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)
Eleven 2024 novels have been nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Writer Howard Andrew Jones (Photo courtesy of Baen Books)
Broadly embracing many forms of speculative fiction including science fiction, fantasy, dystopian cautionary tales and near-future political-tech thrillers, the diverse slate offers a wide variety and blends of genres, styles and themes – from the serious to the darkly satirical.
Two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn (Creative Commons license)
Most poignantly, this will be the last time that two authors are nominated for Best Novel because they’ve sadly passed away: Michael Flynn and Howard Andrew Jones.
Flynn, a two-time Prometheus winner for Best Novel, died in 2023 at 75.
Set in Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe, Alliance Rising explores its backstory; it appears to take place at an earlier date than any other novel in the series.
Cherryh’s future history assumes that the new societies founded by outward migration will become politically dominant; its two great powers are the Alliance, based at Tau Ceti, and the Union, centered on Lalande 46650, with the whole of Earth as a less powerful backwater.
Alliance Rising, which Cherryh co-wrote with Jane S. Fancher, explores the emergence of this configuration of interstellar powers, taking place not long after the discovery of faster-than-light travel in the twenty-third century by a Union physicist, at a time when Earth is struggling to catch up and preserve its power by building a new ship at Alpha Station, in the solar system of Barnard’s Star.
The new ship’s name, The Rights of Man, offers a pointed bit of symbolism — but one that takes on an ironic quality when the ship’s first test run is a dismal failure that has to be aborted, largely because of the crew’s lack of practical experience.
Serendipity and seized opportunity enhanced the star power and appeal of the Libertarian Futurist Society’s panel discussion at the 2020 online North American Science Fiction Convention.
Unexpectedly but delightfully, the Hugo-winning Grand Master novelist C.J. Cherryhand her partner Jane. S. Fancher joined past Prometheus winners Sarah Hoytand F. Paul Wilson and several LFS veteran leaders including LFS President William H. Stoddard in answering a variety of thought-provoking questions during the NASFiC/LFS panel on “Visions of SF, Liberty, Human Rights: The Prometheus Awards Over Four Decades, from F. Paul Wilson and Robert Heinlein to Today.”
When panel moderator Tom Jackson noticed that Cherryh and Fancher were still hanging out within the Zoom “meeting room” after accepting their 2020 Best Novel award for co-writing Alliance Rising to watch the post-ceremony panel discussion, he noted their presence and ability to participate.
Tom Jackson
After a few questions to the other panelists, Jackson invited Cherryh and Fancher to come into the discussion with their comments.
Which they graciously did, and fascinatingly so.
Thus, the long-planned NASFiC panel celebrating the recent 40th anniversary of the Prometheus Awards – first presented by L. Neil Smith to F. Paul Wilson in 1979 – expanded into an event with interesting comments from not two but four bestselling, Prometheus-award-winning novelists.
Here is the full panel discussion, part of an 80-minute two-part NASFiC/LFS video that begins with the 2020 Prometheus Awards ceremony, including Cherryh and Fancher’s Best Novel acceptance speech and Astrid Anderson Bear’s Hall of Fame acceptance speech for her late father Poul Anderson; and concludes with the 50-minute panel discussion:
Whether set on Earth, on the Moon, or throughout interstellar space and whether taking place in the near-future or distant future, novels dramatizing fights for freedom and threats of tyranny can achieve a timeless and universal relevance.
Recognizing the perennial tensions between Liberty and Power, the Libertarian Futurist Society presents its annual Prometheus Awards for outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy.
The five 2019 novels that the LFS has just selected as its finalists in the Best Novel category of the 2020 Prometheus Awards certainly range widely in setting, era, plot, character and style. Yet, each sheds fascinating light on the enduring human themes and challenges that inspire each generation’s struggle for freedom amid recurring threats of dictatorship, war, plague, pandemic, powerlust and other ills.
