Freshly exploring utopian and dystopian themes, Salt contrasts an anarchist community and its statist neighbor on a harsh desert planet.
Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Adam Roberts’ science fiction novel illuminates how customs, attitudes and ideologies on both sides spark mutual misunderstandings and accelerating conflicts.
A finalist for the next Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction, Robert’s cautionary tale invites us to question our deepest assumptions about freedom.
Fizzy with ideas and brimming with American idealism, James Blish was widely recognized during the Golden Age of science fiction as a major writer.
One of his best novels, in my view, is The Star Dwellers, first published in 1961 and now nominated for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award for Best Classic Fiction.
Relatively short at 128 pages in the Avon Books paperback and clearly written as a so-called “SF juvenile” yet still rich with insights, Blish’s novel revolves around a fraught “second contact” between humans and an ancient, extremely advanced alien species.
Highlighted at the story’s center are the closely linked concepts of consent and contract – two of the most fundamental ideas at the foundation of both libertarianism and classical liberalism.
By Max More
Powerless, one of six novels nominated so far for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel, is the first novel I have read by Harry Turtledove. I chose to read it because of its anti-authoritarian message.
The structure and function of this alternate reality – in which communism has taken over the United States (and apparently much or all of the world) – seemed familiar and frighteningly plausible to me based on my study of the years under Lenin and Stalin.
British writer-philosopher Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is best remembered today for writing one of the earliest and most emblematic works of dystopian literature.
His 1932 novel Brave New World continues to be a bestseller and is universally recognized as a modern classic. For example, the Modern Library ranked it number 5 on its list of the 100 Best Novels in English of the 20th century.
Not all dystopian works fit the distinctive focus of the Prometheus Award, but Brave New World more than qualifies – and that’s why I’ve nominated it for the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
One of the things Poul Anderson was known for throughout his literary career was world-building. Much of this was planetary design, based on the natural sciences, in which he started out with stellar type, planetary mass, orbital radius, and elemental abundances and worked out the geology, meteorology, and biology of a world.
Anderson was certainly one of the masters of this, up there with Hal Clement and Vernor Vinge. But he put equal effort into social scientific worldbuilding, creating economies, polities, and cultures, and developing plots for his stories from the conflicts they gave rise to. Orion Shall Rise, winner of the 2025 Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction, is a nearly pure example of social scientific world-building, set not in a distant solar system but on a future Earth.
In the Belly of the Whale, the 2025 Prometheus winner for Best Novel, was Michael Flynn’s last, posthumous novel and one of his richest and most resonant.
Exploring the complex lives, jobs, relationships, challenges and conflicts aboard a large colony ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti, the epic 472-page novel takes some time to fully introduce its large cast of characters among 40,000 people who live in the hollowed-out asteroid ship dubbed The Whale.
Yet, patience is amply rewarded with Flynn’s plausible and intricate world-building, deep insights into social psychology and wise grasp of human nature.
In the Belly of the Whale, Flynn’s 14th and final novel, builds dramatic intensity coupled with rich and revelatory insights that freshen this seemingly familiar SF subgenre of the long colony-ship voyage. Flynn raises deeper questions than most SF writers, scientists or space-colonization enthusiasts have considered about the prospects and costs of such generations-long voyages.
Although published more than two decades ago, Singularity Sky (Ace Books, 2003) still feels fresh and brilliant in its cutting-edge SF and explicitly libertarian vision.
A strong write-in candidate for Best Novel in the year it was first published more than two decades ago, Singularity Sky has been nominated for the first time for the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
Fabulously inventive and sophisticated in its cornucopia of world-building, Stross’ widely acclaimed first novel successively introduces a wild variety of clashing cultures, divergent interests, hidden motives and compelling characters. Although some story elements might seem fanciful or within the realm of fantasy, all are ultimately rooted in plausible science fiction.
Even though they’re eligible for nomination, no songs have ever been inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
I can’t imagine a good song more deserving of that honor, and that fits the distinctive focus of the Prometheus Awards better, than “The Trees,” a 1978 song by the Canadian rock group Rush.
Swim among the People, a 2024 Prometheus Best Novel finalist, is the fifth of six (so far) volumes in Karl K. Gallagher’s science fiction series The Fall of the Censorate.
The series as a whole begins when a merchant starship from a long isolated cluster of solar systems discovers a new route through hyperspace that leads to a much larger interstellar human civilization.
Few Prometheus Award winners are as much fun to read as Cloud-Castles.
Zestful and often funny but also imaginative and insightful in its visions of freedom, Dave Freer’s often satirical coming-of-age novel deservedly won the 2023 Best Novel award for its entertaining blend of adventure, comedy, sci-fi, likable characters and nifty world-building.
The novel’s settings, distinctive and ingenious, offer ripe possibilities for varied, cross-cultural exploration of different human and alien environments. And Freer delivers.
