Just how many sequels have won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel?
More than you might expect, as I recently discovered.
Continue reading Sequels, part 2: How many have won a Prometheus Award? You might be surprised…
Category: Sequels
Exploring the appeal and challenge of sequels with four Prometheus nominees: Machine Vendetta, Shadow of the Smoking Mountain and Best Novel finalists Alliance Unbound and Beggar’s Sky
Sequels are increasingly popular these days – especially within the fantastical or speculative genres of science fiction and fantasy.
Among this year’s recently announced five Prometheus Best Novel finalists are two sequels: Alliance Unbound and Beggar’s Sky.
Of the 11 2024 SF/fantasy novels nominated for this year’s 45th Best Novel award, four are sequels – including Shadow of the Smoking Mountain and Machine Vendetta.
Each sequel navigates a tricky balance between the fresh and the familiar.
Each can be enjoyed by newcomers as a stand-alone book. Yet, each is enriched by previous world-building and continuing characters that makes them rewarding for the author’s ongoing fans.
How each novel builds on its predecessors, or in some cases departs from them, varies in ways that help illuminate the appeal of sequels and their challenges.
Best Novel finalist review: Cherryh and Fancher’s Alliance Unbound dramatizes the crucial fact of scarcity as merchant ships pursue voluntary trade amid authoritarian threats
Alliance Unbound is the sequel to Alliance Rising, which won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2020. It appears that this may be the second volume of a trilogy, as the final pages leave important issues unresolved.
Taken together, these novels form a prequel to Cherryh’s Alliance/Union series, one of the larger future histories in the past few decades. (It began in 1981 with Downbelow Station, which won her first Hugo Award for best novel.)
The crucial fact driving its events is scarcity.
There are only three planets with biospheres: Earth, Pell’s World, and Cyteen. Orbital habitats in other solar systems — notably Alpha Station, located at Barnard’s Star, where Alliance Rising was set — are ultimately dependent for supplies, especially biomass, on those three systems; Alliance Rising’s plot turned on Earth’s starving Alpha Station of resources to advance its own goals, and a key point in Alliance Unbound is the discovery of nearly priceless Earth goods on Downbelow Station, which orbits Pell’s World.
Cherryh and Fancher’s characters are well aware of such issues of scarcity and value, being interstellar merchants who spend their lives going from solar system to solar system, with holds full of high-value cargo and computer memories full of equally valuable data.
Review: Alastair Reynolds’ Machine Vendetta blends space opera and a police procedural with kaleidoscopic world-building that explores liberty and diversity
A hidden threat to humanity’s independence and very existence energizes Machine Vendetta, one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Both an epic space opera and a detective-driven murder mystery, the Orbit US novel by British author Alastair Reynolds is of additional interest to freedom-loving SF fans because of the intriguing implications of its quasi-libertarian world-building.
A deft SF police procedural with a twisty plot and credible characters who have legitimate reasons to mistrust central authorities, Machine Vendetta gradually expands into a wider drama about a desperate struggle to preserve humanity’s freedom.
Review: Mackey Chandler’s April Series tells a good SF story with themes of agency, emancipation and declarations of independence
Back in 2020, I encountered an online listing for a novel by Mackey Chandler with the provocative title Who Can Own the Stars?, twelfth in a series and a 2021 Prometheus Best Novel finalist.
After reading it, I went back to the original volume, April, and read it and, in succession, all the rest. Two further volumes have come out since then – Let Us Tell You Again and The Long View, respectively 2023 and 2024 Best Novel nominees. With each, I’ve reread the entire series.
Sarah Hoyt announces plans for more books in her Prometheus-winning Darkship Thieves series
Fans of Sarah Hoyt, especially fans of her Darkship Thieves series, have reasons for thanksgiving – or at least raise their hopes of enjoying more books in that fictional universe.
Hoyt, who won the 2011 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for Darkship Thieves, has revealed plans to write more (much more!) in her Darkship universe.
“No, I’m not abandoning Darkship Thieves,” Hoyt writes in a recent column on the Mad Genius Club blog.
“I have at least five more in that universe, though it might extend to ten or twenty, depending on how much I like the ‘next generation,’” she writes.
The rise of newspapers, crime, corruption and the virtues of a free press: An Appreciation of Terry Pratchett’s The Truth, the 2024 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner
The Prometheus Blog continues its Appreciation series with an essay-review describing how Terry Pratchett’s The Truth, the 2024 inductee into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, fits the focus of the Prometheus Award.
The truth shall make you free.
And The Truth shall make you laugh, while sparking a better appreciation of freedom – especially freedom of the press.
Terry Pratchett’s comic fantasy, winner of the 2024 Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction, tells a smart, sly and ultimately inspirational tale of underdogs seeking the truth against formidable opposition.
Free-market industrialization of our solar system: An appreciation of Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass, the 2024 Prometheus Best Novel winner
By Charlie Morrison and Michael Grossberg
A deep understanding and passion for commercial space development informs and enlivens Critical Mass, the 2024 Prometheus winner for Best Novel.
A courageous band of astronaut-entrepreneurs strive to alleviate Earth-based problems through commercial space projects in Daniel Suarez’s grippingly realistic SF thriller.
Set mostly off the Earth and around the solar system, the suspenseful, fast-paced drama follows the resourceful heroes as they strive to achieve their ambitious, unprecedented goals amid Cold War tensions, shifting global political alliances and shortsighted opposition from Earth governments.
Best Novel finalist review: Wil McCarthy’s Beggar’s Sky offers psychedelic first-contact story exploring economic vs. political power on the frontiers of science
Wil McCarthy’s novel Beggar’s Sky is a first-contact story.
The actual contact, though, is more picturesque than philosophical in this sequel to Poor Man’s Sky, itself the sequel to Rich Man’s Sky, McCarthy’s 2022 Prometheus winner for Best Novel.
The 2024 sequel – which has been nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel – takes place within the larger context of an ongoing space race sparked by four Earth billionaires pushing to expand space industry and humanity to new frontiers beyond our solar system.
Best Novel finalist review: Gordon Hanka’s provocative God’s Girlfriend explores coercion, consent, masculinity, femininity and basic instincts
By Eric S. Raymond and Michael Grossberg
Subversive and satirical, God’s Girlfriend challenges some of the deepest assumptions of today’s politics and culture.
One of five 2024 Prometheus Best Novel finalists, Gordon Hanka’s provocative sci-fi novel raises thorny questions about ethics, religion, coercion and consent, the nature of masculinity and femininity and the use of weapons of mass destruction.
The 540-page novel offers a taboo-shattering mixture of unorthodox libertarian provocations and Christian eschatology amid a life-or-death clash of two cultures: Earth humans and Wyrms, human refugees from another planet.
Subtitled “Sci-Fi that should not be published,” the novel blends SF and fantasy tropes from spaceships and advanced weaponry to the apparently supernatural, including Jesus’ Second Coming.
The story revolves around the rising tensions, conflicts and increasing likelihood of nuclear war between Earth governments, desperate to preserve their power, and the Wyrms, genetically modified to resist disease and political-psychological control.
As the failing nation-states of Earth threaten nuclear apocalypse to wipe out the Outback-style beachhead of the Wyrms in Australia, all hell breaks loose. So does heaven, with the Second Coming of God in the unexpectedly modern form of Joshua, who has his own notions of good and evil and shifting ideas about which side should survive.