Let’s face it: Most sequels don’t measure up to the originals. Yet, when they meet – or surpass – expectations while offering further satisfactions in their own right, sequels deserve recognition.
While quite a large number of sequel novels have been nominated for a Prometheus Award over the past 46 years, only a fraction have gone on to become Best Novel finalists. Even fewer have won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel – by my count, 10 novels, all worth reading or rereading.
That’s especially impressive, since most novels fall short in various ways, reflecting the iron law of mediocrity. As the great SF short-story writer Theodore Sturgeon put it, in what came to be called Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.”
Beyond the general requirements of solid storytelling, strong characters, propulsive plots and believable settings that apply to all literature, writing a sequel poses additional challenges – especially in finding and delivering the tricky balance between the fondly familiar and the excitingly fresh.
Fans of the original work tend to expect more in a sequel – more of the same pleasures they had in reading the first book, in part. Yet, whether they realize it consciously or not, fans also yearn to broaden their reading experience with new dimensions of narrative, character, setting, world-building and themes.
If you’re a lifelong SF/fantasy fan like me, you want a good novel or sequel to expand your imagination and deepen the intensity of your identification, empathy and emotion while reading it. This blog post will describe three sequel novels by Prometheus-winning writers that in my view fulfill such hopes.
Three sequels that have won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel have already been discussed in Part 2 and Part 3 of this Prometheus Blog series exploring the popularity and appeal of sequels: Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass, the 2024 winner; Barry Longyear’s The Hook, the 2021 winner; and Travis Corcoran’s Causes of Separation, the 2019 winner.
Here are three more Prometheus-winning sequels worth a deeper look, with each one a key part of an impressive overall trilogy.
DOCTOROW’S HOMELAND: A LITTLE BROTHER SEQUEL
Cory Doctorow won his third Prometheus in 2014 for Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, our 2009 Best Novel winner. Both novels offer timely dramas about an ongoing struggle for civil liberties against an invasive Big Brother-style National-Security State.
Homeland follows the continuing adventures of Marcus Yallow, a government-brutalized young leader of a movement of tech-savvy hackers who previously had been detained arbitrarily and brutalized by the U.S. government after a terrorist attack on San Francisco.
Set several years after Little Brother, following the collapse of California’s economy and the further growth of the government’s powers, the novel centers on Yallow, now the public face of resistance and more constrained than ever, as he faces a dangerous decision whether to release a thumb-drive containing a provocative Wikileaks-style exposé of massive government abuse and corruption.
Doctorow completed his Little Brother trilogy – whose title evokes the Big Brother of Orwell’s Prometheus Hall of Fame-winning Nineteen Eighty-Four – with Attack Surface, not quite a direct sequel but set in the same near-future America.
For more about Homeland, read the Prometheus Blog appreciation.
WALTON’S HA’PENNY: A SMALL CHANGE SEQUEL
Jo Walton won her Prometheus Award for Ha’Penny, which tied for Best Novel in 2008 with Harry Turtledove’s The Gladiator. A sequel to Farthing, Ha’Penny is part of Walton’s Small Change trilogy, which culminates with Half a Crown.
A cozy mystery and police procedural, Ha’Penny is set in an alternate-history timeline where the United Kingdom came to terms with National Socialist Germany in the 1930s.
Much of the corruption in Walton’s fascist United Kingdom takes place through the channels of influence among the “right sort of people,” as Stoddard notes in his Prometheus Blog appreciation.
Walton’s perceptive novel – and her entire trilogy – illuminates how an authoritarian government, even one well short of totalitarian, can corrupt society, create political pressures that could destroy careers and undermine even the daily basics of a murder investigation.
For more about Ha’Penny, read William H. Stoddard’s Prometheus Blog Appreciation.
STEPHENSON’S SYSTEM OF THE WORLD: A BAROQUE CYCLE SEQUEL
Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World, the 2005 Best Novel winner, is the ambitious and kaleidoscopic culmination of The Baroque Cycle trilogy.
The sequel to both Quicksilver and The Confusion, System is set within Europe’s Baroque era, in which the gradual rise of reason and science come into conflict with power, tyranny and superstition.
With Sir Isaac Newton and German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz as key characters, the saga charts the development in the late 1600s and early 1700s of the modern world’s classical liberal institutions, which paved the way for modern libertarianism.
As Stoddard observes in his Prometheus Blog appreciation, Stephenson’s complex, multi-threaded plot offers a secret history of the origins of experimental natural science, the British monetary system, and the antislavery movement, among other elements of modernity.
For more about The System of the World, read Stoddard’s Prometheus Blog appreciation.
Coming up: In the next part of our sequel series, three more sequels that have won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel will be explored.
If you can’t guess what they are, here are three clues: One sequel was written by a three-time Prometheus winner, one, by a five-time Prometheus winner, and one, by a six-time Prometheus winner.
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 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 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.
