By Michael Grossberg
Throughout the 46-year history of the Prometheus Award, 505 novels have been nominated for Best Novel.
That’s a surprisingly large number, at least to me – and a cumulative total that I don’t believe has been calculated and reported before, or at least not in many years.
Yet, when I counted them up recently, I was even more surprised by the number of Best Novel nominees that turn out to be sequels. (Quite a few were hard to identify as sequels, by the way, until I researched each title – with some so obscure, and not immediately recognizable as sequels when nominated and read by Prometheus judges and LFS members, because many work fine as stand-alone stories without any obvious indications of previous works.)
Can you guess how many Best Novel nominees have been sequels?
Here’s the answer: 194 sequels have been nominated- or almost 40 percent of all Best Novel nominees. (That doesn’t include the many additional candidates for nomination considered, read and discussed by Prometheus judges and other LFS members over the decades that ultimately were not formally nominated for our award.)
That’s an astonishingly high quotient, and far more than I imagined when I started counting them up, or even after I began writing this Prometheus blog series about the popularity of sequels and their particular challenges.
Beyond that, quite a few nominated sequels have become Best Novel finalists.
That includes two of this year’s Best Novel finalists: C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher’s Alliance Unbound (the sequel to Alliance Rising, the 2020 Best Novel winner) and Wil McCarthy’s Beggar’s Sky (the sequel to Rich Man’s Sky, the 2022 Best Novel winner.)
(Read a report with capsule descriptions of all five 2025 Best Novel finalists.)
THE 11 SEQUELS THAT HAVE WON BEST NOVEL
Overall, 11 nominated sequels have gone on to win the Prometheus Award.
That’s about 24 percent of the 46 Best Novel winners since the Prometheus Awards were first presented in 1979.
All have been discussed in previous parts of this series about the popularity and challenges of sequels, but here for the first time is the full list, including the year each work won its Prometheus Award:
* Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass (2024)
* Barry Longyear’s The Hook (2021)
* Travis Corcoran’s Causes of Separation (2019)
* Cory Doctorow’s Homeland (2014)
* Jo Walton’s Ha’Penny (2008)
* Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World (2005)
* Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky (2000)
* Ken MacLeod’s The Stone Canal (1998)
* Poul Anderson’s The Stars Are Also Fire (1995)
* Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time (1987)
* F. Paul Wilson’s Wheels Within Wheels (1979)
SEQUELS AND SERIES
By the way, the above list doesn’t include a few winners that work well as stand-alone novels, with self-contained stories that aren’t direct sequels to any previous novel, but also are part of a much-larger series of novels and stories set within the same fictional universe.
Science fiction and fantasy authors have frequently and for generations tended to return to the same fictional universe, once imagined and richly detailed, to write fresh stories that aren’t formal sequels. I consider such “series” fiction to be distinct from sequels, at least for the purposes of this series exploring the particular challenges and pleasures of writing and reading sequels.
Still, two other Best Novel winners within the “series” category deserve at least a brief mention here, if only because in some ways, they also can be considered sort-of sequels.
Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, the 2003 Best Novel winner, is set within his vast Discworld fantasy series.
C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher’s Alliance Rising, the 2020 Best Novel winner, is set within Cherryh’s vast Alliance-Union series, with many separate novels dramatizing different aspects of her interstellar-colony future history.
And of course, Robert Heinlein wrote many of his novels and stories – including quite a few of his nine works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction – within what he informally grouped together for convenience, clarity and internal consistency into a loose future history of humanity’s emergence into an interstellar civilization.
Whether direct sequels or loosely tied together in series, such novels provide readers with the pleasures of returning to favorite fictional worlds and beloved characters for more adventures while adding fresh twists and levels of detail and discovery.
For further reading: The 11 sequels that have won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel, along with other Prometheus winners that inspired sequels, are discussed in Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 and Part 10 of this Prometheus Blog series exploring the popularity and appeal of sequels.
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.
