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.
As a guide to Prometheus Awards voting, the Prometheus Blog has once again published full-length and in-depth reviews of each of this year’s five Best Novel finalists.
Whether Libertarian Futurist Society members read the reviews (which do contain a few spoilers) before, during or after reading the finalists themselves, the reviews are designed to illuminate and raise the visibility of each novel.
Other SF/fantasy fans and other libertarians, outside the LFS, also are invited to check out the reviews to better understand how they fit the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Awards on both quality and liberty.
Before he became best known to younger generations as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, British actor Alec Guinness was known in part for his comedies.
Guinness made his name in six Ealing Studios film comedies between 1949 and 1957, most notably playing eight characters in Kind Hearts and Coronets and lead roles in The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit. The latter film, released in 1951, has a deserved reputation as one of the great movie comedies of its era. It also happens to be both libertarian and individualist in its wry themes.
Not only that: The Man in the White Suit has an ingenious plot whose premise is clearly science fiction, making the film of even greater interest to the Libertarian Futurist Society.
Recognized in the Prometheus Awards as a classic for its cautionary libertarian theme about how power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts even the good, The Lord of the Rings has become one of the most popular and enduring works of modern fiction.
Yet, I hadn’t fully grasped until recently just how enduring and influential J.R.R. Tolkien and his bestselling works have become to modern culture.
So many books and articles analyzing Tolkien’s life and fiction have been published and continue to appear that the Tolkien Society, founded in 1969, is able to sustain annual awards with full slates of finalists in several categories.
A Pope has quoted a Prometheus-winning classic in an encyclical letter.
So far as I can tell, that seems to be a first.
Pope Leo XIV (Creative Commons license)
The American Pope Leo XIV has quoted the British author J.R.R. Tolkien in his latest papal encyclical, published May 15, 2026: “On Safeguarding The Human Person In The Time Of Artificial Intelligence.”
The Pope quotes a powerful and wise statement by Gandalf from The Return of the King, the third volume of The Lord of the Rings. Libertarian Futurist Society members inducted the trilogy in 2009 into our Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
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.”
Acclaimed science fiction writer David Brin will receive the National Space Society’s Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Award.
Novelist David Brin (ISDC, Creative Commons license)
Brin, a Prometheus Best Novel finalist and two-time Prometheus nominee, expressed his libertarian/liberal views about how the world should be and is evolving toward greater freedom in “Confessions of a Cheerful Libertarian,” published in the former Prometheus quarterly.
According to a report in File 770, Brin will receive the coveted Clarke Memorial Award for “his pivotal writing in sci-fi and futurism.”
One of the most chilling and distasteful aspects of the totalitarian dictatorship that George Orwell envisioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four was the “two-minute hate.” Fuelled by State propaganda demonizing dissidents and alleged enemies, and reflecting the mob psychology of true believers manipulated by power-hungry rulers, the “two-minute hate” is the type of Reign of Terror phenomenon that no sane and decent person would wish to be part of – or be victimized by – in real life.
Yet, increasingly in American and European politics and culture, extreme partisans of Left and Right indulge in hateful rhetoric while ironically accusing others of “hate” – even when a bit of introspection and understanding of human behavior might reveal fewer people than one might think are actually motivated by that dark emotion.
Referencing Orwell and his Prometheus Hall of Fame-winning classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, libertarian economist David Henderson identifies the disturbing trend of using and abusing language to demonize anyone who holds differing views.
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?
