Editor’s note: To kick off a new year of judging and for the sake of greater transparency about the Prometheus Awards, the Prometheus Blog is posting an occasional series of essays by LFS awards judges about how they view our distinctive award standards and how they apply them to weigh candidates and nominees.
The Libertarian Futurist Society has long had a hybrid process for choosing its annual award winners.
First the members nominate books for Best Novel, and books or other works for Hall of Fame. Then committees of judges review the nominees and select the best five in each category (or sometimes four or six) as finalist. The members read these finalists and rank them from best to worst, and their votes are totaled to select the winners.
But what does “select the best” mean?
A PROBLEM OF MEASUREMENT
I look at this as a problem in measurement, in the statistical sense. I believe that a literary work has an objectively meaningful trait of quality — one that’s more than simply our liking it.
I’ve long thought that if you can’t say both “I enjoyed this book, but it’s not actually good” and “this is a good book, but I didn’t care for it,” you aren’t taking literature seriously.
I think awards should be more than popularity contests. But at the same time, we don’t yet have any way of measuring literary quality other than human judgment, just as at one time we had no way of measuring spiciness other than human judgment (but now we have Scoville units), and at a remoter time we could only judge weight by hefting things.
Human judgment can be fallible. So we get ratings from multiple judges, and use a vote counting procedure to pool their judgments.
But before that, each judge has to balance out their own ratings of works by different criteria.
For me, there are three main criteria: fantastic content, pro-liberty theme, and pure literary quality.
A BROADER FOCUS ON SPECULATIVE FICTION
The Prometheus Award began as an award for science fiction specifically: for works that appeal to science or technology to gain their readers’ willing suspension of disbelief. But over the years, we’ve come to recognize that works of fantasy, which appeal to myths, legends, or fairy tales —such as Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch (Best Novel, 2003) or J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (Hall of Fame, 2009) or most recently Terry Pratchett’s The Truth (Hall of Fame, 2024)—may also speak to libertarian concerns. So we’ve broadened our focus to include all the fantastic genres.
The important point here, for me, is that the fantastic element should be taken seriously as the basis for a story that couldn’t happen without it, rather than merely used as a springboard for a conventional adventure, love story, or satire (as suggested in Wilson Tucker’s original definition of “space opera”).
For example, I see Gulliver’s Travels as a pioneering work of science fiction, because it doesn’t just use its tiny people or giants or sapient horses as satires on human folly: it asks how much food a Lilliputian eats or how a Houyhnhnm manipulates tools, an effect the poet Marianne Moore described as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” (The fact that Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians turn out to be physiologically impossible, for reasons J.B.S. Haldane discussed in “On Being the Right Size,” doesn’t negate Swift’s having asked science fictional questions about his imaginary creations.)
WHAT MAKES A WORK PRO-LIBERTY
It might seem easy for a work to be pro-liberty: Dystopian novels and films are widely popular and are full of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes that have to be fought against.
But stories of that kind may fall into treating the regime and its servitors as cardboard villains, who want to do evil simply because it’s evil, in the spirit of “evil, be thou my good.” That makes for shallow and uninteresting stories.
I want at least to see some insight into the evildoers’ motives and beliefs, and into the specific things that their authoritarianism destroys or corrupts. Even better, I’d like to see a vision of liberty as a positive, of what it would be like to live in a libertarian society, or of how such a society might be attained or defended. I particularly like works that ask interesting questions about such a society, or that approach libertarian themes from an unusual direction, as in Donald Kingsbury’s deconstruction of the Selden Plan in Psychohistorical Crisis.
THE ELEMENTS OF LITERARY QUALITY
Literary quality is largely a matter of things that would also be desirable in works that were neither fantastic nor pro-liberty.
For me, in particular, the use of language is vital. I’m not talking about mere correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation, but about sensitivity to the nuances of meaning of words and the precise effects of syntax; as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, the difference between the right word and the nearly right word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. I prefer writers to whom language isn’t merely a means to the end of telling a story that might just as well have been told in drawings or moving pictures, but itself a source of delight.
Another important concern for me is characterization, and particularly my own sense of involvement with the characters. I want to read about people whose motives are more than conventional tropes; and in particular, in stories set in fantastic created worlds, about people who make sense as having emerged from the societies and histories of those worlds. I think this kind of involvement is one of the things that keeps me turning the pages, rather than struggling against the impulse to put a book down.
This last concern, and more generally the ease with which I continue to read, is the most subjective of my concerns; and in the last analysis, I have to trust that my fellow judges will compensate for the peculiarities of my own tastes.
But ultimately, if I’m comparing two works that both meet LFS standards as fantastic and as pro-liberty, the one that holds my interest all the way through is the one I’ll rank higher. And I also can hope that, if I think about why one work does that, and another doesn’t, I’ll be able to identify a real difference between the two.
Note: LFS President William H. Stoddard chairs the Prometheus Hall of Fame finalist-selection committee and has served for decades on the Best Novel finalist-selection committee.
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, individuality, and human dignity.
Through recognizing the literature of liberty and the many different but complementary visions of a free future via the Prometheus Awards, the LFS hopes to help spread ideas and ethical principles that help humanity overcome tyranny, end slavery, reduce the threat of war, repeal or constrain other abuses of coercive power and achieve universal liberty, respect for human rights and a better world (perhaps ultimately, worlds) for all.
