Mark your calendar and tune in to watch the 45th Prometheus Awards!
Half a dozen interesting and inspiring speakers, including three book authors, will participate in the 40-minute live ceremony, scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. Saturday (Eastern time) Aug. 30 and open to the public via Zoom.
This will be the first ceremony in the Prometheus Awards’ 46-year history in which both winners will be recognized posthumously – with eloquent, personal, revealing, amusing and inspirational speeches about their lives and works by the family members who loved them and knew them best.
ASTRID ANDERSON BEAR TO REMEMBER POUL ANDERSON
Astrid Anderson Bear, daughter of the late SFWA Grand Master Poul Anderson and wife of the late sf author Greg Bear, will accept the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction for Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise.
Poul Anderson (1926-2001) was a major American science fiction writer who won the Hugo Award seven times, the Nebula Award three times and the Prometheus Award seven times (including this year’s award).
Astrid will discuss her father’s 1983 novel, which explores the corruptions and temptations of power and how a free society might survive and thrive after a post-nuclear-war apocalypse on a largely depopulated Earth with the emergence of four drastically different socioeconomic societies.
Orion Shall Rise is the fifth work by Anderson to be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, following Trader to the Stars (in 1985), The Star Fox (in 1995), “No Truce with Kings” (in 2010) and “Sam Hall” (in 2020.)
AUTHOR KEVIN FLYNN TO REMEMBER BROTHER MICHAEL FLYNN
Robert Heinlein Awardwinner and Hugo Award finalist Michael Flynn, who died in 2023 at 75, is the first posthumous winner of the Prometheus Award’s Best Novel category.
Now a three-time Prometheus winner (beginning with his first Best Novel win in 1991 for In the Country of the Blind), Flynn won the 2025 Best Novel category for In the Belly of the Whale.
The epic social novel offers a sobering and often revelatory drama about challenges and conflicts among the crew on a vast colony ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to settle Tau Ceti.
Flynn’s brother Kevin Flynn – a Denver city councilman, retired journalist and non-fiction author (The Order: Inside America’s Racist Underground, The Silent Brotherhood) – will accept the Best Novel award for Flynn’s family and share family stories about Michael Flynn’s childhood, coming of age and inspirations.
GUEST SPEAKER DAVID D. FRIEDMAN TO PRESENT HALL OF FAME
David D. Friedman, a Prometheus-nominated fantasy novelist (Harald, Salamander, Brothers), prominent economist (and son of Milton Friedman) and law-and-economics professor, will be this year’s guest celebrity speaker.
Friedman, who will present the Hall of Fame category, will discuss economic themes in science fiction/fantasy, the influence of libertarian science fiction, and his friendships with Anderson and the late Vernor Vinge (himself a four-time Prometheus winner), who both influenced Friedman’s writings and economic insights.
Since the heyday of the emerging libertarian movement in the 1970s-1980s, David has been recognized as a leading libertarian theorist (The Machinery of Freedom) and economist.
Among his other books: Price Theory: An Intermediate Text, Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World, Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters, and Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life.
OTHER AWARDS CEREMONY SPEAKERS
Shahid Mahmud, publisher of CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, will discuss Flynn’s career and winning novel. In the Belly of the Whale is the first novel published by CAEZIK SF & Fantasy to go on to win the Prometheus Award.
LFS President William H. Stoddard will emcee the ceremony and introduce the Prometheus Hall of Fame category for Best Classic Fiction.
An editor-writer and reviewer, Stoddard has published more than half a dozen books on sf/fantasy gaming with Steve Jackson Games.
Among his books: GURPS Fantasy, GURPS Social Engineering, GURPS Steampunk, GURPS Supers; GURPS Adaptations, and GURPS Weird War II.
Prometheus Blog editor-contributor Michael Grossberg, who chairs the Prometheus Best Novel finalist-selection judging committee, will present the Best Novel category.
Grossberg, a retired newspaper journalist and theater/film/book critic, has contributed to six books, including essays in four editions of The Burns Mantle Yearbook of the Theater and a critical-essay afterword in the paperback of J. Neil Schulman’s Prometheus-winning novel The Rainbow Cadenza. Grossberg also has written for several national magazines, including Reason, Libertarian Review, and Private Practice and was a regional-theater columnist for several years for Backstage weekly.
The 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony, open to the public, will be recorded and subsequently posted on Youtube and the Prometheus Blog at www.lfs.org/blog/
Here is the Zoom link to access and watch the 2-2:45 p.m. Saturday (EST) Aug. 30 event:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87344910540?pwd=rD6ckCN7j8k5Ytyh2n2YaQbpqoGkjr.1
Meeting ID: 873 4491 0540
Passcode: 396343
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ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS
* 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.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in 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. This page 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.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* 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.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
