Sequels are increasingly popular these days – especially within the fantastical or speculative genres of science fiction and fantasy.
Among this year’s recently announced five Prometheus Best Novel finalists are two sequels: Alliance Unbound and Beggar’s Sky.
Of the 11 2024 SF/fantasy novels nominated for this year’s 45th Best Novel award, four are sequels – including Shadow of the Smoking Mountain and Machine Vendetta.
Each sequel navigates a tricky balance between the fresh and the familiar.
Each can be enjoyed by newcomers as a stand-alone book. Yet, each is enriched by previous world-building and continuing characters that makes them rewarding for the author’s ongoing fans.
How each novel builds on its predecessors, or in some cases departs from them, varies in ways that help illuminate the appeal of sequels and their challenges.
Alliance Unbound is the sequel to Alliance Rising, which won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2020. It appears that this may be the second volume of a trilogy, as the final pages leave important issues unresolved.
Taken together, these novels form a prequel to Cherryh’s Alliance/Union series, one of the larger future histories in the past few decades. (It began in 1981 with Downbelow Station, which won her first Hugo Award for best novel.)
The crucial fact driving its events is scarcity.
There are only three planets with biospheres: Earth, Pell’s World, and Cyteen. Orbital habitats in other solar systems — notably Alpha Station, located at Barnard’s Star, where Alliance Rising was set — are ultimately dependent for supplies, especially biomass, on those three systems; Alliance Rising’s plot turned on Earth’s starving Alpha Station of resources to advance its own goals, and a key point in Alliance Unbound is the discovery of nearly priceless Earth goods on Downbelow Station, which orbits Pell’s World.
Cherryh and Fancher’s characters are well aware of such issues of scarcity and value, being interstellar merchants who spend their lives going from solar system to solar system, with holds full of high-value cargo and computer memories full of equally valuable data.
This year’s five Prometheus Best Novel finalists plausibly imagine everything from dystopian Earth scenarios sparked by authoritarian true-believer cults to more positive but challenging interstellar futures for humanity.
C.J. Cherryh, left, and Jane Fancher (Photo courtesy of Jane Fancher)
Works published in 2024 by C.J. Cherryh & Jane S. Fancher, Michael Flynn, Danny King, Wil McCarthy and Lionel Shriver will be competing for the 45th Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn (File photo)
First presented in 1979, the Prometheus Awards have recognized hundreds of authors and a dizzying variety of works. This year’s slate of finalists embrace the old and the new.
Of these authors, British writer Danny King is new to our award, being recognized for the first time as a Best Novel finalist.
British writer Danny King (Creative Commons license)
Lionel Shriver, a Portugal-based American writer who’s lived in Nairobi, Bangkok, Belfast and London, is being recognized for the third time as a Best Novel finalist.
Wil McCarthy, and writing partners Cherryh and Fancher, each previously won a Prometheus Award, while Flynn (1947-2023) is a two-time previous Best Novel winner being recognized posthumously for what may be his last work.
Novelist Wil McCarthy (Photo courtesy of Baen Books)
In brief, here are this year’s Best Novel finalists, in alphabetical order by author:
* Alliance Unbound, by C.J Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW)
* In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy)
* Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press)
* Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books)
* Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers)
