George Orwell – Prometheus Blog

Orwell’s 1984, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and other Prometheus-recognized dystopian cautionary tales are popular again, post-election (but deserve a sober reading)

Two of the best-known Prometheus Hall of Fame winners are enjoying a surge in sales.

George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 shot up on Amazon’s best-seller list after the recent U.S. presidential election.

So did Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a 1987 Prometheus Best Novel finalist. (The Testaments, Atwood’s sequel to her classic dystopian novel, was recognized as a Best Novel finalist in 2020.)

Both Orwell’s classic and Bradbury’s classic dystopian novels were inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 1984, only the second year of the Hall of Fame.

All three novels – well-worth reading (or rereading) – offer cautionary tales about the rise of various types of authoritarian or totalitarian governments that institutionalize massive violations of individual rights – from censorship to torture and mass murder.

Check out the Prometheus blog review-essay Appreciations of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451.

Continue reading Orwell’s 1984, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and other Prometheus-recognized dystopian cautionary tales are popular again, post-election (but deserve a sober reading)

Orwell’s fable Animal Farm ruefully hailed as relevant to today’s sociopolitical trends 

By Michael Grossberg

George Orwell. (Creative Commons license)

Perhaps the most commonly referenced Prometheus-winning author over the past decade or two in sociopolitical discourse is George Orwell.

Yet, virtually all the commentary, editorial columns and essays mentioning Orwell tend to focus exclusively on Nineteen Eighty-Four, his classic dystopian novel inducted early on into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.

Far fewer articles reference Orwell’s evocative fable Animal Farm – yet that deceptively simple animal fable explores profound themes and deeper truths that are just as relevant to today’s dismal authoritarian trends on the extreme Left and Right.

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Review: Queen Wallis an inventive, suspenseful sequel to the dystopian alternate history of Carey’s Widowland

By Michael Grossberg

Sequels can be tricky and often disappointing, falling short of the originals in potentially all sorts of ways.

So it’s nice to report that C.J. Carey’s Queen Wallis (published by Sourcebooks in the U.S. and Quercus in the U.K.) is a worthy sequel that in several ways improves on Widowland, her 2023 Prometheus Best Novel finalist.

Overall, this feminist dystopian novel is one of the most enjoyable works of alternate history I’ve read in years.

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Review: Sandra Newman’s Julia a worthy companion to Orwell’s 1984

By Michael Grossberg

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remains one of the seminal novels of the past century.

An early inductee (appropriately enough, in 1984) into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, Orwell’s cautionary tale was inspired by the totalitarian horrors of Soviet Communism, yet remains a far broader warning about the perils of tyranny, no matter its variants and extremes of Left or Right.

Given the acclaim and reputation that Orwell’s classic has attained and deserves, it would seem foolhardy for anyone to dare to write a sequel. After all, how could it possibly measure up?

Yet, Orwell’s estate authorized novelist Sandra Newman to do just that with Julia – or more precisely, offer “a retelling of George Orwell’s 1984” (as subtitled on its hardback-book cover.)

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17 works of science fiction, fantasy and dystopian literature are nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel

Libertarian Futurist Society members have made 17 nominations for the Best Novel category of the next Prometheus Award.

Of the authors whose works are nominated, a majority are being recognized for the first time by the LFS and the Prometheus Awards.

Ten novelists are being recognized for the first time with Prometheus nominations. Listed in alphabetical order, those authors are Stephen Albrecht, Devon Eriksen, Howard Andrew Jones, Naomi Kritzer, Paul Lynch, Sandra Newman, Salman Rushdie, C. T. Rwizi, Fenton Wood and Alan Zimm.

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British Science Fiction Association Awards’ 2023 long list includes several Prometheus-nominated authors

Prometheus-winning author Charles Stross and Prometheus-finalists Martha Wells and John Scalzi are on the BSFA list.

So is Sandra Newman, author of Julia, the acclaimed sequel to Orwell’s 1984 that’s recently been nominated along with a dozen other 2023 novels for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.

What list are they on? It’s the fascinating and far-flung long list of nominees for the BSFA Awards, recently announced for works published in 2023.

Sponsored by the British Science Fiction Association, the BSFA awards have been presented annually since 1970 – and can be a harbinger of the Hugos, the Nebulas and other major sf/fantasy awards.

The BSFA awards also overlap to some extent with the Prometheus Awards over the decades, recognizing several of our favorite writers.

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Best of the blog, Part 2: Was Shakespeare a libertarian? Has cancel culture peaked? And what was that crossword puzzle clue mentioning the LFS?

By Michael Grossberg

Was Shakespeare a libertarian?

Has the “cancel culture” trend peaked, or will it continue in 2024?

With Shakespeare increasingly in disfavor among some elite precincts of academia and popular authors like Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming posthumously having their classic fiction bowdlerized and edited to be politically correct, what artists and authors will be next?

Will 2024 deepen disturbing trends undermining artistic freedom and other civil and economic liberties? Or will a new year bring fresh hope for civility, voluntarism, tolerance and respect for other people’s rights?

Such questions continue to linger in the back of my mind as I recall some of my favorite posts in 2023 on the Prometheus Blog.

Although it’s now the start of 2024, it’s not too late to look back again at the past year to savor (and perhaps reread) a few especially timely and relevant favorites from the blog – beyond the three already highlighted last week.

Continue reading Best of the blog, Part 2: Was Shakespeare a libertarian? Has cancel culture peaked? And what was that crossword puzzle clue mentioning the LFS?

From Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, today’s discourse often evokes Prometheus-winning classics

By Michael Grossberg

You can’t get away from it these days, for good or ill.

Just about anywhere you look, from mainstream newspapers and magazines to Substack blogs and social-media references, writers, columnists and commentators frequently are referencing classic novels, stories and fables to forge timely metaphors about today’s trends.

All too many prove to be cautionary warnings about the importance of telling the truth, in the midst of so many public falsehoods… and draw upon some of the most enduring Prometheus-winning works of fiction, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

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Making ‘em laugh: Which Hall of Fame winners best incorporate comedy?

By Michael Grossberg

Everyone has their favorites among the fiction works that have won the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.

And by everyone, I mean virtually everyone – since at least some of the 46 winning works are enjoyed by libertarians and non-libertarians alike, and by both science fiction/fantasy fans and those who don’t often read that genre.

But how many rank the comedies that high?

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Orwell’s 1984 vs Huxley’s Brave New World: Which fictional dystopia seems more timely today?

Who had the more prophetic and realistic vision of a dystopian future?

George Orwell? Or Aldous Huxley?

Orwell, most famous for Nineteen Eighty-Four (one of the earliest works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame), was inspired by Stalinist communism in imagining his “hard tyranny” of brute dictatorship.

Huxley, best known for Brave New World, worried that a softer tyranny would ultimately prevail, one more insidious partly because it was more enveloping of both politics and culture and more seductive via a future of mindless pleasures.

Writing for the Institute for Art and Ideas, a British philosophical organization founded in 2008, British university instructor Emrah Atasoy compares Orwell and Huxley’s different dystopian visions in an informed and provocative essay: “Orwell, Huxley and the path to truth: How fiction can help us to understand reality.”

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