On a recent visit to the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., I was delighted to discover some recognition of the work of a Prometheus-winning author. And not just any author, but the Golden Age Grand Master who has received more Prometheus Awards than anyone else: Robert A. Heinlein.
Destination Moon, a 1950 Technicolor feature film co-written by Heinlein, is highlighted in the Destination Moon gallery (Gallery 206) at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
By Michael Grossberg
How do Libertarian Futurist Society members rank the Best Novel finalists as they fill out the final Prometheus Awards ballot?
Members typically keep their rankings private, while the LFS vote-counting committee maintains strict confidentiality about the results, aside from the announcement of the winners. Today, though, on the verge of the midnight July 4 voting deadline, one LFS member chose to post a YouTube video explaining his rankings.
It’s the latest yeoman effort by novelist John C.A. Manley, who throughout this past awards-finalist season has repeatedly helped raise the visibility of the Prometheus Awards by posting YouTube discussions of award finalists and by reviewing each Best Novel finalist on his BlazingPineCones website.
“Help promote the fiction you want to see in the world,” Manley said in his email today to BlazingPineCones subscribers.
That’s an apt statement, which helps illuminates his (and our) vision of why the Prometheus Awards is important and clarifies why Manley has invested so much time and energy this year in highlighting our award.
So how did Manley, himself a Prometheus Best Novel nominee for All the Humans Are Sleeping, rank the five Best Novel finalists?
Continue reading Voting for the Prometheus Awards: How one LFS member ranked his Best Novel ballot (revealed on a YouTube video) on the verge of tonight’s July 4 deadline
By Michael Grossberg
Which Prometheus Award winners would you like to see on screen someday?
So far, 17 Prometheus Award-winners have been adapted with varying degrees of success to the large or small screen or have been recognized as original movies – including George Orwell’s Animal Farm, most recently adapted for the third time into a 2026 animated film.
When I asked my fellow Prometheus Best Novel judges which other winning works they most yearn to see made into a movie or TV series, Lowell Jacobsen chose two related novels by the same author: Travis Corcoran.
By Michael Grossberg
It’s relatively rare for a Prometheus-winning work of pro-freedom science fiction or fantasy to be adapted into a movie or for television. But that happened this year, with the recent 2026 release of an animated film of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, inducted in 2011 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
While the misconceived third film version of Orwell’s anti-authoritarian and anti-communist classic fable proved disappointing, our hopes remain high for more Prometheus-winning novels or stories to be filmed – and some are already in the works.
Meanwhile, sparked by this year’s film release, I asked Libertarian Futurist Society members I work with as fellow Best Novel judges which Prometheus-winning works they’d like to see on screen.
Adam Tuchman’s top choice is The Probability Broach, L. Neil Smith’s alternate-history SF novel that won the 1982 Best Novel award.
By Michael Grossberg
Of the many reviews of the flawed new film version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, perhaps the most insightful is one that broadens its critique to examine Orwell himself.
Richard M. Salsman, an economist and visiting assistant professor of political economy at Duke University, goes deeper than most other writers in contextualizing Andy Serkis’ widely panned animated film version.
With disturbing clarity, Salsman explains how Orwell’s evolving views led him to reverse his initial conception of Animal Farm as a critique of capitalism – but also how the British democratic socialist remained faithful to some of his deepest underlying assumptions.
This is a powerfully illuminating review and essay that deserves to be read in full at The Daily Economy, a publication of the American Institute for Economic Research.
But I also want to highlight some of Salman’s key insights, because they are so relevant to the themes and world view that shape the Prometheus Awards.
Patience can be a virtue – especially when it comes to nominations for the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
Not all works that become Hall of Fame finalists or winners do so in the first year that they are nominated. But that’s never a permanent obstacle to recognition, because in this annual Prometheus category, Libertarian Futurist Society members benefit from the luxury of time.
If at first a work is overlooked or doesn’t rank high enough to become a finalist, it can be nominated and renominated in future years.
It’s time to begin considering what’s worth nominating for potential induction into the next Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
Even as Libertarian Futurist Society members are voting to select the 2026 Hall of Fame winner from the current slate of finalists, it’s not too early to nominate eligible works for the 2027 Hall of Fame.
Only LFS members have the right to nominate works for any category of the Prometheus Award. However, publishers, authors and other SF/fantasy fans and libertarians are welcome to contact us to make suggestions.
Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer who also was devoted to championing scientific progress and space development, dreamed of what’s now fast becoming a reality on and off the Earth.
Sparked by his enthusiasm over the recent successful SpaceX Starship v.3 launch, Instapundit columnist and American legal scholar Glenn Harlan Reynolds has written a heartfelt column paying tribute to the prescient vision of Jerry Pournelle.
Pournelle, a Prometheus Best Novel winner, deserves to be remembered – and not only for his fiction.
“When I was still a kid, I read Jerry’s column “A Step Farther Out” in Galaxy magazine religiously. Jerry saw it all coming: vertical takeoff and landing spaceships, the need to lower costs to orbit, and the absolute necessity for both reusability and launch volume to make things cheap enough, and reliable enough, to build an interplanetary economy,” Reynolds writes.
“He wrote about the immense resources of space (both in terms of energy and material), and the wide-open human future they could support. As the blurb for a collection of his work published in 2022 says, “If you wanted a strategy for the technology of going to space in the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, Dr. Jerry Pournelle was your man.”
Of the 104 works of fiction that have won a Prometheus Award, 15 have been adapted into movies (sometimes more than once.)
Plus, two other Prometheus winners were conceived for and originated on screen – one as a feature film and the other as a TV series.
Thus, 17 Prometheus winners can be seen on the large or small screens.
That represents about 15 percent of all the Prometheus-winning works recognized since the award was first presented in 1979. Not a bad quotient, perhaps, but it certainly would be nice to see more of our recognized novels and stories raise their visibility and thereby find larger audiences.
So which works have reached the screen?
Just for fun or out of curiosity, before reading further, why not visit the Prometheus Awards page listing all the past winners and see how many you can recall that have had film or TV adaptations?
Hint: There’s more than you realize!
Continue reading How many Prometheus winners have reached the screen? More than you might realize!
When it comes to film versions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the third time’s not the charm.
With visionary director-actor Andy Serkis at the helm of the recently released animated film version of Orwell’s classic anti-authoritarian fable and a host of great actors doing the voices of the farm animals, I’d hoped for the best for Animal Farm, inducted in 2011 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson, Kieran Culkin, Steve Buscemi, Kathleen Turner, Laverne Cox and Jim Parsons are among the actors voicing the animal characters in the story about pigs consolidating control on a farm in a movement for equality that is systematically corrupted.
Yet, Serkis’ long-in-gestation 2025 film, finally released in the U.S. in May 2026, has proved to be a major disappointment.
