Tag: series

The best of the blog: Highlights of 2025, from two probing series to an unusually moving and stimulating 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony

By Michael Grossberg

As we look back at what was published on the Prometheus Blog over the past year, it’s hard to pick the very best articles and reports to highlight.

Among our more sustained efforts, we launched an awards-standards series, with essays by William Stoddard and Eric Raymond exploring the criteria for Prometheus nominations, and devoted an 11-part series to analyzing the pros and cons of the increasing popularity of sequels in pop culture and in our awards.

Novelist Michael Flynn at an sf convention several decades ago (File photo)

Yet in this final of three “Best of the Blog” posts highlighting some of our best work of 2025, reporting on our 45th awards ceremony may rank highest.

For the first time in the history of the Prometheus Awards, the Best Novel winner was recognized posthumously. While we continue to mourn the passing of Michael Flynn, who died in 2023 at 75, this year’s well-deserved award for his final novel In the Belly of the Whale paved the way for one of our most emotional and inspirational acceptance speeches.

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Calling all Murderbot fans: Apple TV+ to stream Martha Wells’ series

Talk about a killer show!

Murderbot, Martha Wells’ popular book series about the diaries of a self-aware robot struggling to overcome his programming to kill, will be adapted into a 10-episode science-fiction drama.

Actor Alexandr Skarsgard (Creative Commons license)

Apple TV+ recently announced plans stream the series, which will star Emmy-winning actor Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood, Battleship, Succession, The Legend of Tarzan, The Northman, The Stand), who also will serve as executive producer.

The news should spark wide interest from sf/fantasy fans, since Well’s bestselling Murderbot Diary books have won both Hugo and Nebula awards – and from LFS members and libertarian futurists, since several books in the series have been nominated for the Prometheus Award.

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“A beacon of libertarian freedom” – Barry Longyear’s acceptance speech for The Hook, the 2021 Prometheus winner for Best Novel

What is freedom?
How can we achieve it?
How can we defend it?

Veteran sf novelist Barry B. Longyear, winner of the 2021 Prometheus Award for Best Novel, discussed those questions in his acceptance speech, which he delivered Aug. 21 during the Libertarian Futurist Society’s online 2021 Prometheus Awards ceremony.

Here is the transcript of Longyear’s speech, which discusses his 2021 winner, The Hook, Book Five of The War Whisperer:

By Barry B. Longyear

On behalf of The Hook, Book 5 of The War Whisperer, I thank the members of the Libertarian Futurist Society for their Prometheus Award.

The seven volumes of The War Whisperer are, essentially, a fictionalized think-and-do on human freedom: What it is, how it works, how to achieve it, and how to defend it.

The first four volumes, through the eyes of Jerome Track, show what the problems are as well as presenting and absorbing the elements of the solution.

In Book 5: The Hook, is at last that beacon of libertarian freedom and one possible answer to the charge that has, up until now, always led the libertarian argument down paths of compromise or fantasy: How does a society that forbids the initiation of coercive force defend itself against military invasion?

That is the libertarian hook.

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