Editor’s note: To kick off a new year of judging and for the sake of greater transparency about the Prometheus Awards, the Prometheus Blog is posting an occasional series of essays by LFS awards judges about how they view our distinctive award standards and how they apply them to weigh candidates and nominees.
I am, and have been for many years, one of the 12 judges who screens LFS membership suggestions about novels deserving of the Prometheus Award.
This past year we had a record number of Best Novel nominations for the 2024 award – 17 – and trying to evaluate all of them in the time we have available was a real strain. In the future I think all the judges would prefer to see fewer but higher-quality submissions.
So I’m going to talk about what I consider a high-quality submission. Other judges have slightly different criteria and I’m not claiming to speak for them; but I will try to focus on the criteria I think we have in common, and towards the end of this post I’ll describe some axes of controversy within the committee’s emailing-list discussions and comparative reports.
