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
Ayn Rand’s ideas have become so polarized and politicized that few people seem capable of appreciating her fiction on its own literary terms. It’s rare to come across an honest dialogue between two highly educated, rational and open-minded people about Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as simply a novel.
Henry Oliver and Hollis Robbins did just that in a fascinating and surprising dialogue, which I only recently discovered. Often illuminating and with fresh insights free from most conventional views of Rand and her magnum opus, their conversation is worth highlighting on the Prometheus Blog in order to bring it to the attention of LFS members and a wider group of readers.
“We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we’re going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century,” Oliver said in introducing their conversation on his Common Reader blog at common reader.co.uk.
Their wide-ranging discussion centered on Atlas Shrugged “in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand’s greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology.”
It’s always encouraging to see a Prometheus-recognized writer remembered in any contemporary article, especially about one of the hottest, most divisive and misunderstood issues of our day.
But it’s wonderful – and rare – to find two such authors remembered in the same article, especially one that quotes them with accuracy and insight.
The enduring wisdom of both C.S. Lewis and George Orwell is at the core of a sensible article about Artificial Intelligence by Benjamin M. Osborne in Chronicles magazine.
Orwell, of course, is a two-time Prometheus Hall of Fame inductee for his novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Lewis, meanwhile, is again a Hall of Fame finalist this year for his 1945 science fiction novel That Hideous Strength.
So what ideas and insights by Lewis and Orwell are explored and applied in Osborn’s June 2026 article, “What Would C.S. Lewis Have Thought of AI?”
Not everyone is familiar with the British-based Orwell Prizes, which recently announced their slate of 2026 finalists.
Sponsored and administrated by The Orwell Foundation in the United Kingdom, the prizes aim to recognize work that comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into art.”
Orwell certainly achieved that goal with his most widely acclaimed and enduring novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both later inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction. So it’s nice to see another award honoring Orwell’s spirit.
By Michael Grossberg
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.
Perhaps the most significant work recognized is The Tower and the Ruin, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation, by Michael Trout, which won the 2026 Tolkien Society Award for Best Book. Continue reading ‘The Tower and the Ruin’ and other Tolkien Society Award winners recognize the enduring influence of The Lord of The Rings and related works
By Michael Grossberg
A Pope has quoted a Prometheus-winning classic in an encyclical letter.
So far as I can tell, that seems to be a first.
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.
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.
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.
