By Michael Grossberg
Which Prometheus Award winners would you like to see on screen someday?
So far, 17 Prometheus Award-winners have been adapted with varying degrees of success to the large or small screen or have been recognized as original movies – including George Orwell’s Animal Farm, most recently adapted for the third time into a 2026 animated film.
When I asked my fellow Prometheus Best Novel judges which other winning works they most yearn to see made into a movie or TV series, Lowell Jacobsen chose two related novels by the same author: Travis Corcoran.
Corcoran is the only author to win back-to-back Prometheus awards for Best Novel. He won in 2018 for The Powers of the Earth and in 2019 for its sequel, Causes of Separation – the first two books in his planned four-volume Aristillus series about a libertarian lunar colony.
“The Prometheus winners I’d most like to see adapted are the Aristillus books by Travis J.I. Corcoran,” Jacobsen said.
“What I want to see is the plotlines played out, and all the epic action scenes (especially the alternatively-abled soldiers) — and who wouldn’t want to see the uplifted dogs?” he said.
As LFS President William H. Stoddard explains in his Appreciation of the two Prometheus winners, the novels have a large cast of characters beyond its central character: Mike Martin. A libertarian dissident who dug the first tunnels of the underground colony, Mike Martin has become a leader of the “growing city inhabited by refugees from the economic authoritarianism of Earth’s major nations.”
The refugees includes intelligent non-humans – including the uplifted dogs that Jacobsen wants to see on screen.
“There are scenes focusing on Martin’s leadership of the “Boardroom Group,” a committee of entrepreneurs seeking to organize a defense against invasion from Earth,” Stoddard writes.
“But many other groups are important to the story, from the young adults from Earth hoping to do a journalistic exposé of Aristillus to the Indian families who emigrate seeking economic opportunity to the dogs with enhanced intelligence rescued from a laboratory on Earth just before being euthanized.”
With all these characters, Stoddard writes, the novel offers a panoramic view of a libertarian society, and in a lesser degree, of the forces on Earth that are hostile to it.
Jacobsen, for his part, already can envision the Corcoran novels as films, with each novel still vividly alive in his memory from reading them years ago.
“The titular scene of Causes of Separation would be amazing to see in IMAX,” Jacobsen said.
“And the sense of frantic tension leading up to it in all of the plotlines at once would be gripping in the hands of a talented director.”
From your lips, Lowell, to Hollywood’s ears!
Read the previous blog posts in this series about Prometheus winners on screen.
ABOUT THE LFS AND THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
* 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 international 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 the 106 works that have won a Prometheus 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.
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