Rich Man’s Sky, one of five 2022 Best Novel finalists currently competing for the Prometheus Award, will have a sequel.
Actually, two!
Continue reading Author update: Wil McCarthy writing sequels to Best Novel finalist Rich Man’s Sky
Category: Appreciations
Author update: Karl K. Gallagher continues writing his Fall of the Censor series
Author Karl K. Gallagher, a frequent Prometheus Awards nominee and Best Novel finalist, is keeping busy and catching up with an ambitious writing schedule – including a new novel just published: Captain Trader Helmsman Spy.
This is the fourth novel in the Fall of the Censor series for the Texas-based writer, currently a 2022 Best Novel finalist for two different novels (the second and third) in that series.
Captain Trader Helmsman Spy, published May 9, 2022 by Kelt Haven Press, focuses on an exploratory mission to gather more information about the authoritarian Censorate in the ongoing series about a complex interstellar conflict between two long-separated but newly connected sets of human-colonized solar systems – one relatively free and peaceful, blending diverse cultures through mutual trade, and the other near-totalitarian in its murderous control of many planets and Orwellian cancellation of history and culture.
Continue reading Author update: Karl K. Gallagher continues writing his Fall of the Censor series
Meet the author: Karl K. Gallagher, a double Best Novel finalist for Between Home and Ruin and Seize What’s Held Dear
For only the third time in the 43-year history of the Prometheus Awards, one author has been recognized twice within one year as a Best Novel finalist.
That’s Karl K. Gallagher, whose 2022 finalists include Between Home and Ruin and Seize What’s Held Dear, respectively the second and third novels in his Fall of the Censor series.
Christian libertarian novelist C.S. Lewis, a current Prometheus Hall of Fame finalist, receives attention in leading sf magazine
By Michael Grossberg
Tor.com, a leading online sf magazine, has published an intriguing article about bestselling writer C.S. Lewis. That’s welcome news to Lewis’ fans, including sf readers and Libertarian Futurist Society members.
The positive attention comes as LFS members are considering the 2022 Prometheus Hall of Fame finalists – which include That Hideous Strength, the third and final novel of Lewis’ Space Trilogy.
(For the record, the three other Hall of Fame 2022 finalists are Robert Heinlein’s novel Citizen of the Galaxy, Barry B. Longyear’s collection of stories in Circus World, and the Rush song “The Trees.”)
Review: Lionel Shriver’s alternate-reality novel Should We Stay or Should We Go highlights how government paternalism, NHS bureaucracy, runaway inflation and other statist disasters make end-of-life decisions worse
Here’s a review of Lionel Shriver’s Should We Stay Or Should We Go, which became a Prometheus Best Novel finalist:
By Michael Grossberg
Life, aging and death are difficult enough for most people to deal with, even when we strive to think and plan ahead and make the best choices we can about our senior years – including the possibilities of assisted living and even euthanasia.
Exploring those increasingly vital and common 21st-century issues in her kaleidoscopic 2021 novel Should We Stay or Should We Go, shrewd contrarian British novelist Lionel Shriver underscores how much worse the outcomes can be when oppressive laws, obtrusive welfare-state bureaucracy, socialized health care, forced medication, involuntary hospitalization, virtual imprisonment, anti-suicide laws, other bad government policies, abuses of power and even today’s dangerous trends of exploding federal debt and rising monetary inflation can damage lives further while undermining our ability to make our own decisions about end-of-life matters.
Robot rights, practical autonomy and character-driven comedy: An appreciation of Mark Stanley’s webcomic Freefall, the 2017 Special Prometheus Awardwinner
With this review-essay of the 2017 Special Prometheus Award winner, we complete the Appreciation series of past Prometheus winners, launched in 2019 with the Best Novel category, continued in 2020 with the Hall of Fame category and concluded* in 2022 with this final appreciation of our Special Prometheus Award-winners.
As the Libertarian Futurist Society began giving awards to works other than novels, one of the questions we faced was how to decide if a series was eligible.
It obviously wasn’t appropriate to give an award to an open-ended series, or to one that hadn’t been completed yet (though we might recognize a single volume, story, or episode). We were prepared to recognize a series that had been completed, such as Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. We also decided that we were prepared to recognize a bounded part of a series, such as one season of a television show. This decision proved applicable in 2017, when after nearly 20 years of publication, Mark Stanley announced that the first chapter of his webcomic Freefall had been completed with installment 2834.
Libertarian fiction’s philosophical or ideological content makes a lot of it serious, or even didactic, with characters discussing politics and economics in long speeches. Freefall, 2017 winner of a Special Prometheus Award, proved to be a happy exception.
Robots, rights & moral panics: Jonathan Luna and Sarah Vaughn’s graphic novel Alex + Ada, the 2016 Special Prometheus Award winner
The Libertarian Futurist Society’s Appreciation series continues with review-essays about fiction that has won Special Prometheus Awards. Here’s an appreciation of the graphic novel Alex + Ada, the 2016 Special Prometheus Award winner.
Libertarians describing their legal and political goals often use the original wording of the Declaration of Independence, referring to rights to life, liberty, and property. The order is important: on one hand, property rights grow out of the liberty to use and appropriate material objects without interference from others; on the other, liberty rights implement the right to life, seen not as a passive state of endurance but as an active process of self-creation and self-sustenance.
A central question for libertarian thought is which beings have rights to life and liberty? Libertarians influenced by Ayn Rand’s idea that freedom is a requirement for rational beings tend to think that every rational being has rights: rather than applying only to human beings, they would extend to such science fictional entities as aliens, enhanced animals —and robots.
In Alex + Ada, a graphic novel in three volumes (published in 2013-2015 by Image Comics), artist Jonathan Luna and writer Sarah Vaughn explore the question of robot rights, not through abstract philosophical analysis, or through a story of political conflict, but in an intensely personal narrative.
A song of community and resistance to tyranny, and the novella it inspired: An appreciation of Leslie Fish’s “The Horsetamer’s Daughter” and “Tower of Horses,” the 2014 Special Prometheus Award winner
Here is an appreciation of writer-songwriter-singer Leslie Fish’s song “The Horseman’s Daughter” and related novella “Tower of Horse,” together recognized with a 2014 Special Prometheus Award.
By Steve Gaalema and Michael Grossberg
“Tower of Horses,” Leslie Fish’s rich Darkover novella, may be one of the most libertarian stories ever recognized with a Prometheus Award.
With its very believable and human characters, suspenseful plot and resonant coming-of-age and temptations-of-power themes, Fish’s fantasy novella is certainly one of the most satisfying, and emotionally involving.
Together with Fish’s epic folk-song “The Horsetamer’s Daughter,” the novella received a Special Prometheus Award in 2014 – the first time within the history of the awards that a song was recognized, and the first time that a paired song and novella have received a joint award.
Author update, part 2: A preview of Travis Corcoran’s next two novels in his Prometheus-winning Aristillus series (and a possible story anthology)
Note: Here is the latest author’s update about Travis Corcoran, and a follow-up to a previous blog post. (Submissions of news and updates from other Prometheus-recognized authors – whether nominees, finalists or winners – are welcome and will be considered for publication.)
Prometheus-winning author Travis Corcoran recently shared some glimpses into the subjects and themes of two of his upcoming sf novels.
Right and Duty and Absolute Tyranny respectively will be the third and fourth novels in Corcoran’s four-part Aristillus series.
The novels will continue the story in the future-history series that Corcoran launched with The Powers of the Earth and its sequel Causes of Separation, set partly on the Earth but mostly in a functioning-with-challenges anarcho-capitalist colony on the Moon. Both novels won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel, with Powers winning in 2018 and Causes winning in 2019.
Corcoran reports that he is working simultaneously on both the third and fourth novels in the series, “which are still very libertarian in background,” he said.
A dystopian action film with radical and libertarian ideas: V for Vendetta, the 2007 Prometheus Special Award winner
Only two films have been recognized with Special Prometheus Awards since that occasional awards category was first presented more than two decades ago: Serenity and V for Vendetta.
Here is an appreciation of V for Vendetta, the 2007 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner:
V for Vendetta, a Warner Bros. Pictures feature film released in 2006, offers a powerful and poignant indictment of totalitarianism as a brutal denial of not only our liberty but our very humanity.
“Some movies fade on repeated viewings while others maintain their brilliance. V for Vendetta is a stellar example of the latter…. The movie is simply brilliant,” Fred Curtis Moulton wrote in his rave review, printed in the Spring 2007 issue of Prometheus, the LFS’ quarterly newsletter.