By Michael Grossberg
Brave New World, the classic dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) warning about a future “soft tyranny” under a seemingly benevolent State, will be the 50th work to be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
The Libertarian Futurist Society is pleased to announce that Huxley’s two grandchildren Tessa and Trevenan Huxley and Pulitzer-winning author Jack Miles, co-trustee of the Aldous and Laura Huxley Literary Trust, will accept the posthumous award.
Tessa and Trevenan Huxley and author Jack Miles, co-trustee of the Aldous and Laura Huxley Literary Trust, will deliver acceptance speeches discussing the novel and Huxley’s legacy Aug. 16 at the 46th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
“I was delighted to learn of the honor being bestowed upon my grandfather,” Tessa Huxley said in an email.
“I am pleased that others find Brave New World as important and relevant as I do. I re-read Brave New World early this year and was really struck by the seductive nature of his imaginary world and that of the USA… In particular, in 2026 where Americans seem endlessly obsessed by consumerism and pleasure seeking and apparently rather proud of it.”
THE FOCUS OF THEIR SPEECHES – AND THE ZOOM LINK
Tessa and Trevenan Huxley are expected to discuss Brave New World and Huxley’s legacy while offering more personal and family-oriented perspectives as his grandchildren.
Jack Miles, a co-trustee for several decades for the Aldous and Laura Huxley Literary Trust, will discuss in his speech the enduring relevance of Brave New World, which seems even more timely today as a cautionary tale – and as a novel that’s still considered controversial and is under attack.
The roughly hourlong Prometheus ceremony, open to the public via Zoom, will begin at 10 a.m. Sunday Pacific time (1 p.m. Eastern time) on Aug. 16, 2026.
Libertarian Futurist Society members, Brave New World fans, other science-fiction fans and the public are invited to watch the ceremony live using this Zoom link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87824388418?pwd=CsoznF4wtlLNTYvEotlIpVJkCoGb9I.1
ABOUT JACK MILES
A Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, Miles has written on religion, politics, and culture for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar, Commonweal, and many other publications.
His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.
The Norton Anthology of World Religions, of which he was general editor, was published in 2014 in hardcover and in 2015 in a six-volume paperback edition. The book has been translated into sixteen languages, including Hebrew and (twice) Chinese.
A sequel to that book entitled CHRIST: A Crisis in the Life of God—published simultaneously in 2001 in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France—was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and led to Miles being named a MacArthur Fellow in 2002.
A MacArthur Fellow during the years 2003-2007, he is most recently the author of God in the Qur’an (2018) and Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story (2019).
Most recently, Jack co-authored a book of correspondence between him and a friend, Mark C. Taylor, titled A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life, about many topics from religion, philosophy, academia and nature during the deadly 2020 pandemic.
In his 1990 monograph “The Perils of Pluralism: In Quest of a Common Literary Culture,” Miles examined cultural fragmentation, focusing on events like the Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses controversy to explore the friction between diverse moral values and shared societal standards.
Over a period of nearly twenty years, 1975-1995, Miles was successively an editor at Doubleday, executive editor at the University of California Press, literary editor at the Los Angeles Times, and finally a member of the Times Editorial Board, writing on politics and culture.
Born in Chicago in 1942, he spent the years 1960-1970 as a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before enrolling at Harvard University where he completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages in 1971. He is fluent in several modern languages.
For more information about Miles and his books, visit his website www.jackmiles.com.
ABOUT THE LFS AND THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
* 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 international 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 the 106 works that have won a Prometheus 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.
