The Prometheus Hall of Fame Award honors classic SF that promotes individual liberty, and with our current crop of nominees, we’ve reached across decades of work:
One of the nominations is for a Rudyard Kipling story published in 1912, and we also have work from the 1940s, the 1960s and the 1980s.
Official press release follows.
— Tom Jackson
Continue reading Our latest ‘Hall of Fame’ nominees span many decades
By Tom Jackson
My Jan. 24 blog post on the death of prominent SF writer Ursula K. LeGuin mentioned that she won our Hall of Fame Award in 1993, for The Dispossessed.
I know now a lot more about the history behind that award, thanks to a new article by Victoria Varga.
Varga, the former editor of The Prometheus, the newsletter we sent out until we established this blog, explains that the novel came out in 1974 and she nominated it for the Hall of Fame Award in 1983, touching off years of debate. LeGuin appreciated the nominations but privately expressed doubt it would win, although it finally did.
Ursula K. LeGuin (with Harlan Ellison) at Westercon in Portland, Oregon, in 1984. Creative Commons photo by Pip R. Lagenta.
Ursula K. LeGuin, who has died at age 88, wrote a variety of fiction and poetry. She preferred to be known as an “American novelist.” But we science fiction fans can claim her, too, as the above photograph illustrates.
Her awards included a Hugo and Nebula for The Left Hand of Darkness, but she also won our Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1993, for The Dispossessed.
The very first Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, back in 1983, was given, in a tie, to Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, published in 1966, won the Hugo for best novel in 1967. It was a favorite of mine when I read it during the 1970s, as a high school student. Evidently it was a favorite of lots of people.
Tyler Cowen, the influential economist, libertarian-leaning blogger, author and columnist, recently re-read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and found that it holds up.
Continue reading A thumb’s up: Tyler Cowen re-reads ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’
