Category: News

The 2022 Best Novel finalists reflect a few interesting “firsts”

Even after building up a relatively consistent track record over 43 years, the Prometheus Awards can surprise by venturing here and there into new territory and new authors.

This year’s interesting and varied slate of five Best Novel finalists, selected from 16 nominees by LFS members serving as judges on the Best Novel finalist-selection committee, happens to reflect several intriguing “firsts” or rarities in the history of the awards.

Here are the five finalists, all published in 2021 and contenders for the 2022 Prometheus Award, to be presented online in August at a time and place to be announced:
• Between Home and Ruin, by Karl K. Gallagher (Kelt Haven Press, 227 pages)
• Seize What’s Held Dear, by Karl K. Gallagher (Kelt Haven Press, 244 pages)
• Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber and Faber, 321 pages)
• Rich Man’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books, 291 pages)
• Should We Stay Or Should We Go, by Lionel Shriver (Harper Collins, 266 pages)

Just from looking over the finalists list, can you guess any of those “firsts?

As a sort of fun “pop quiz,” why not take a moment to ponder that – before clicking over to the jump page of this blog, which has the answers.

Continue reading The 2022 Best Novel finalists reflect a few interesting “firsts”

Bruce Sommer, R.I.P. – Veteran Prometheus judge, board member helped sustain the LFS and its annual awards for decades

Libertarian Futurist Society leaders are remembering Bruce Sommer, a stalwart West Coast science-fiction fan and left-libertarian who helped sustain the Prometheus Awards for many years.

Bruce Sommer (File photo)

Bruce made a big difference as one of the earliest LFS members – and one of the few Life members – who remained active year after year, reading potential award candidates, weighing the pros and cons of nominees and serving for years as a board member.

Yet, even after disability and ongoing health issues began to limit Bruce’s energy and ability to work full-time, he expressed his love of science-fiction fandom and his libertarian ideals of a better and more just, peaceful and cooperative world by reading widely and diligently year after year to find science fiction and fantasy novels that might fit the distinctive pro-liberty and anti-authoritarian focus of the Prometheus Awards.

Continue reading Bruce Sommer, R.I.P. – Veteran Prometheus judge, board member helped sustain the LFS and its annual awards for decades

Christian libertarian novelist C.S. Lewis, a current Prometheus Hall of Fame finalist, receives attention in leading sf magazine

By Michael Grossberg

Tor.com, a leading online sf magazine, has published an intriguing article about bestselling writer C.S. Lewis. That’s welcome news to Lewis’ fans, including sf readers and Libertarian Futurist Society members.

The positive attention comes as LFS members are considering the 2022 Prometheus Hall of Fame finalists – which include That Hideous Strength, the third and final novel of Lewis’ Space Trilogy.

(For the record, the three other Hall of Fame 2022 finalists are Robert Heinlein’s novel Citizen of the Galaxy, Barry B. Longyear’s collection of stories in Circus World, and the Rush song “The Trees.”)

Continue reading Christian libertarian novelist C.S. Lewis, a current Prometheus Hall of Fame finalist, receives attention in leading sf magazine

Tor covers ‘Finnish Weird’

Johanna Sinisalo holds up her Prometheus Award (Photo by Ryan Lackey)

Tor.com, one of my favorite sites devoted to science fiction, ran a recent piece by Jonathan Thornton, “A Readers’ Guide to the Finnish Weird in Translation.”

If you check it out, you’ll notice that writer Johanna Sinisalo is a central figure in the genre and even named it: “Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo coined the term “suomikumma,” or Finnish Weird, to refer to a new strain of speculative fiction being produced by herself and her Finnish peers.”

Thornton then goes on to offer some recommendations, including an anthology edited by Sinisalo, and two of Sinisalo’s novels, Not Before Sundown and The Blood of Angels. 

Yet another Sinisalo novel, The Core of the Sun, won the Prometheus Award in 2017. As it happens, she won the same year the Worldcon was held in Helsinki, so we were able to present the award before Sinisalo’s local fans.

You can read an appreciation of The Core of the Sun by our own Chris Hibbert at this blog, and also read a piece about the book at Tor’s website, written by Natalie Zutter. 

More new, emerging authors recognized in this year’s large slate of Best Novel nominees

If one of the salutary effects of the Prometheus Award for Best Novel over the decades has been to help raise the visibility of new, young or emerging talent, that goal might well be furthered by this year’s larger-than-usual slate of nominees.

These 16 novels, published in 2021 and listed below, reflect a wide range of styles, from the satirical to the sorrowful and from hard sf to mythic fantasy.

Continue reading More new, emerging authors recognized in this year’s large slate of Best Novel nominees

Dangerous Visions anthology and Reason review highlight Heinlein and other Prometheus winners

By Michael Grossberg

Several leading sf writers whose classic works have won Prometheus Awards are examined in a new anthology about science fiction’s New Wave.

Most notably, Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Marsh Mistress and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed are among the libertarian sf works explored, contrasted and debated in Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985.

Reason book editor Jesse Walker reviews the anthology of essays while noting its discussions of libertarian writers and libertarian-themed sf in the March 2022 issue of Reason magazine.

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Author update: Other freedom-loving fiction by writer-songwriter Leslie Fish, a 2014 Prometheus winner

Anti-statist and anarchist themes frequently fill the stories, songs, books and other fiction by Leslie Fish, a 2014 Prometheus Award winner.

“Most of my fan fiction has subtle or blatant Anarchist themes,” Fish recently told the Libertarian Futurist Society.

So does her “fan-fic” novel “The Weight,” which is “pretty blatant,” she said.

Meanwhile, her sf/fantasy novel “Of Elven Blood,” published through Writers Of The Apocalypse Press and available on Amazon, is among her pro-published writings that have “subtle anti-statist themes,” Fish said.

That news will come as no surprise to the fans of Fish’s Darkover-inspired novella “Tower of Horses” and her related filk song “The Horsetamer’s Daughter.”

Together, Fish’s novella and the song that inspired it received the 2014 Special Prometheus Award – the first time that the award has recognized a song.

“That got me into the Darkover anthology series — which, alas, is now coming to an end,” Fish said.

Continue reading Author update: Other freedom-loving fiction by writer-songwriter Leslie Fish, a 2014 Prometheus winner

Author update, part 2: A preview of Travis Corcoran’s next two novels in his Prometheus-winning Aristillus series (and a possible story anthology)

Note: Here is the latest author’s update about Travis Corcoran, and a follow-up to a previous blog post. (Submissions of news and updates from other Prometheus-recognized authors – whether nominees, finalists or winners – are welcome and will be considered for publication.)

By Michael Grossberg

Prometheus-winning author Travis Corcoran recently shared some glimpses into the subjects and themes of two of his upcoming sf novels.

Right and Duty and Absolute Tyranny respectively will be the third and fourth novels in Corcoran’s four-part Aristillus series.

Travis Corcoran wins his first Prometheus Award Photo: Courtesy of author

The novels will continue the story in the future-history series that Corcoran launched with The Powers of the Earth and its sequel Causes of Separation, set partly on the Earth but mostly in a functioning-with-challenges anarcho-capitalist colony on the Moon. Both novels won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel, with Powers winning in 2018 and Causes winning in 2019.

Corcoran reports that he is working simultaneously on both the third and fourth novels in the series, “which are still very libertarian in background,” he said.

Continue reading Author update, part 2: A preview of Travis Corcoran’s next two novels in his Prometheus-winning Aristillus series (and a possible story anthology)

Author update: Two new books by Prometheus-winning author Travis Corcoran (but they’re not what you’d expect)

Note: The Prometheus blog periodically posts updates about authors who have been recognized over the years through the Prometheus Awards, especially to report recently published or upcoming books. Submissions of news and updates from authors, publishers or fans are welcome, and will be considered for publication. Here’s the latest update on a relatively recent Prometheus winner:

By Michael Grossberg

Prometheus-winning author Travis J. I. Corcoran has been busy writing and publishing books, with more to come.

Sf novelist Travis Corcoran (Photo courtesy of author)

Corcoran is a two-time Prometheus winner for Best Novel in 2018 and 2019 for The Powers of the Earth and its sequel Causes of Separation. Both novels, part of Corcoran’s Aristillus series, explore government threats to a working anarchs-capitalist colony, established on the Moon by a libertarian dissident who became wealth after discovering anti-gravity in the mid-21st century.

Since Corcoran’s explicitly libertarian sf novels were published, his fans (including but far from limited to Libertarian Futurist Society members) have been eagerly awaiting publication of the next novel in that projected four-novel future history.

But as Corcoran explained in a recent email to the LFS, we’re going to have to wait a while longer to actually read more in the Aristillus series, because the two massive books that Corcoran published in 2021 were actually long-planned non-fiction works.

Continue reading Author update: Two new books by Prometheus-winning author Travis Corcoran (but they’re not what you’d expect)