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.
Jerry Pournelle in 2005 (Creative Commons license)
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?
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.
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” is a cautionary and satirical tale warning about the imagined future excesses of radical egalitarianism and attacks on individualism and personal excellence carried to absurd and coercive extremes.
The classic story, inducted in 2019 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, suddenly seems as relevant as recent headlines about state and federal efforts to impose unprecedented confiscatory taxation on wealthier people.
Challenging the view that everything is or should become property of the State, NR Online writer Andrew Stuttaford invokes Vonnegut’s themes in a perceptive column.
Those words are familiar to just about everyone in America, since people frequently repeat them at several of the biggest annual televised awards ceremonies.
Especially at the Academy Awards, informally known as the Oscars – and still the premier annual American awards show in arts and entertainment despite its recent decline.
Yet I’d argue that such an iconic phrase is often misleading. Worse, it can lead to confusion and misperceptions about other awards – including our own.
The Prometheus Awards use the term “nominees” quite differently than the Oscars do.
What the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which sponsors and presents the Academy Awards, dubs “nominees” is actually what the Prometheus awards quite properly refers to as finalists.
That may seem like mere semantics, or a minor disagreement over labeling, but it’s an important distinction with significant differences.
In fact, finalists attain a higher level of recognition than nominees – and thus deserve greater respect and their own distinct name.
Today, March 19, is the birthday of Patrick McGoohan.
Patrick McGoohan as Number 6 in The Prisoner (Creative Commons license)
It’s a timely opportunity to remember and pay tribute to McGoohan, an iconoclastic talent who excelled as an actor, director, producer, screenwriter and creator of one of the most unusual, provocative, genre-smashing and influential TV series in history.
I’m referring, of course, to The Prisoner, inducted in 2002 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
McGoohan (1928-2009) achieved a great deal on screen in his long and well-respected career. But The Prisoner in retrospect may be his crowning and most lasting achievement.
Yet, when McGoohan conceived, wrote and starred in the short-lived series, no one quite knew how to categorize it or what to make of it.
For me as a boy, The Star Dwellers was revelatory.
An idealistic drama about a fraught “second contact” between Earth humans and ancient aliens, James Blish’s 1961 novel sparked my thinking about ethics, economics and politics.
I couldn’t have imagined at the time what reading yet another Young Adult science fiction novel would lead me to, but ultimately The Star Dwellers paved the way for me to develop into a full-fledged libertarian by the early 1970s.
“People come to libertarianism through fiction. They come through Ayn Rand… Robert Heinlein…. L. Neil Smith.”
– Libertarian feminist author Wendy McElroy at the 2000 Prometheus Awards ceremony
For quite a few libertarians, “It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand.” Or Robert Heinlein. Or other freedom-loving science fiction writers.
James Blish in the 1960s (Creative Commons license)
For me, though, my introduction to libertarian and classical-liberal ideas and ideals began earlier – at least in part – with James Blish.
Specifically, Blish’s The Star Dwellers.
When I read Blish’s 1961 novel as a pre-teen in the early 1960s, I came to understand for the first time key insights about voluntary consent and mutual exchange for profit as the best foundation for peace and progress.
Now a finalist for the next Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction, The Star Dwellers is a young-adult-oriented science fiction novel that revolves around a fraught “second contact” between star-faring humans and an ancient, advanced alien species.
