Quite a few Prometheus Award Best Novel winners, while not sequels themselves, have inspired subsequent novels that have received further Prometheus recognition.
Such winners by Sarah Hoyt (Darkship Thieves), Victor Milan (The Cybernetic Samurai) and Dani and Eytan Kollins (The Unincorporated Man) were examined in the previous post of this ongoing series about sequels.
Let’s turn our attention here to Prometheus-winning works by Ramez Naam and L. Neil Smith. Both authors were inspired to write more than one follow-up novel to their initial Prometheus-winning novels.
While Naam framed one complex story for his near-future Nexus trilogy, Smith conceived a variety of zestful and rambunctious stories all linked within his alternate-universe North American Confederacy series.
RAMEZ NAAM’S NEXUS TRILOGY: NEXUS, CRUX, APEX
Ramez Naam won the 2014 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for Nexus, which launched his Nexus Trilogy.
Set in the near future, the novel imagines the personal, social and political implications of an experimental nano-drug called Nexus 5 that can link humans together, mind to mind.
Inevitably, the new drug and its possibilities divide humanity, with some wanting to exploit it, others to improve it and others to ban and eradicate it.
When a young scientist is caught improving the drug, he falls into the dangerous world of international espionage.
The novel, and the trilogy, build to an epic scope. As Naam weaves the many strands of his far-flung and suspenseful saga, the settings encompass illegal biotech markets, a remote mountain monastery in Thailand, underground parties in San Francisco, the headquarters of an elite Washington D.C. agency, and a secret lab beneath a Shanghai university.
Both sequels were recognized within the Prometheus Awards as Best Novel finalists.
Crux, published and nominated in the same year as Nexus, is Book 2 of the trilogy.
Set half a year after the release of Nexus 5 as the world has changed and become more dangerous, Crux follows several narrative threads that gradually intertwine among developments in the United States, Thailand, Vietnam and China.
In the United States, as the terrorists of the Post-Human Liberation Front use Nexus to transform people into human time bombs aimed at the president and his allies, a government scientist, secretly addicted to Nexus, is endangered by his growing knowledge of forces behind the assassinations.
In Thailand, Samantha Cataranes has found happiness with some children born with Nexus in their brains, but faces forces that could tear her new family apart.
In Vietnam, Kade and Feng are on the run in Vietnam from the CIA and bounty hunters as Kade strives to stop the terrorists misusing Nexus before they spark global war between human and posthuman.
Meanwhile, in Shanghai, China, a postman child goes to dangerous lengths to free her uploaded mother from Chinese authorities.
An exciting hybrid of science fiction and a near-future political suspense thriller, The Nexus trilogy culminates with Apex.
As armies mobilize, political establishments collapse and global unrest widens, the Nexus-driven revolution opens the door for a new breed of post-human children to grow into their powers and become the planet’s new apex species.
Overall, Naam’s trilogy offers intriguing speculations that remain timely and culturally relevant today about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and mind expansion, the nature of human consciousness and how new technological or pharmacological developments might impact our individual liberty and autonomy.
L. NEIL SMITH’S GALLATIN ALTERNATE-UNIVERSE NOVELS
L. Neil Smith (1946-2021), won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel three times, including for Pallas in 1994 and The Forge of the Elders in 2001.
Yet, Smith perhaps had his biggest impact with his influential first novel, which sparked many sequels.
The Probability Broach, the 1982 Best Novel winner, was the first of many zestful novels in Smith’s alternate-universe North American Confederacy series about a profound and ongoing philosophical and sociopolitical conflict between Jeffersonian decentralist and Hamiltonian authoritarian societies.
Among its seven sequels in the Gallatin Universe, five were recognized as Prometheus Best Novel finalists: The Nagasaki Vector, Thom Paine Maru, The Gallatin Divergence and The American Zone, which brings the saga to its close.
A lifelong libertarian who deeply loved America and its noble but flawed constitutional order, Smith imagines an alternate history that emerges from just a change in a single word in the Declaration of Independence.
As a result, the United States has become replaced by a prosperous and more advanced libertarian society with a bare-minimum night-watchman state – the next best thing to the type of society without government dreamed of by such leading libertarian thinkers of the 1970s-1980s as Murray Rothbard and David Friedman.
Also known as the Gallatin Universe because of the pivotal role of real-life person Albert Gallatin at the point of time-line divergence in 1794, this freer, more civilized and peaceful future is threatened by the Federalists, also known as Hamiltonians because of their centralizing-coercive-government ideology, most identified in actual history with Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist Party after the American Revolution.
Just to be clear, Smith named his evil antagonists Hamiltonians decades before Lin-Manuel Miranda partially rehabilitated the reputation of the undeniably flawed Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and perhaps the most authoritarian in his centralist-statist views of all the Founding Fathers, with his celebratory award-winning musical Hamilton.
Smith, a former policeman and ardent Second Amendment advocate, envisioned his libertarian alternate history as both well-armed and far more peaceful than today’s America.
Two other sequels in the series were nominated for Best Novel: The Venus Belt and Their Majesties’ Bucketeers.
The Venus Belt, the first sequel published, is set in outer space and charts other settlements in the Gallatin Universe solar system, while the Hamiltonians strive to establish a new civilization in interstellar space by kidnapping and enslaving a quarter of a million women as breeding stock.
Their Majesties’ Bucketeers, which introduces characters who later interact with others in the Gallatin Universe, is refreshingly atypical within this series. It’s basically a pastiche of the Sherlock Holmes tales and introduces the Lamviin, a trilaterally symmetrical race of aliens native to an arid planet.
Meanwhile, Brightsuit MacBear (1988), a Best Novel nominee, and Taflak Lysandra (1989) were the first two Smith novels in a projected new series set in the North American Confederacy universe.
When you consider all of the authors and their sequels covered in this series, one has to conclude that giving readers more of what they’ve enjoyed before, enhanced by new situations and characters within the same universe, can be a proven path to success.
For further reading: Other sequels that have won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel are discussed in Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7, of this Prometheus Blog series exploring the popularity and appeal of sequels.
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