In the Country of the Blind – Prometheus Blog

Celebrating the 45th Prometheus Awards: A heartfelt family tribute to the late great Michael Flynn, three-time Best Novel winner

“He lived exactly the life he wanted to live.”
– Kevin Flynn, about his brother Michael

Two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn (Creative Commons license)

Michael Flynn won his third Prometheus Award for Best Novel for his posthumously published In the Belly of the Whale.

Here is the text of the eloquent, poignant and very personal acceptance speech by Kevin Flynn, brother of the late novelist, who died in 2023 at 75. The speech was recorded and presented Aug. 30, 2025, during the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony.

By Kevin Flynn

On behalf of Michael Flynn’s family, his daughter Sara, his son Dennis, his grandchildren Noelle, Zaid, and Adam, and his brothers Sean and Patrick, it is my privilege to be chosen by them to speak here today and accept this award. I know that Michael would be deeply moved by this recognition, which will serve as the capstone of his distinguished science fiction bibliography. Thank you so much for recognizing our brother’s work.

As Michael was nominated for the Prometheus Awards nine times, chosen as a Best Novel finalist eight of those times, and won the Best Novel award now for the third time, you know well of Michael’s passion for learning, for liberty, for liberation of the mind and pushing back on authority in pursuit of freedom of thought and expression.

For those of us who knew him so well, we know he would be reluctant to display his pride as publicly and shamelessly as I am going to do on his behalf. That was simply who our big brother was. But he was so much more, and I hope to use this short time to tell you what kind of human our brother was.

Continue reading Celebrating the 45th Prometheus Awards: A heartfelt family tribute to the late great Michael Flynn, three-time Best Novel winner

Michael Flynn’s legacy: How the Best Novel finalists have received broader cultural recognition (Part Five) 

By Michael Grossberg

Two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn has become a Best Novel finalist again this year for In the Belly of the Whale, an epic work illuminating the complex lives, work, challenges, conflicts and threats to liberty aboard a large colony ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti.

Flynn previously won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel for In the Country of the Blind (in 1991) and Fallen Angels (in 1992), co-written with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

One of the most frequently recognized authors within the 46-year history of the Prometheus Awards, Flynn wrote works that were ranked Best Novel finalists seven times – a track record exceeded only by Ken MacLeod, L. Neil Smith and F. Paul Wilson.

Sadly, Flynn, who died at 75 in 2023, is no longer around to do interviews about his final, posthumous novel.

But in Part Five of our ongoing Prometheus Blog series documenting how each of our 2025 Best Novel finalists have received broader cultural recognition for their fiction, talent and imagination, we offer the next best thing: One of the best and last interviews Flynn gave before he passed.

Continue reading Michael Flynn’s legacy: How the Best Novel finalists have received broader cultural recognition (Part Five) 

Two-time Prometheus winner Michael F. Flynn has died

We are sorry to have to report that science fiction writer Michael F. Flynn has died. He was 75. Here is the obituary from his local newspaper in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Flynn won the Prometheus Award twice, in 1991 for In the Country of the Blind, and in 1992 for Fallen Angels (a collaboration with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle).

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Interview: LFS President William H. Stoddard on fandom, freedom, favorite novels and the power of language

Few individuals have made more of a difference to the Libertarian Futurist Society and the Prometheus Awards in the 21^stcentury than William H. Stoddard.

Bill, as he’s known to friends and fellow LFS members, has led the nonprofit, all-volunteer group of freedom-loving sf fans for more than a decade as president of the board of directors.

But Stoddard has done far more for many years, writing reviews of sf/fantasy for the Prometheus newsletter and more recently, this blog, and serving for decades as a key judge on both finalist-judging committees for the Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction categories of the Prometheus Award.

Here is LFS Secretary Michael Grossberg’s interview with Stoddard about how he became an sf fan, a libertarian and an active LFS member and what are some of his favorite writers and Prometheus-winning works.

Q: What Prometheus Award winners especially excited you or pleased you when they won for Best Novel?

A: For the Best Novel Award, I’d name two.

Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind (1991 award) asked “what if Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine had come into use in the nineteenth century?” in the form, not of an alternate history, but of a hidden history where multiple secretive groups used predictive social science (made possible by Analytical Engines) to create the actual history of the twentieth century from behind the scenes; it was one of my main influences when I wrote GURPS Steampunk for Steve Jackson Games in 2000.

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Steampunk, Victorian technology, secret history and freedom of choice: An Appreciation of Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind, the 1991 Prometheus Best Novel winner

The Libertarian Futurist Society’s ongoing Appreciation series strives to make clear what libertarian futurists see in each of our past winners and how each fit the Prometheus award’s distinctive focus on Liberty vs. Power. Here’s our appreciation of Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind, the 1992 Prometheus winner for Best Novel.

By William H. Stoddard

Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind came out in 1990, the same year as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. While the word “steampunk” was somewhat older (coined in 1987 by K.W. Jeter for Victorian fantasies generally), these two novels gave the genre one of its central themes: the use of Victorian technology and social transformation as an analog of (then-) recent computer technology, making steampunk parallel to cyberpunk.

For both novels, a central technology was Charles Babbage’s “analytical engine,” a proposed machine that would have been fully programmable in the manner of an electronic computer.

Gibson and Sterling made the analytical engine the basis for an alternate history – a literal “difference engine.” Flynn did something subtler: He made the analytical engine the basis for an only minimally fictionalized version of real-world history.

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