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Harlan Ellison on his anti-authoritarian politics and the honor of the Prometheus Award: His 2015 acceptance speech and home video
Sample excerpt from Harlan Ellison acceptance speech:
“I consider it to be a great honor. I take this award with considerable seriousness,” Ellison said.
“When I received the initial nomination (in 2011), I was enormously impressed….. George Orwell (Animal Farm), Rudyard Kipling (“As Easy as A.B.C.”), E.M. Forster (“The Machine Stops”)… That’s pretty stiff competition to be in. It’s now four years later, and I’m very pleased to be getting the Prometheus Award.”
Harlan Ellison at the 1984 LA Worldcon (Creative Commons license)
“I’ve never been a Republican, never been a Democrat, communist, socialist, fascist or anything else,” Ellison said.
“If you want to call me a libertarian, I have no objections… We’ll sit down sometime and have our discussions.
In the meantime,… I’m enormously pleased to be getting this award.”
At the London Worldcon in August 2014 in England, emcee Amy Sturgis presented the Best Novel award to Prometheus Award Best Novel co-winners Cory Doctorow (for Homeland) and Ramez Naam (for Nexus). Each author spoke about threats to liberty, from constraints on the information society to the War on drugs and War on terror.
The Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction went to Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel Falling Free. Sturges read Bujold's acceptance statement.
LFS member Fred Moulton presented the 2011 Prometheus Awards in Aug. 2011 at Renovation, the Reno, Nevada, Worldcon, to Sarah Hoyt (for Best Novel for Darkship Thieves, a coming-of-age saga depicting a plausible anarchist society among the asteroids and a heroic woman’s fight for her freedom and identity against a tyrannical Earth) and to the late George Orwell (for Best Classic Fiction for his 1945 novel Animal Farm.)
Michael Grossberg, who founded the LFS in 1982 to help sustain the Prometheus Awards, has been an arts critic, speaker and award-winning journalist for five decades.
Michael has won Ohio SPJ awards for Best Critic in Ohio and Best Arts Reporting (seven times).
He's written for Reason, Libertarian Review and Backstage weekly; helped lead the American Theatre Critics Association for two decades; and has contributed to six books, including critical essays for the annual Best Plays Theatre Yearbook and an afterword for J. Neil Schulman's novel The Rainbow Cadenza.
Among books he recommends from a libertarian-futurist perspective: Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist & How Innovation Works, David Boaz's The Libertarian Mind and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress.
View all posts by Michael Grossberg
