Appreciations – Prometheus Blog

Review: James Blish’s The Star Dwellers dramatizes core concepts of consent, contract and deal-making that make peace and freedom possible

Fizzy with ideas and brimming with American idealism, James Blish was widely recognized during the Golden Age of science fiction as a major writer.

One of his best novels, in my view, is The Star Dwellers, first published in 1961 and now nominated for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award for Best Classic Fiction.

Relatively short at 128 pages in the Avon Books paperback and clearly written as a so-called “SF juvenile” yet still rich with insights, Blish’s novel revolves around a fraught “second contact” between humans and an ancient, extremely advanced alien species.

Highlighted at the story’s center are the closely linked concepts of consent and contract – two of the most fundamental ideas at the foundation of both libertarianism and classical liberalism.

Continue reading Review: James Blish’s The Star Dwellers dramatizes core concepts of consent, contract and deal-making that make peace and freedom possible

The Special Prometheus Award for YA fiction isn’t well-known yet, but that could change with the nomination of Dave Freer’s Storm-Dragon 

By Michael Grossberg

Many publishers and authors may not be aware of the newest category of Special Prometheus Awards, set up to recognize Young Adult (YA) fiction. Even some Libertarian Futurist Society members may be unaware of the award, only added as a possibility a few years ago.

Yet, that could be about to change, with the recent nomination of Dave Freer’s YA novel Storm-Dragon for a Special Award.

Continue reading The Special Prometheus Award for YA fiction isn’t well-known yet, but that could change with the nomination of Dave Freer’s Storm-Dragon 

The newest Prometheus Award: A Special Award for Young Adult fiction – and why it’s important to encourage younger generations to read books

By Michael Grossberg

Did you know that Young Adult novels are eligible for a Special Prometheus Award?

In the broad realm of fantastical fiction, Young-Adult or YA novels have had and continue to have a special and honored place.

Just recall how much of the Golden Age of modern SF was YA books for teenagers or so-called “juvenile fiction” for children or middle-grade readers, including many of Robert Heinlein’s early bestsellers, such as Citizen of the Galaxy or Red Planet, both inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.

That’s a key reason why the Libertarian Futurist Society decided several years ago to set up a process to begin recognizing eligible and worthy YA novels with a Special Prometheus Award – and why we invite our members, as well as publishers and authors, to bring eligible YA works to our attention.

Continue reading The newest Prometheus Award: A Special Award for Young Adult fiction – and why it’s important to encourage younger generations to read books

Sequels, part 11: Unlike literary sequels, movie sequels and genre films don’t get as much respect at the Oscars, but that may be changing 

By Michael Grossberg

Movie sequels seem to be more common and more popular than ever in the 21st century, often dominating at the box office. Yet, they just don’t get as much respect or awards recognition as literary sequels.

Far fewer sequels have won Academy Awards than have been recognized by science fiction and fantasy’s Hugo and Prometheus awards.

Just consider how few movie sequels have won the Oscar for Best Picture compared to how often sequel novels win a top SF/fantasy award.

Within the 46-year history of the Prometheus Awards, 194 of the 505 novels nominated within the Best Novel category have been sequels – and 11 have gone on to win.

Meanwhile, as recently reported here, nine sequel novels have won the Best Novel category in the 72-year history of the Hugo Awards, voted by members of the World Science Fiction Society and presented annually at the Worldcon.

Yet, in the 97 years that the Academy Awards have been presented, only two movie sequels have won Best Picture: The Godfather Part II and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Intriguingly, both movies were key parts of the only trilogies or series to have three films nominated for Best Picture, perhaps partly reflecting the stature and impact of the overall effort.

And perhaps coincidentally, both movies dramatize libertarian and classical-liberal themes about the temptations and abuses of power.

Continue reading Sequels, part 11: Unlike literary sequels, movie sequels and genre films don’t get as much respect at the Oscars, but that may be changing 

Sequels, part 10: Like the Prometheus Awards, the Hugo awards often recognize sequels – including many of the same novels and authors

By Michael Grossberg

Within the 46-year history of the Prometheus Awards, 194 of the 505 novels nominated within the Best Novel category have been sequels, as previously reported – and 11 have gone on to win. Yet, the Prometheus Awards are not the only science fiction awards that often recognize sequels.

Quite a few have been honored by the Hugo Awards, voted by members of the World Science Fiction Society and presented annually at Worldcons.

By my count, the Hugos have honored sequels nine times in the Best Novel category. Interestingly, quite a few of those authors also have been recognized in the Prometheus Awards – including Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, C.J. Cherryh and Vernor Vinge. In several cases, both awards have recognized writers for the same works.

This overview of such recognition reminds us of the frequent overlap between the Hugos and the Prometheus awards while shedding light on the popularity and appeal of sequels.

Continue reading Sequels, part 10: Like the Prometheus Awards, the Hugo awards often recognize sequels – including many of the same novels and authors

Sequels, part 9: By the numbers, Prometheus Awards history is full of Best Novel sequels

By Michael Grossberg

Throughout the 46-year history of the Prometheus Award, 505 novels have been nominated for Best Novel.

That’s a surprisingly large number, at least to me – and a cumulative total that I don’t believe has been calculated and reported before, or at least not in many years.

Yet, when I counted them up recently, I was even more surprised by the number of Best Novel nominees that turn out to be sequels. (Quite a few were hard to identify as sequels, by the way, until I researched each title – with some so obscure, and not immediately recognizable as sequels when nominated and read by Prometheus judges and LFS members, because many work fine as stand-alone stories without any obvious indications of previous works.)

Can you guess how many Best Novel nominees have been sequels?

Continue reading Sequels, part 9: By the numbers, Prometheus Awards history is full of Best Novel sequels

Masterful social-scientific world-building in clash of cultures, including a libertarian society: An appreciation of Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise, the 2025 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner 

By William H. Stoddard

One of the things Poul Anderson was known for throughout his literary career was world-building. Much of this was planetary design, based on the natural sciences, in which he started out with stellar type, planetary mass, orbital radius, and elemental abundances and worked out the geology, meteorology, and biology of a world.

Poul Anderson (Creative Commons license)

Anderson was certainly one of the masters of this, up there with Hal Clement and Vernor Vinge. But he put equal effort into social scientific worldbuilding, creating economies, polities, and cultures, and developing plots for his stories from the conflicts they gave rise to. Orion Shall Rise, winner of the 2025 Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction, is a nearly pure example of social scientific world-building, set not in a distant solar system but on a future Earth.

Continue reading Masterful social-scientific world-building in clash of cultures, including a libertarian society: An appreciation of Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise, the 2025 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner 

An epic social novel about conflicts and threats to liberty on a multi-generation interstellar colony ship: An Appreciation of Michael Flynn’s In the Belly of the Whale, the 2025 Best Novel winner

By Michael Grossberg

In the Belly of the Whale, the 2025 Prometheus winner for Best Novel, was Michael Flynn’s last, posthumous novel and one of his richest and most resonant.

Exploring the complex lives, jobs, relationships, challenges and conflicts aboard a large colony ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti, the epic 472-page novel takes some time to fully introduce its large cast of characters among 40,000 people who live in the hollowed-out asteroid ship dubbed The Whale.

Yet, patience is amply rewarded with Flynn’s plausible and intricate world-building, deep insights into social psychology and wise grasp of human nature.

In the Belly of the Whale, Flynn’s 14th and final novel, builds dramatic intensity coupled with rich and revelatory insights that freshen this seemingly familiar SF subgenre of the long colony-ship voyage. Flynn raises deeper questions than most SF writers, scientists or space-colonization enthusiasts have considered about the prospects and costs of such generations-long voyages.

Continue reading An epic social novel about conflicts and threats to liberty on a multi-generation interstellar colony ship: An Appreciation of Michael Flynn’s In the Belly of the Whale, the 2025 Best Novel winner

The Day Before the Revolution: Ursula K. Le Guin story, a prequel to her Prometheus-winning The Dispossessed, recommended by Reactor Magazine 

By Michael Grossberg

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Day Before the Revolution has been highlighted and recommended by Reactor Magazine among “five SF stories in which hope survives.”

The story, available in the Le Guin short-story collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, should be of interested to LFS members and other freedom-loving SF/fantasy fans because it’s considered a sequel to Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, an early Prometheus Hall of Fame winner.

“Science fiction has the power to remind us that hope is valuable, and necessary,” James Davis Nicoll wrote in the Reactor column.

That insight, and sentiment, rings true to Prometheus Awards voters and fans. After all, our award in part aims to recognize worthy works of speculative fiction that in many cases do remind us that even amid troubled times and authoritarian societies, better and freer futures remain possible.

Continue reading The Day Before the Revolution: Ursula K. Le Guin story, a prequel to her Prometheus-winning The Dispossessed, recommended by Reactor Magazine 

Sequels, part 8: More Best Novel winners (not sequels) by L. Neil Smith and Ramez Naam that inspired sequels 

By Michael Grossberg

Quite a few Prometheus Award Best Novel winners, while not sequels themselves, have inspired subsequent novels that have received further Prometheus recognition.

L. Neil Smith in the 1980s (Creative Commons license)

Such winners by Sarah Hoyt (Darkship Thieves), Victor Milan (The Cybernetic Samurai) and Dani and Eytan Kollins (The Unincorporated Man) were examined in the previous post of this ongoing series about sequels.

Let’s turn our attention here to Prometheus-winning works by Ramez Naam and L. Neil Smith. Both authors were inspired to write more than one follow-up novel to their initial Prometheus-winning novels.

While Naam framed one complex story for his near-future Nexus trilogy, Smith conceived a variety of zestful and rambunctious stories all linked within his alternate-universe North American Confederacy series.

Continue reading Sequels, part 8: More Best Novel winners (not sequels) by L. Neil Smith and Ramez Naam that inspired sequels 