One of the things Poul Anderson was known for throughout his literary career was world-building. Much of this was planetary design, based on the natural sciences, in which he started out with stellar type, planetary mass, orbital radius, and elemental abundances and worked out the geology, meteorology, and biology of a world.
Poul Anderson (Creative Commons license)
Anderson was certainly one of the masters of this, up there with Hal Clement and Vernor Vinge. But he put equal effort into social scientific worldbuilding, creating economies, polities, and cultures, and developing plots for his stories from the conflicts they gave rise to. Orion Shall Rise, winner of the 2025 Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction, is a nearly pure example of social scientific world-building, set not in a distant solar system but on a future Earth.
How did Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress give leading libertarian thinker David Friedman the radical idea that society can develop just laws and functional legal systems without government?
What life events, travels, famous scientists and space projects helped shape the late Poul Anderson’s 1983 novel Orion Shall Rise, the 2025 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner?
How did the late Michael Flynn’s childhood lead him to become an award-winning science fiction writer?
Why does Flynn’s CAEZIK SF & Fantasy publisher view him as one of the most underestimated sf writers of his generation?
What Prometheus-winning sf/fantasy authors rank high among Friedman’s favorites – and why?
To find out, watch the recorded YouTube video of the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony:
David D. Friedman added excitement and intellectual stimulation as the guest presenter at the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
David Friedman (Photo provided by Friedman)
A leading libertarian theorist (The Machinery of Freedom), economist (Price Theory: An Intermediate Text) and law-and-economics professor (Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters), David is also a Prometheus-nominated sf/fantasy novelist (Harald, Salamander, Brothers).
Friedman presented the Prometheus Hall of Fame category for Best Classic Fiction during the Aug. 30 ceremony. Here is the text of his speech, which followed an introduction by LFS President William (Bill) Stoddard.
By David D. Friedman
Bill mentioned my friend Vernor Vinge, who is in part responsible for my writing my second novel.
I described to him my idea for that and for the alternative, a sequel to my first novel (Harald, a 2007 Prometheus Best Novel nominee). He thought Salamander would more interesting, so I wrote it. He was right.
I thought I’d start by saying a little about what I’ve learned relevant to libertarianism from science fiction.
As some of you may know, Vernor’s story “The Ungoverned” (inducted in 1994 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame) is about a stateless society, modeled on my ideas, being invaded by an adjacent state.
Seeing that society through the eyes of a novelist rather than an economist showed me things about it that would not have occurred to me….
Astrid Anderson Bear, daughter of the late SFWA Grand Master Poul Anderson (1926-2001) and wife of the late sf author Greg Bear, accepted the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction for Poul Anderson’s novel Orion Shall Rise.
Astrid Anderson Bear (Photo courtesy of Bear)
Astrid spoke during the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony, presented live via Zoom on Aug. 30, 2025, and recorded to post later on Youtube and on the Prometheus Blog.
By Astrid Anderson Bear
Thank you to the members of the Libertarian Futurist Societyfor voting to induct my dad’s novel, Orion Shall Rise, into the Prometheus Awards Hall of Fame.
Published in 1983, this wide ranging book is in his Maurai universe, a loosely connected seriesof works set on a post-apocalyptic future Earth.
Orion Shall Rise takes placeroughly 500 years in our future, and brings together characters from the principal powers on the planet: the Domain, controlling much ofwestern Europe by means of a huge aerostat, Skyholm, that has survived since the nuclear wars hundreds of years previously; the Maurai Federation, a coalition of Pacific Islanders centered in New Zealand; and the Northwest Union and its powerful Lodges in thePacific Northwest of North America.
Mark your calendar and tune in to watch the 45th Prometheus Awards!
Half a dozen interesting and inspiring speakers, including three book authors, will participate in the 40-minute live ceremony, scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. Saturday (Eastern time) Aug. 30 and open to the public via Zoom.
Poul Anderson, a seven-time Prometheus winner, who died in 2001 (Creative Commons license)Three-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn, who died in 2023 (Creative Commons license)
This will be the first ceremony in the Prometheus Awards’ 46-year history in which both winners will be recognized posthumously – with eloquent, personal, revealing, amusing and inspirational speeches about their lives and works by the family members who loved them and knew them best.
Mark your calendar: The45th Prometheus Awards has been confirmed for Saturday Aug. 30, with a leading libertarian thinker and novelist as a guest presenter.
The Zoom-led ceremony will run from 2 to 3 p.m. that Saturday (Eastern time) and will be open to all LFS members and the public. (The Zoom link is below.)
Among the speakers: leading libertarian thinker and fantasy novelist David D. Friedman, who will present the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction; Astrid Anderson Bear, daughter of the late sf/fantasy writer Poul Anderson, a frequent Prometheus Awards winner; CAEZIK SF & Fantasy publisher Shahid Mahmud; author Kevin Flynn, brother of the late sf novelist Michael Flynn, a three-time Prometheus winner; LFS President William H. Stoddard, and Libertarian Futurist Society co-founder Michael Grossberg.
Orion Shall Rise, a 1983 novel by Poul Anderson, has won the 2025 Best Classic Fiction award and will be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
Poul Anderson (Creative Commons license)
Published by Timescape and first nominated for the Prometheus Award in 1984, when it became a Best Novel finalist, Orion Shall Rise explores the corruptions and temptations of power and how a free society might survive and thrive after a post-nuclear-war apocalypse on a largely depopulated Earth.
When a sequel novel is part of a trilogy or series, it can help broaden the scope of a narrative and its world-building while providing a bigger canvas to explore more characters and subplots in greater depth.
Poul Anderson (Creative Commons license)Ken MacLeod (Creative Commons photo)
Two internationally acclaimed science fiction writers who achieved such goals in Prometheus-winning Best Novel sequels are Poul Anderson and Ken MacLeod.
Previous articles in this series on Prometheus-winning sequel novels explored winners by Daniel Suarez (Critical Mass), Barry Longyear (The Hook), Travis Corcoran (Causes of Separation), Cory Doctorow (Homeland), Jo Walton (Ha’Penny) and Neal Stephenson (The System of the World).
Part 5 will discuss Anderson’s The Stars are Also Fire, the 1995 Best Novel winner, and MacLeod’s The Stone Canal, the 1998 Best Novel winner.
Both sequels are key works in their respective tetralogies.
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.
For the convenience of LFS members and a guide to this year’s Prometheus Awards, the Prometheus Blog has now posted reviews of all four of the year’s Prometheus Hall of Fame finalists for Best Classic Fiction.
Libertarian Futurist Society members, who have the right to vote to select the annual Best Classic Fiction winner, are invited to read (or reread) our reviews of the 2025 finalists: Poul Anderson’s novel Orion Shall Rise, Rudyard Kipling’s story “As Easy as A.B.C.,” the Rush song “The Trees” and Charles Stross’ novel Singularity Sky.
Other science fiction and fantasy fans, outside the LFS, also may wish to check out the reviews to appreciate these works and to better understand how they fit the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Awards on both quality and liberty.
