2025 Prometheus Awards with family tributes to Michael Flynn (Best Novel winner: In the Belly of the Whale) and Poul Anderson (Hall of Fame winner: Orion Shall Rise), with libertarian theorist David Friedman on how Anderson, Heinlein, Vinge influenced his thinking

* What life events, travels and scientific projects helped shape Poul Anderson’s 1983 novel Orion Shall Rise, the 2025 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner?

* How did Michael Flynn’s family, childhood and young adulthood lead him to become an award-winning sf writer – and 2025 Prometheus winner for Best Novel for In the Belly of the Whale?

* Why does Flynn’s CAEZIK SF & Fantasy publisher view Flynn as one of the best (but also underestimated) sf writers he’s ever known?

* Why do Prometheus winners Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Vernor Vinge, Jerry Pournelle, C.J. Cherryh and Lois McMaster Bujold rank high among the favorite sf authors of law-and-economics-theorist David D. Friedman?

* How did Heinlein’s Hugo-winning, Prometheus Hall of Fame novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress give Friedman (Milton’s son) the radical idea that society can develop just laws and functional legal systems without government?

Those are among the questions explored – and fascinatingly answered – at the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony honoring Anderson and Flynn – the first Prometheus ceremony in which both winning authors of the two annual categories  received their recognition posthumously.

Astrid Anderson Bear, Anderson’s daughter, and Kevin Flynn, Michael Flynn’s brother, each shared very personal and family-oriented memories of this year’s Prometheus Award winners. Alternately revealing, inspiring, poignant and amusing, their eloquent speeches became moving tributes to two freedom-loving novelists whose works continue to be read and deserve recognition.

To whet your appetite to watch the full video, here are excerpts from the Aug. 30, 2025, broadcast, which aired live via Zoom and was posted on YouTube:

From Astrid Anderson Bear’s acceptance speech for her father Poul Anderson, whose Orion Shall Rise was inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction:

“My parents went to Cape Kennedy many times to watch rocket launches, from Apollo in the 1970s and on to some shuttle launches in the 1980s as well. Friendships with rocket scientists, physicists, and scientists of all stripes are all in the mix that went into this book.

And of course Orion, the nuclear pulse powered spaceship that — spoiler alert — does rise as the novel concludes, is closely modeled after the designs of Project Orion from the late 1950s.  I’m not positive that my dad and Freeman Dyson ever met, but it is likely, and Dyson is called out in the text of the book.

At the end of Orion Shall Rise, the pleas for nuclear power to be used solely in peaceful ways, especially for space flight, are set against the pervasive desires of humans to seek power and domination over each other.    Will we evolve our thinking enough to be able to do this?  We are left to wonder and hope.”

* From CAEZIK SF & Fantasy publisher Shahid Mahmud’s speech about Michael Flynn:

“I am not saying this because I published him: Michael was one of my favorite authors. I think he was one of the most underrated authors in the genre, in terms of how well he was known among the readers. I think his work holds up to some of the best science fiction I’ve ever read.

But let me warn you about something. He loved killing characters.

If you remember his novel The Wreck of the River of Stars, nearly everybody dies. You get invested in his characters, because he wrote good characters, and then he kills them almost all off.

And this is an absolutely true story: I once asked him to write a number of novellas for me for a collection. And I told him, ‘Please, please, Michael, just don’t kill off your characters.’

Soon enough, I got a message from him: ‘Shahid, I have to kill off the baby.’

I said: ‘No, no, Michael, you can’t kill the baby! You can’t kill off babies in stories. People don’t like it.’

But he insists.  And then he sends me the story…. and he had to kill off the baby.

So rest in peace, Michael, and thank you for all the joy – and the sadness, with his onus for killing off those characters.”

* From David D. Friedman’s speech presenting the Prometheus Hall of Fame:

Heinlein’s book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (one of the first two works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 1983) was a major influence on my views.

Before I read it, my view was that the free market, voluntary exchange, was the right way to produce things, but that it required a legal framework produced and enforced outside the market – a government.

That view was in tension with my moral intuitions, which found no basis for taxes, government authority, no obligation to obey the law merely because it was the law. Right and wrong are not made by act of Congress.

Heinlein’s book was set in a society where the legal order was endogenous – produced from within the society. So far as I could tell, it was an internally consistent picture. If the society he described existed, there was no reason why it could not have functioned as he described. If that society could function as described, it could not be true, as I had believed and thought I could prove, that all societies required a legal framework produced by government.

A theorem is refuted by a single counter example – in this case, a fictional counterexample, but one that appeared to me to be internally consistent.

If a stateless legal order was not impossible, it was worth trying to imagine what such a thing could be like in something closer to the real world. That was the origin of the model of anarcho-capitalism, a stateless legal order in my first book (The Machinery of Freedom.)”

From Kevin Flynn’s acceptance speech for his late brother Michael Flynn.

* “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. From his youngest days, he wanted to be a science fiction author, in collaboration with his Irish twin brother Dennis.

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.”

* “Michael was a voracious reader, which can be challenging in a small house with one bathroom serving as our library. Our mother always said she was glad she never had daughters because then no one would get time in there.

* “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.”

* From LFS President and emcee William H. Stoddard’s speech introducing the 45th Prometheus Awards:

“What is “libertarian science fiction”? We take both parts of that label in an inclusive spirit. On one hand, we look for works that are pro-liberty — that explore the question of what a free society is, how we get there, or why the loss of freedom is a disaster.

On the other, we take “science fiction” to encompass all the fantastic genres: fantasy, many sorts of horror, alternative history, dystopia, utopia, and others.

* From LFS co-founder Michael Grossberg’s speech presenting the Best Novel category to Michael Flynn for In the Belly of the Whale:

“When Flynn won his first award in 1991 for In the Country of the Blind, Illuminatus! co-author Bob Shea presented the award to him at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago.

Shea observed that “Flynn’s novel dealt with a conflict between free will and historical determinism.”

In his acceptance speech, Flynn said he was glad to finally learn what the novel was about.”

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.

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