Not one but two celebrity presenters will grace the 44th annual Prometheus Awards ceremony, set for Sunday Aug. 25 in a Zoom event set to begin at 2 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (11 a.m. Pacific time) and open to the public.
We invite Libertarian Futurist Society members, their families and friends, science fiction/fantasy fans and all freedom lovers to watch the roughly hourlong awards show, which is expected to include interesting, entertaining and substantive speeches by celebrity presenters, LFS leaders and this year’s Prometheus Award winner for Best Novel.
Robert (Bob) Poole, co-founder of the Reason Foundation, a leading libertarian think tank that publishes Reason magazine, will present the Prometheus Hall of Fame category for Best Classic Fiction.
Three-time Prometheus Best Novel winner Victor Koman will present the Best Novel category.
Please spread the news and save this link to watch the Zoom awards show (under an hour long, and quite likely to run only about 30 to 40 minutes). The 2024 awards ceremony will be recorded to post later on YouTube and on the Prometheus Blog. Also, here’s the Zoom link spelled out:
https://agoric.zoom.us/j/83817951322?pwd=NaWZI0Wwxha8KpKCoiSbLx7wympXzv.1
Prometheus awards committee chairs William H. Stoddard and Michael Grossberg respectively will introduce the Best Classic Fiction and Best Novel categories and discuss the distinguished track records of the two annual Prometheus Awards categories.
Stoddard, president of the LFS board of directors, will emcee the 44th annual awards show, as he has done in recent years.
WHO IS VICTOR KOMAN?
This will be the first time in decades that Koman will participate in a Prometheus Awards ceremony, and frankly, the honor is overdue.
One of the few authors to win as many as three Prometheus Awards for Best Novel, Koman has been praised for his science fiction novels by Ray Bradbury, Gregory Benford, Robert Anton Wilson, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and the “Neils” (J. Neil Schulman and L. Neil Smith).
Koman won his first Prometheus Award in 1988 for The Jehovah Contract, an audacious thriller and millennial-noir fantasy about a dying atheistic assassin, masquerading as a private detective in a near-future Los Angeles, who’s given a contract to kill God in exchange for eternal life.
Philosophical speculations accentuate the suspenseful story as the assassin evades secret cabals while seeking a way to excise the concept of God from the minds of humanity and enable a more laissez-faire “Creatrix” to return to power.
Koman won his second Prometheus Award in 1990 for Solomon’s Knife, a libertarian-themed hybrid of a medical thriller and courtroom drama.
The novel goes beyond partisan debates over abortion by imagining a plausible future in which a renegade doctor devises a controversial new surgical procedure that could help women terminate unwanted pregnancies by transferring the living fetus to women who want children but can’t become pregnant.
Koman won his third Prometheus Award in 1997 for Kings of the High Frontier, which postulates a profit-enhanced competition via private enterprise to achieve Earth orbit before a UN-backed takeover of space programs worldwide.
The novel’s prophetic plot anticipated the X Prize (it was published the same week the prize was announced), which ultimately saw Burt Rutan’s SpaceShip One reach space in 2004, helping to open the door for all the subsequent commercial development of rockets and space milestones achievedthrough free markets.
Notably, Kings of the High Frontier was the first book published exclusively on the Internet to win a major literary award.
“Kings of the High Frontier is an intriguing, exhilarating, thought-provoking, and — yes — sprawling novel that brings back the sense of wonder that drew so many of us into science-fiction in the first place.” – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
“In case you, like others, have forgotten the Future, Victor Koman remembers it. He grew up there and now, with total recall, wakes us to jog our memories and rebirth Tomorrow. Would that there were a dozen more writers like him in the field.” – Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451
“An exciting, bracing look at a future some of us hope for, yet many fear. Hard-edged, tough-minded SF indeed!” – Gregory Benford, author of Heart of the Comet
WITH 3 AWARDS, KOMAN IS IN SELECT COMPANY
Koman was the first author to win three Prometheus Awards for Best Novel, accomplishing the feat between 1988 and 1997.
Besides Koman, only three other authors have win three Prometheus Awards for Best Novel.
L. Neil Smith accomplished the feat between 1982 and 2001 for The Probability Broach, Pallas and Forge of the Elders. (Smith said of Koman’s novel: “It has a story to tell on the same scale as Atlas Shrugged or Dune.”
Ken MacLeod accomplished the feat between 1996 and 2006, winning Prometheus Awards for The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal and Learning the World.
Most recently, Cory Doctorow accomplished the feat between 2009 and 2014, winning the Prometheus Award for Best Novel for Little Brother, Pirate Cinema and Homeland).
MORE ABOUT KOMAN
Koman’s other novels include Captain Anger #1: The Microbotic Menace and his long-suppressed first novel, Death’s Dimensions.
Koman, owner of the publishing house KoPubCo, has contributed stories to four hardcover anthologies, including Free Space, the first explicitly libertarian SF anthology, and The King is Dead: Tales of Elvis Postmortem.
Koman has appeared as an extra in several films, including Star Trek — The Motion Picture, CyberZone, Billy Frankenstein, Rapid Assault, Fugitive Rage, KidWitch (in which his daughter, Vanessa, played the title role), Red Dragon, The Hot Chick, and A-List.
Koman, who recently turned 70, graduated with honors, summa cum laude, from Redlands University in 2001 with a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems. He received his MBA in 2004 from Pepperdine University. In 2016, Capella University conferred non Koman his PhD in Information Technology with a specialization in Information Assurance and Security.
Koman remains active in libertarianism and science fiction, despite his age. He is working on a new novel – his first in a quarter century – and currently curates The Agorist Archives of Samuel Edward Konkin III. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two cats.
WHO IS BOB POOLE?
Robert (Bob) Poole, a lifelong SF fan and writer-editor, has been a leading libertarian thinker and policy expert since the 1970s. He is credited as the first person to use the term “privatization” to refer to the contracting-out of public services and is the author of the first-ever book on privatization, Cutting Back City Hall, published by Universe Books in 1980.
His popular writings have appeared in national newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Forbes. He has also been a guest on network television programs such as Good Morning America, NBC’s Nightly News, ABC’s World News Tonight, and the CBS Evening News.
For more about Poole, check out the recent Prometheus Blog post announcing him as a celebrity presenter of the 44th annual awards show.
OUR 2024 PROMETHEUS WINNERS
Daniel Suarez, who first won a Prometheus for Best Novel in 2015 for Influx, will give a speech accepting the 2024 Best Novel award for Best Novel for Critical Mass, a persuasive and grippingly realistic thriller about private space industrialization.
The late Terry Pratchett, who first won a Prometheus Award in the Best Novel category in 2003 for Night Watch, is the winner of the 2024 Best Novel award for The Truth.
A previous Best Novel finalist, The Truth offers a hilarious but serious and historically informed comedy about the rise of newspapers and the value of a free press.
Stoddard, who chairs the Hall of Fame finalist-judging committee, will accept the award for Pratchett and discuss why The Truth merits our recognition.
THE LATE GREAT PRATCHETT
The LFS has reached out several times to the Terry Pratchett estate to notify them of his second Prometheus Award. We hope to hear back from them soon – so that we can send the estate the Hall of Fame winner’s plaque and gold coin, and also post here on the blog any official acceptance statement.
Pratchett was both eloquent and witty in his acceptance speech for Night Watch, which includes libertarian themes that he acknowledged and discussed.
The Pratchett website, which is worth visiting, includes the first Prometheus Best Novel award as one of the milestones in Pratchett’s best-selling career.
Official LFS Appreciations of the novels by both 2024 winners will be posted soon on the Prometheus Blog.
In the meantime, feel free to read the blog’s initial reviews of Critical Mass and The Truth.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS:
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies (including the recent 2023 ceremony with inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freer and Sarah Hoyt), Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
