With the Libertarian Futurist Society on the verge of sending Prometheus Awards ballots to LFS members, here’s a quick-reference guide to this year’s finalists.
This guide offers LFS members a timely summary of this year’s finalists in our two annual categories: Best Novel and the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
Again this year, the Prometheus Blog was able to publish in-depth reviews of each of the finalists to add context and perspective on why each work deserved our recognition. So also included here, for the convenience of Prometheus voters, are links to each review.
Plus, this guide will offer tips on the availability of finalists – including links to those available free and online.
This year’s five Prometheus Best Novel finalists plausibly imagine everything from dystopian Earth scenarios sparked by authoritarian true-believer cults to more positive but challenging interstellar futures for humanity.
C.J. Cherryh, left, and Jane Fancher (Photo courtesy of Jane Fancher)
Works published in 2024 by C.J. Cherryh & Jane S. Fancher, Michael Flynn, Danny King, Wil McCarthy and Lionel Shriver will be competing for the 45th Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn (File photo)
First presented in 1979, the Prometheus Awards have recognized hundreds of authors and a dizzying variety of works. This year’s slate of finalists embrace the old and the new.
Of these authors, British writer Danny King is new to our award, being recognized for the first time as a Best Novel finalist.
British writer Danny King (Creative Commons license)
Lionel Shriver, a Portugal-based American writer who’s lived in Nairobi, Bangkok, Belfast and London, is being recognized for the third time as a Best Novel finalist.
Wil McCarthy, and writing partners Cherryh and Fancher, each previously won a Prometheus Award, while Flynn (1947-2023) is a two-time previous Best Novel winner being recognized posthumously for what may be his last work.
Novelist Wil McCarthy (Photo courtesy of Baen Books)
In brief, here are this year’s Best Novel finalists, in alphabetical order by author:
* Alliance Unbound, by C.J Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW)
* In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy)
* Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press)
* Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books)
* Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers)
Without a commitment to reading, the Prometheus Awards couldn’t have been sustained for 46 years. That commitment is about to be put to the test, once again.
To assist Prometheus voters, we offer below a few tips to enhance your reading habits amid life’s busy home and work demands.
This is a timely moment to offer such encouragement. After a considerable degree of reading, discussion and related efforts by the LFS’ two awards-finalist-judging committees over the past half year or more, we are now on the verge of entering the final stage of judging the Prometheus Awards.
David Friedman, the influential economist, legal scholar, libertarian theorist and novelist, has graciously agreed to speak and present a category at this year’s 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
Friedman is best known for his academic scholarship and for The Machinery of Freedom, his pioneering libertarian classic. With an empirical focus on the practical solutions to many social problems that private markets can address optimally, and far better than governments, Friedman’s nonfiction book had a major impact on the early libertarian movement in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet, Friedman is also a science fiction fan and a novelist who has written three fantasy novels, apt and additional reasons the Libertarian Futurist Society board of directors invited him to speak and present the Prometheus Hall of Fame category for Best Classic Fiction at our 2025 Prometheus Awards ceremony.
One of the most exciting and promising Libertarian Futurist Society outreach projects in years is our new Prometheus Awards Collection for Libraries.
The ambitious project offers a carefully curated selection of Prometheus-winning novels to be donated and mailed to interested libraries across the country upon their request.
The set of brand-new books was chosen to expand the range and variety of notable and acclaimed science fiction on library shelves across the country – especially to aid smaller libraries, which may have more limited resources.
What do Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, James P. Hogan, Sarah Hoyt, Victor Koman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken MacLeod, George Orwell, Ayn Rand, L. Neil Smith, Neal Stephenson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Vernor Vinge and F. Paul Wilson have in common?
Robert Heinlein in the 1980s (Photo courtesy of Heinlein Trust)
Some rank high among bestselling and even world famous authors; some are not quite as well known but still have sold millions of copies of their books, and a few are lesser-known writers who deserve a wider readership.
George Orwell. (Creative Commons license)
Yet they’re all writers who have written notable speculative fiction (generally science fiction and/or fantasy) that in different ways championed freedom-loving themes and exposed the evils of authoritarianism.
And all of the above have been recognized for such works by winning Prometheus Awards – some for Best Novel, some for Best Classic Fiction and several for both annual award categories.
As 2025 gets underway, the Libertarian Futurist Society has a lot of remember and much to celebrate.
Our non-profit international association of liberty-loving sf/fantasy fans is the midst of our annual cycle nominating eligible works and selecting finalists for the Prometheus Awards, now entering their 46th year and with a solid track record of 50 years within sight.
Reason magazine’s Bob Poole and three-time Prometheus winner Victor Koman added to the luster of our annual Prometheus Awards ceremony, which included an eloquent acceptance speech by two-time Prometheus winner Daniel Suarez, who won his second prize for Best Novel for Critical Mass.
The LFS continued to receive excellent media coverage about our annual Prometheus Award finalists and winners in our two annual categories for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (the Prometheus Hall of Fame) – especially from the SF/fantasy field’s two leading trade publications, Locus and File 770.
With an attractive new logo, a new series of outreach display ads to reach out to potential new members, and other outreach efforts, the LFS and the Prometheus Awards continue to raise our visibility and enhance our influence.
Although the Prometheus Blog focuses primarily on posting reviews, essays, and updates newly written for timely publication, occasionally we have the honor of reprinting an older article or speech that remains timeless.
Poul Anderson (Creative Commons license)
One of the best highlights of 2024 on the blog was our reprint, as a timely Fourth of July remembrance, of a 1978 Leprecon speech by the late great Poul Anderson, one of the greatest libertarian SF/fantasy authors and a frequent Prometheus Awards winner.
Another blog highlight was an insightful addition to our occasional series on Economics in Science Fiction: LFS President William H. Stoddard’s essay on Aladdin’s Lamps, technocracy and “post-scarcity.”
Vernor Vinge at an SF con (File photo)
Finally, sparked by the passing last year of the major and widely beloved SF writer Vernor Vinge, the Prometheus Blog devoted more than one post to honoring the legacy of this brilliant and visionary author, one of only four writers to receive recognition (as Anderson did before he passed) with a Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime achievement.
As we begin a new year, with high hopes for a better and freer world, we include convenient links to all of the above stories, lest we forget.
While most reviewspublished on the Prometheus blog tend to focus on our Best Novel or Best Classic Fiction finalists or winners, other works deserve attention, too.
As time permits, and when nominated (or nominatable) works capture our attention and stimulate both enjoyment and further thoughts, we strive to bring it to the attention of Libertarian Futurist Society members and the wider public by writing about it – hopefully, in ways that make it clear how the work is relevant to Prometheus Award themes.
Here are excerpts from four such novels of note that we reviewed in 2024 – and that continue to deserve recognition and wide readership:
By the end of 2024, just a few days from now, the Prometheus Blog will have posted a record number of articles, essays, reviews, updates and news.
For the first time since the blog began seven years ago, Libertarian Futurist Society members and Prometheus judges wrote, edited and published 100 posts, or an average of roughly one article every three and a half days.
That’s a notable increase over the previous year, which also reached a new high of 77 articles, up from 67 in 2022 and 59 in 2021.
Of this past year’s 100 articles, more than one-fourth (28) were full-length or capsule reviews, often but not always of Prometheus Award nominees and finalists.
Looking back at a year rich with interesting, illuminating and just-plain entertaining reviews, here are excerpts from (and convenient links to) five of the best.
