By Michael Grossberg
Science fiction novelist Travis Corcoran is gearing up to publish a new novel in his Prometheus-winning Aristillus series.
Corcoran has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Aristillus: Escape From Io, his first new Aristillus novel in almost ten years.
“The manuscript is complete,” Corcoran said.
Travis Corcoran, a guest speaker at the 46th Prometheus Awards ceremony, was introduced by LFS President William H. Stoddard with these words:
“The Best Novel and Hall of Fame awards are given annually. But the LFS also gives Special Awards, not every year, but when there’s a deserving recipient. A few years ago, we established the category of Special Awards for Young Adult Fiction. This year, for the first time, we’re giving such an award.
“To present this award, we have invited Travis Corcoran to speak. Corcoran received our Best Novel award in 2018 and 2019 for the two volumes of his Aristillus series, The Powers of the Earth and Causes of Separation; this year he has published a new novel, Red State Mars. He currently serves as a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. We look forward to hearing what he has to say about young adult fiction and about this year’s honoree.”
There’s a strange thing about systems – they have state, and often state comes in two or more types, which trade off against each other.
Pendulums have both kinetic energy and potential energy. When a pendulum is dead still, it’s at its highest altitude, and when it’s moving rapidly, it’s at its lowest. Social phenomena can also have state that’s traded back and forth – hobbies and subcultures often reach their absolute peak at exactly the point when growth has fallen to zero. …but there’s no law of conservation of energy in subcultures – a hobby can lose both size and energy at the same time!
Ham radio, bowling leagues – many hobbies have suffered from losing both “altitude” and “speed” at the same time. Deadly in an airplane as a private pilot, and equally deadly to a subculture. …deadly in a subculture like science fiction, generally, or libertarian science fiction, more specifically.
By Michael Grossberg
ONE Special Prometheus Award — the first for Young Adult Fiction.
TWO exciting guest speakers — leading libertarian thinker Ilya Somin, who will give the keynote speech on libertarian currents in SF/fantasy; and two-time Prometheus Best Novel winner Travis Corcoran (The Powers of the Earth, Causes of Separation), who will discuss the vital importance of Young Adult Fiction to encourage and inspire new generations of readers.
THREE Prometheus Awards — more than the usual annual two for Best Novel and the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
By the numbers alone, this Sunday’s 46th Prometheus Awards ceremony will be pretty special – with more awards and far more interesting and inspiring speakers (10) than is typical at our annual awards ceremonies.
You can watch the roughly hourlong awards show, which is open to the public, by using this Zoom link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87824388418?pwd=CsoznF4wtlLNTYvEotlIpVJkCoGb9I.1
Please log in at 1 p.m. Sunday Aug. 16 Eastern time.
By Michael Grossberg
The 46th Prometheus Awards ceremony is shaping up to be one of the most interesting, thought-provoking and exciting in years.
Ten speakers from around the world have been lined up for the roughly hourlong awards show, which will present the two annual categories for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (the Prometheus Hall of Fame) plus an occasional Special Award – the first Prometheus Award for Young Adult Fiction.
Here is the Zoom link to watch the awards live:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87824388418?pwd=CsoznF4wtlLNTYvEotlIpVJkCoGb9I.1
All Libertarian Futurist Society members, other SF/fantasy fans and the general public are invited to watch the live Zoom event, which will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific time (1 p.m. Eastern time) on Sunday Aug. 16, 2026.
So who are the 10 presenters, winners and other speakers?
By Michael Grossberg
Travis Corcoran, a two-time Prometheus-winning novelist, will present the first Special Prometheus Award for Young Adult Fiction.
Corcoran was invited to speak because he’s a passionate believer in encouraging younger generations to read – and convinced that writing good young-adult SF/fantasy can help young readers better envision more positive futures – including a future of freedom.
Corcoran will discuss the vital importance of young-adult fiction in his speech presenting that occasional category at the 46th Prometheus Awards. The roughly hourlong ceremony, open to the public via Zoom and with Ilya Somin as the keynote speaker, is set to start at 1 p.m. (Eastern time) Sunday Aug. 16.
Corcoran has praised YA fiction for its potential to offer positive portraits of young people as capable, rational and independent-minded individuals. Such characters can be admirable role models for the young, in Corcoran’s view, because they tend to be better suited for living in, and sustaining, the dynamic live-and-let-live interactions of free societies.
Continue reading Prometheus-winning novelist Travis Corcoran to present first Special Award for Young Adult Fiction at the Aug. 16 ceremony
By Michael Grossberg
Which Prometheus Award winners would you like to see on screen someday?
So far, 17 Prometheus Award-winners have been adapted with varying degrees of success to the large or small screen or have been recognized as original movies – including George Orwell’s Animal Farm, most recently adapted for the third time into a 2026 animated film.
When I asked my fellow Prometheus Best Novel judges which other winning works they most yearn to see made into a movie or TV series, Lowell Jacobsen chose two related novels by the same author: Travis Corcoran.
Ilya Somin will be the guest presenter and keynote speaker at the Libertarian Futurist Society’s 2026 Prometheus Awards ceremony.
A professor of Law at George Mason University and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, a leading libertarian think tank, Somin has written several books reflecting his research and expertise on constitutional law, property law, democratic theory, federalism, and migration rights.
Just as relevant to our upcoming August 2026 awards ceremony – which will be hosted on Zoom and open to the public – Somin is a long-time fan of science fiction and fantasy – which he plans to focus on in his speech presenting the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
By Michael Grossberg
Two-time Prometheus Awards-winning author Travis Corcoran, a passionate believer in encouraging younger generations to read, is writing several Young Adult novels that promise to be published in 2026.
Two will be part of Corcoran’s Aristillus series, set in our solar system’s future and launched with his two Prometheus-winning novels The Powers of the Earth and Causes of Separation.
Tentatively set for publication this fall by Morlock Publishing, Corcoran’s two Aristillus YA novels are The Aristillus Engineering Club and the Journey to the Center of Mars and The Aristillus Engineering Club Around Mars in 80 Sols.
By Michael Grossberg
This year should be a notable one for author Travis Corcoran.
The two-time Prometheus-winning author, who won for Best Novel in 2018 for The Powers of the Earth and again in 2019 for its sequel Causes of Separation, hasn’t published a major work of fiction in several years.
But that’s about to change.
One of the first novels published by Ark Press, a new SF publisher, will be Corcoran’s Red State Mars.
Scheduled for publication May 29, 2026, Red State Mars is billed as “a sweeping epic of Mars’s fight for freedom—an unforgettable saga of war, family, and civilization on the red frontier.”
By Michael Grossberg
Once again, the Prometheus Blog has posted a record annual number of articles, reviews, essays, trend pieces, interviews, author updates, progress reports and awards news. For the eighth consecutive year since the blog replaced our former printed quarterly newsletter in 2017, the Libertarian Futurist Society has increased the number of articles on our blog – a long-term goal.
By the last day of 2025, we anticipate having posted 120 articles, many quite substantive. That’s roughly double the number we posted in 2021 – raising the visibility of the Prometheus Awards, educating the public about libertarian sf/fantasy and enriching discussions and debate among LFS members about the relative merits of Prometheus Award nominees and finalists, and enhancing our awards process as we choose the winners each year. But which articles ranked among the most notable of the year?
Sadly, some of the most timely and poignant stories we wrote in 2025 were obits – marking the passing of several notable writers who demonstrated a passionate love of liberty – including Tom Stoppard, Barry Longyear, Howard Andrew Jones and Leslie Fish.
Continue reading Best of the blog: A record year for posts, but also a sad one, in memoriam
