Best Novel finalist review: Cherryh and Fancher’s Alliance Unbound dramatizes the crucial fact of scarcity as merchant ships pursue voluntary trade amid authoritarian threats


By William H. Stoddard

Alliance Unbound is the sequel to Alliance Rising, which won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2020. It appears that this may be the second volume of a trilogy, as the final pages leave important issues unresolved.

Taken together, these novels form a prequel to Cherryh’s Alliance/Union series, one of the larger future histories in the past few decades. (It began in 1981 with Downbelow Station, which won her first Hugo Award for best novel.)

The crucial fact driving its events is scarcity. 

There are only three planets with biospheres: Earth, Pell’s World, and Cyteen. Orbital habitats in other solar systems — notably Alpha Station, located at Barnard’s Star, where Alliance Rising was set — are ultimately dependent for supplies, especially biomass, on those three systems; Alliance Rising’s plot turned on Earth’s starving Alpha Station of resources to advance its own goals, and a key point in Alliance Unbound is the discovery of nearly priceless Earth goods on Downbelow Station, which orbits Pell’s World.

Cherryh and Fancher’s characters are well aware of such issues of scarcity and value, being interstellar merchants who spend their lives going from solar system to solar system, with holds full of high-value cargo and computer memories full of equally valuable data.

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Review: Alastair Reynolds’ Machine Vendetta blends space opera and a police procedural with kaleidoscopic world-building that explores liberty and diversity


By Michael Grossberg

A hidden threat to humanity’s independence and very existence energizes Machine Vendetta, one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.

Both an epic space opera and a detective-driven murder mystery, the Orbit US novel by British author Alastair Reynolds is of additional interest to freedom-loving SF fans because of the intriguing implications of its quasi-libertarian world-building.

A deft SF police procedural with a twisty plot and credible characters who have legitimate reasons to mistrust central authorities, Machine Vendetta gradually expands into a wider drama about a desperate struggle to preserve humanity’s freedom.

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Best Novel finalist review: Danny King’s Cancelled envisions true-believer excesses of a dystopian New Britannia

By Steve Gaalema and Michael Grossberg

Oh, what a brave new world Danny King charts in Cancelled – now a Best Novel finalist.

Framed initially as a visionary utopia that fully embraces love, inclusion, social justice, and a triumphant institutionalization of progressive-left politics maybe not that far beyond current norms, this New Britannia initially might seem appealing.

Yet, cracks inevitably appear in the facade, as hidden realities are revealed in this gripping SF-enhanced dystopian fable, one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.

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Best Novel finalist review: Lionel Shriver’s Mania offers cautionary tale about an alternate America denying differences in intelligence


By Michael Grossberg

Lionel Shriver, arguably the world’s greatest living libertarian novelist, has found another timely subject worthy of her illuminating insight and piercing wit.

Living up to her iconoclastic reputation, the British-American novelist finds satirical, intensely dramatic and gut-wrenchingly personal dimensions to bring to life in Mania.

The cautionary fable depicts a slightly different but recognizable contemporary world where good intentions have gone terribly astray.

Set in the recent past and present but in a wryly revealing alternate history, Mania portrays an America taken over by a new ideology: the Mental Parity movement.

Warning: Any resemblances to any cultlike trends or movements of today or just yesterday are purely intentional.

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Hall of Fame finalist review: Rudyard Kipling’s heterotopia “As Easy as A.B.C.” offers critique of lynching, racial prejudice, mob rule

By William H. Stoddard

As an epigraph for his novel Glory Road, Robert Heinlein quoted a passage from Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra, which included the following memorable line:

. . . he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

These lines captured, for me, what I have come to feel is one of the great pleasures of science fiction: stories set in worlds whose customs are different from those of our own time, or as I like to call them, heterotopias—neither “good places” nor “bad places” but “other places,” where customs other than ours are followed and indeed taken for granted.

Such visions implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, invite us to adopt the heterotopian perspective and look back on our own lives and our own world as if we inhabited some nearly unimaginable alien realm. The literary critic Darko Suvin coined the phrase cognitive estrangement for this experience.

One of the first works of fiction that made me feel this effect was one of Rudyard Kipling’s “airship utopia” stories, “As Easy as A.B.C.” – now one of four classic works selected as finalists for the next Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction.

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Best Novel finalist review: Michael Flynn’s In the Belly of the Whale offers sobering drama about challenging and un-libertarian aspects of multi-generation colony-ship voyages

By Michael Grossberg

In the Belly of the Whale, the ambitious final and posthumous novel by two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn, explores the complex lives, work, challenges and conflicts aboard a large colony ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti.

The epic multifaceted 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 rewarded with Flynn’s highly plausible and intricate world-building and wise grasp of human nature.

In the Belly of the Whale – one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel – builds dramatic intensity coupled with rich and even revelatory insights that freshen this seemingly familiar SF subgenre while raising deeper questions than most SF writers, scientists or space-colonization enthusiasts have considered about the prospects and costs of such generations-long voyages.

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Hall of Fame finalist review: Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky offers cornucopia of cutting-edge SF and libertarian themes

By Michael Grossberg

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.

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Best Novel finalist review: Wil McCarthy’s Beggar’s Sky offers psychedelic first-contact story exploring economic vs. political power on the frontiers of science

By Rick Triplett

Wil McCarthy’s novel Beggar’s Sky is a first-contact story.

The actual contact, though, is more picturesque than philosophical in this sequel to Poor Man’s Sky, itself the sequel to Rich Man’s Sky, McCarthy’s 2022 Prometheus winner for Best Novel.

The 2024 sequel – which has been nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel – takes place within the larger context of an ongoing space race sparked by four Earth billionaires pushing to expand space industry and humanity to new frontiers beyond our solar system.

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Hall of Fame finalist review: Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise offers masterful social-scientific world-building in clash of cultures (including a libertarian society)

By William H. Stoddard

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, a 2024 Prometheus Hall of Fame finalist 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.

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Hall of Fame finalist review: “The Trees,” a fantasy-themed rock song by Rush, resonates as cautionary tale

By Michael Grossberg

Even though they’re eligible for nomination, no songs have ever been inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.

Neal Peart, Rush drummer and songwriter of “The Trees.” Credit: Creative Commons

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.

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