Freshly exploring utopian and dystopian themes, Salt contrasts an anarchist community and its statist neighbor on a harsh desert planet.
Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Adam Roberts’ science fiction novel illuminates how customs, attitudes and ideologies on both sides spark mutual misunderstandings and accelerating conflicts.
A finalist for the next Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction, Robert’s cautionary tale invites us to question our deepest assumptions about freedom.
E.M. Forster isn’t the only Prometheus-recognized author on New Scientist’s intriguing list of the 26 best science fiction/fantasy stories of all time.
Although Forster’s “The Machine Stop” is the only story on the list specifically inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, as described in a recent Prometheus blog post, several other enduring authors have stories on the magazine’s list – just not the ones our award has recognized.
Among those writers: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut.
It’s interesting to see which of their stories are recognized by the magazine, and why.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Day Before the Revolution has been highlighted and recommended by Reactor Magazine among “five SF stories in which hope survives.”
The story, available in the Le Guin short-story collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, should be of interested to LFS members and other freedom-loving SF/fantasy fans because it’s considered a sequel to Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, an early Prometheus Hall of Fame winner.
“Science fiction has the power to remind us that hope is valuable, and necessary,” James Davis Nicoll wrote in the Reactor column.
That insight, and sentiment, rings true to Prometheus Awards voters and fans. After all, our award in part aims to recognize worthy works of speculative fiction that in many cases do remind us that even amid troubled times and authoritarian societies, better and freer futures remain possible.
Many bestsellers or award-winning books or plays or movies or record albums tend to fade over the years, but a few manage to pass the test of time.
In that latter category is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, inducted in 1993 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
Recently honored on its 50th anniversary with a Harper’s 50th Anniversary Edition, Le Guin’s novel contrasts two alleged utopian worlds.
One human-settled planet is anarchist (but without property rights and with mob rule and group think); the other is mostly capitalist (but with recurrent wars and extremes of wealth and poverty.)
Several Prometheus-recognized authors are included on New Scientist’s intriguing list of the 26 best science fiction/fantasy stories of all time.
E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” is the only story on the magazine’s list previously inducted into the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Hall of Fame. Yet, several other enduring and Prometheus-winning authors have classic stories on the magazine’s list – just not the ones our award has recognized.
Among them: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut.
It’s interesting to see which of their stories are recognized by the magazine, and why.
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.
