkly satirical story revolving around a woman, working for a leading cancellation company and eager to remove offenders from society, who ends up inadvertently becoming a victim of cancel culture herself.
Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy
(Baen Books, 369 pages)
Book 3 of the Rich Man’s Sky series focuses on a private-enterprise-driven effort by a billionaire entrepreneur to overcome Earth obstacles and send the first interstellar ship to establish first contact with mysterious but benevolent aliens.
Rich Man’s Sky, McCarthy’s 2022 Prometheus Best Novel winner, launched the series, which continued with Poor Man’s Sky in 2023.
Machine Vendetta, by Alastair Reynolds
(Orbit Books, 408 pages)
This novel concludes the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies detective-mystery trilogy, following Aurora Rising and Elysium Fire.
All three works are set within the British SF writer’s acclaimed Revelation Space interstellar future-history series in which thousands of different polities are bound loosely by a quasi-libertarian ethic of voluntary consent that’s minimally enforced by a small force of Panoply detectives.
Mania: A Novel, by Lionel Shriver
(HarperCollins Publishers, 286 pages)
Set in a recent alternate-history past where differences in intelligence are denied and the Mental Parity movement imposes a new orthodoxy, this darkly satirical cautionary tale revolves around a lifelong friendship threatened by culture wars.
Shriver is a two-time Prometheus Best Novel finalist for The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047 (in 2017) and for Should We Stay Or Should We Go in 2022.
The Glass Box, by J. Michael Straczynski
(Blackstone Publishing, 266 pages)
A first-time Prometheus nominee, Straczynski is a prolific television and film screenwriter best known for writing all five seasons of Babylon 5.
Set in a dystopian near-future American dictatorship in which protestors are locked in preventive detention in secretive American Renewal Centers modeled after psychiatric facilities, The Glass Box focuses on a rebellious young woman struggling to resist mandatory medication, group therapy and re-education and escape.
Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
(Orbit Books, 424 pages)
A first-time Prometheus nominee, the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning British SF writer imagines a far-future epic in which a dissident Earth scientist is sentenced for his orthodoxy-challenging research into alien biology and sent by Earth’s authoritarian Mandate to survive if he can in a harsh prison colony on an alien planet with a dangerous and mysterious ecology.
The Last Murder At the End of the World, by Stuart Turton
(Sourcebooks Landmark, 367 pages)
A first-time Prometheus nominee, Turton is known for his genre-smashing, imaginative and international bestselling blend of murder mysteries, thrillers and speculative SF themes.
Set on an isolated island in a nearly destroyed Earth, Turton’s novel offers a post-apocalyptic locked-room SF-accented murder mystery exploring the dangers of absolute power, conflicts between individual freedom and the collective, and the importance of questioning authority to discover the truth.
SELECTING THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS FINALISTS
The 12-member Prometheus Best Novel Judging Committee will be reading, discussing and ranking the nominees over the next six or seven weeks to select the slate of (typically five, but occasionally four or six) finalists.
Once the Best Novel finalists are announced by April, LFS members will have roughly three months to read them before the traditional July 4 voting deadline for all categories of the Prometheus Award.
The four finalists for the next Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction, selected in December, will also be on the final ballot.
All LFS members have the right to vote for each year’s Hall of Fame inductee; all LFS members at the Full membership level or above (Sponsor or Benefactor) have the right and privilege to also vote to choose each year’s Best Novel winner.
Both awards come with an engraved plaque and gold coin; the Best Novel category includes a one-ounce gold coin (currently worth almost $3000), which is why higher-level members, whose annual dues help pay for the gold prize, have the privilege to vote in that annual category.
The 45th annual Prometheus Awards is tentatively planned for mid-August for an online Zoom ceremony open to the public.
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, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
