One aspect of fantastical fiction that can make it especially vivid and dramatic is when authors create an imaginative story with epic scope.
A work of fiction that offers such a vast and even cosmic perspective can enhance that distinctive sense of wonder that has defined some of the best science fiction or fantasy.
Each of this year’s Prometheus Best Novel finalists benefits in some ways from aspiring to and achieving great scope.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
In the Belly of the Whale, the ambitious final and posthumous novel by two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn, explores the complex lives, work, challenges and conflicts aboard a large colony ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti.
The epic multifaceted 472-page novel takes some time to fully introduce its large cast of characters among 40,000 people who live in the hollowed-out asteroid ship dubbed The Whale. Yet, patience is rewarded with Flynn’s highly plausible and intricate world-building and wise grasp of human nature.
In the Belly of the Whale – one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel – builds dramatic intensity coupled with rich and even revelatory insights that freshen this seemingly familiar SF subgenre while raising deeper questions than most SF writers, scientists or space-colonization enthusiasts have considered about the prospects and costs of such generations-long voyages.
Eleven 2024 novels have been nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
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.
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.
Jones, a Best Novel finalist last year, died in January 2025 at 56.
Victor Koman, a veteran libertarian SF writer, had the honor of presenting the Best Novel category Sunday at the 44th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
Who better to fulfill that role than Koman, one of very few writers to win as many as three Prometheus awards for Best Novel?
Here, for the record, is the transcript of Koman’s speech.
Rick Triplett, 79, has seen the Prometheus Awards from the inside.
Recently recognized by the Libertarian Futurist Society board as the organization’s first Emeritus member after decades of service, Rick has served as a judge in all three categories of the Prometheus Awards – chairing the Special Awards committee and serving as a finalist-selection judge on the two committees that help whittle down candidates and nominees to a short list in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction categories.
So Rick’s views about the challenges of judging the Prometheus Award are worth sharing, as well as his insights about the pros and cons of various ideologies.
Here is the third part of the Prometheus Blog interview with Triplett.
Victor Koman, a veteran libertarian sf writer who’s won three Prometheus Awards for Best Novel, has agreed to speak and be a presenter at the 44th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
Koman will present the Best Novel category at the online Zoom ceremony, tentatively planned for a Saturday afternoon in mid- to late August.
Publisher-editor Tom Doherty, who founded TOR Books, has won the 2024 Robert A. Heinlein Award.
The award, funded by the Heinlein Society and named after the Grand Master who has won more Prometheus Awards than anyone else, is bestowed for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space.
According to a Heinlein Society press release, the Heinlein award was given to Doherty in recognition of his work “in bringing the inspiring books of hundreds of authors writing about our future in Space to public awareness.”
One of the leading publishers of sf/fantasy, TOR Publishing Group has won every major award in the sf field – including Hugo, Nebula and Prometheus awards.
Continue reading TOR Books founder Tom Doherty wins Heinlein Award
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).
Continue reading Two-time Prometheus winner Michael F. Flynn has died
Few individuals have made more of a difference to the Libertarian Futurist Society and the Prometheus Awards in the 21st century 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.
