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?

Continue reading 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.”)


Best of the blog 2024, part two: Reviews of Mackey Chandler, Devon Eriksen, Dave Freer, Gordon Hanka and Howard Andrew Jones

By Michael Grossberg

By the end of 2024, just a few days from now, the Prometheus Blog will have posted a record number of articles, essays, reviews, updates and news.

For the first time since the blog began seven years ago, Libertarian Futurist Society members and Prometheus judges wrote, edited and published 100 posts, or an average of roughly one article every three and a half days.

That’s a notable increase over the previous year, which also reached a new high of 77 articles, up from 67 in 2022 and 59 in 2021.

Of this past year’s 100 articles, more than one-fourth (28) were full-length or capsule reviews, often but not always of Prometheus Award nominees and finalists.

Looking back at a year rich with interesting, illuminating and just-plain entertaining reviews, here are excerpts from (and convenient links to) five of the best.

Continue reading Best of the blog 2024, part two: Reviews of Mackey Chandler, Devon Eriksen, Dave Freer, Gordon Hanka and Howard Andrew Jones

Best of the blog 2024: More reviews posted than ever, including of the year’s two Prometheus Award winners


By Michael Grossberg

For the first time, the Prometheus Blog was able to post timely reviews of all five Best Novel finalists and all four Prometheus Hall of Fame finalists for Best Classic Fiction this past year.

Thanks to all the LFS members and Prometheus judges who took the time and effort to write thoughtful, insightful and illuminating reviews, just as Libertarian Futurist Society members were seriously considering the merits of the nominees and finalists and reading and ranking their favorites to help choose the 2024 Prometheus Award winners.

This enormous effort and success fulfills a long-term goal for the Prometheus Blog, established in mid-2017 as a replacement for Prometheus, the LFS’ former printed quarterly.

Our purpose in soliciting more full-length, in-depth reviews of our awards winners and contenders was twofold:

* to increase the substantive content of the blog, for both our membership and our wider public readership,

* to further enhance our annual awards-judging process by offering members more food for thought as they read and ranked the 2024 Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction finalists.

Continue reading Best of the blog 2024: More reviews posted than ever, including of the year’s two Prometheus Award winners


Prometheus Blog progress: The LFS Appreciation series about past winners is now complete and accessible

If sci-fi fans or anyone else ever wants to know why the Libertarian Futurist Society presented a Prometheus Award to any work of fiction, and how that work reflects libertarian, classical liberal and anti-authoritarian themes, they now have an easy, quick and enjoyable way to find out.

Just visit the LFS website’s Prometheus Awards page, scroll down to any particular past winner of interest – for Best Novel, Best Classic Fiction or Special Awards – and click on the “Appreciation” link added next to its title.

To highlight and honor the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society celebrated in 2019, LFS members began writing review-essays about each past winner that summer.

Today, more than three years later, that series of informative essays is now complete:
Continue reading Prometheus Blog progress: The LFS Appreciation series about past winners is now complete and accessible

A Prometheus milestone: a progress report on completion of the blog’s Hall of Fame appreciation series, and how to access it

The Prometheus Blog’s ongoing Appreciation series has reached a milestone -after two productive years of regularly published review-essays exploring and explaining the libertarian and anti-authoritarian themes of past Prometheus winners.

With the recent publication of an appreciative review-essay about the 2021 winner (F. Paul Wilson’s short story “Lipidleggin’), the appreciation series for the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction is now complete – and conveniently accessible via links from our Prometheus Awards page.

Or at least it’s now as up-to-date as possible – until next year’s winner is announced.

Continue reading A Prometheus milestone: a progress report on completion of the blog’s Hall of Fame appreciation series, and how to access it