Just how many sequels have won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel?
More than you might expect, as I recently discovered.
Continue reading Sequels, part 2: How many have won a Prometheus Award? You might be surprised…
Tag: Prometheus Awards
The Best Novel finalists range from exciting visions of humanity’s challenging possible futures in space to cautionary dystopian tales on Earth
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)
Reading tips: How to enhance your participation during the Prometheus Awards’ peak voting season
Without a commitment to reading, the Prometheus Awards couldn’t have been sustained for 46 years. That commitment is about to be put to the test, once again.
To assist Prometheus voters, we offer below a few tips to enhance your reading habits amid life’s busy home and work demands.
This is a timely moment to offer such encouragement. After a considerable degree of reading, discussion and related efforts by the LFS’ two awards-finalist-judging committees over the past half year or more, we are now on the verge of entering the final stage of judging the Prometheus Awards.
What a nomination means (and doesn’t mean) in the Prometheus Awards
When Libertarian Futurist Society members vote to select annual winners from the slate of Prometheus Awards finalists for Best Novel or the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction, that really means something.
That’s because it’s the highest level of recognition possible by the LFS as a whole – and those two awards come with an engraved plaque and a gold coin prize.
Similarly, the annual slates of (typically four or five) finalists mean a lot, too. Achieving Prometheus finalist status can bring a worthy work or an emerging author to wider attention, not only by LFS members but the wider communities of SF/fantasy fans and libertarians.
Prometheus finalists are selected by hard-working LFS members appointed to the committees that judge each year’s Prometheus nominees in our two annual awards categories, with the wider LFS membership then having several months to consider and rank the finalists on the final ballot to choose the winners.
As such, and unlike a basic nomination, the slate of Prometheus finalists represents the first stamp of approval from the LFS itself as a nonprofit international association of freedom-loving SF/fantasy fans.
Continue reading What a nomination means (and doesn’t mean) in the Prometheus Awards
File 770’s year-end best-novels recommended reading list includes four Prometheus Best Novel nominees
By Michael Grossberg
File 770, a leading SF/fantasy publication that frequently posts reviews, has offered its annual list of outstanding novels.
Of the 35 novels on File 770’s “2024 Recommended SF/F List,” four have been nominated by LFS members for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Meanwhile, four other novels on that list also have been under review on our unofficial “short list” of 2024 candidates to consider for nomination.
Awards standards series: What are the best criteria for Prometheus Award nominations? Explorations of libertarian ideas, visions of fully free futures, cautionary tales and genre criticism all have their place
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.
How do judges evaluate Prometheus Award candidates? By balancing the criteria of literary quality and pro-liberty themes within the fantastical genre
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.
The Libertarian Futurist Society has long had a hybrid process for choosing its annual award winners.
First the members nominate books for Best Novel, and books or other works for Hall of Fame. Then committees of judges review the nominees and select the best five in each category (or sometimes four or six) as finalist. The members read these finalists and rank them from best to worst, and their votes are totaled to select the winners.
But what does “select the best” mean?
Heinlein, Anderson, Tolkien, Orwell, Rand, Hoyt, Vinge, Stephenson, Bradbury and Wilson among popular Prometheus-winning authors added as convenient index links on our blog
What do Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, James P. Hogan, Sarah Hoyt, Victor Koman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken MacLeod, George Orwell, Ayn Rand, L. Neil Smith, Neal Stephenson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Vernor Vinge and F. Paul Wilson have in common?
Some rank high among bestselling and even world famous authors; some are not quite as well known but still have sold millions of copies of their books, and a few are lesser-known writers who deserve a wider readership.
Yet they’re all writers who have written notable speculative fiction (generally science fiction and/or fantasy) that in different ways championed freedom-loving themes and exposed the evils of authoritarianism.
And all of the above have been recognized for such works by winning Prometheus Awards – some for Best Novel, some for Best Classic Fiction and several for both annual award categories.
What might have more lasting impact than a Prometheus award? (Or, what happened when I googled Rudyard Kipling’s “As Easy as A.B.C.”)
By Michael Grossberg
Sometimes, a review of a good novel can have a lasting impact, even more than an award or award nomination – something to ponder as we begin a new year of the blog and of the Prometheus Awards.
Perhaps that might seem counterintuitive or even heretical, when it comes to the Prometheus Awards and its 45-year-old track record of more than 100 winners – 106 at last count, including 46 in the Best Novel category, 48 in the Best Classic Fiction category and 12 Special Awards.
Yet, that thought was sparked recently by what happened when I was rereading Rudyard Kipling’s 1912 story “As Easy as A.B.C.” – one of four classic works selected as finalists for the Prometheus Hall of Fame – and decided to research it further via Google.
When I googled the words “Rudyard Kipling and “As Easy as A.B.C.,” guess what popped up rather high on the Google web links?
The Prometheus Awards enter their 46th year, with much to celebrate – including raves for our reviews
As 2025 gets underway, the Libertarian Futurist Society has a lot of remember and much to celebrate.
Our non-profit international association of liberty-loving sf/fantasy fans is the midst of our annual cycle nominating eligible works and selecting finalists for the Prometheus Awards, now entering their 46th year and with a solid track record of 50 years within sight.
Reason magazine’s Bob Poole and three-time Prometheus winner Victor Koman added to the luster of our annual Prometheus Awards ceremony, which included an eloquent acceptance speech by two-time Prometheus winner Daniel Suarez, who won his second prize for Best Novel for Critical Mass.
The LFS continued to receive excellent media coverage about our annual Prometheus Award finalists and winners in our two annual categories for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (the Prometheus Hall of Fame) – especially from the SF/fantasy field’s two leading trade publications, Locus and File 770.
With an attractive new logo, a new series of outreach display ads to reach out to potential new members, and other outreach efforts, the LFS and the Prometheus Awards continue to raise our visibility and enhance our influence.