This year’s five Prometheus Best Novel finalists plausibly imagine everything from dystopian Earth scenarios sparked by authoritarian true-believer cults to more positive but challenging interstellar futures for humanity.
Works published in 2024 by C.J. Cherryh & Jane S. Fancher, Michael Flynn, Danny King, Wil McCarthy and Lionel Shriver will be competing for the 45th Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
First presented in 1979, the Prometheus Awards have recognized hundreds of authors and a dizzying variety of works. This year’s slate of finalists embrace the old and the new.
Of these authors, British writer Danny King is new to our award, being recognized for the first time as a Best Novel finalist.
Lionel Shriver, a Portugal-based American writer who’s lived in Nairobi, Bangkok, Belfast and London, is being recognized for the third time as a Best Novel finalist.
Wil McCarthy, and writing partners Cherryh and Fancher, each previously won a Prometheus Award, while Flynn (1947-2023) is a two-time previous Best Novel winner being recognized posthumously for what may be his last work.
In brief, here are this year’s Best Novel finalists, in alphabetical order by author:
* Alliance Unbound, by C.J Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW)
* In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy)
* Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press)
* Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books)
* Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers)
Libertarian Futurist Society members will be reading and considering this year’s Prometheus Awards finalists over the next few months before voting to select winners in the two annual categories for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (the Prometheus Hall of Fame.)
To whether LFS members’ appetite to read the contenders, here are capsule descriptions of all five Best Novel finalists, listed in alphabetical order by author:
* Alliance Unbound, by C.J Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW) — Set within Cherryh’s Alliance-Union future history series, Book 2 of The Hinder Stars projected trilogy and the direct sequel to Alliance Rising, the 2020 Prometheus Best Novel winner, this interstellar science fiction saga dramatizes how an evolving alliance of free traders strives to preserve its independence, freedom and survival amid machinations from an intrusive Earth.
Starting out on the ship “Finity’s End,” en route to Pell Station, the ongoing drama is bolstered by shipboard challenges, military maneuvers, a war-torn romance, and a mystery that unfolds as observant crew notice Earth-based goods that shouldn’t have reached a distant station. Merchanters must strategize amid uncertainties in the human colonies about the game-changing possibility of new jump points opening up a faster-than-light route from Earth.
Perhaps most notable with regard to Prometheus themes, Cherryh and Fancher continue to dramatize how the ethics and benefits of voluntary cooperation and free thought advance merchanter culture, even amid station tensions and competing interests. Focusing more on the personal than the political, the novel highlights both the daily challenges of freer societies and the authoritarian and dysfunctional tendencies within bureaucracies, military commands and other coercive systems.
* In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy) — The posthumous and last novel by two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn (In the Country of the Blind, Fallen Angels) explores the complex lives, work, challenges and conflicts of 40,000 human colonists aboard a large asteroid ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti.
With its intricate world-building, believable characters in conflict and profound grasp of human nature, the epic social novel freshens the SF subgenre of the multi-generational colony ship while raising deeper questions about the enormous difficulties of our species expanding beyond our solar system.
Beyond the usual technological and interpersonal issues of maintenance and survival that naturally arise, the colonists suffer from a dysfunctional bureaucracy, crew class divisions, and a traditional shipboard command structure that calcifies into an authoritarian hereditary aristocracy with enforced eugenics and a loss of focus on the mission goal.
Without sustaining the culture of liberty, self-reliance and voluntary cooperation that helped lift Earth civilization to unprecedented levels of knowledge and prosperity, humanity may be doomed even if such ships reach their distant destination. The enduring theme of Flynn’s ambitious, multi-focused saga of power, decay and revolution: The price of freedom (and survival) is eternal vigilance.
* Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press) — The gripping SF-enhanced cautionary fable is framed as a brave new utopia embracing love, inclusion and social justice, but reveals progressive politics warped into a totalitarian pseudo-religion in the name of women and minorities. Anyone can be cancelled for suspect behavior or old-fashioned attitudes in such personal areas as sex, food, manners and language.
With its subtitle referencing H.G. Well’s 1933 novel foretelling a “history of the future,” King’s disturbing but satirical novel feels similarly prescient in extrapolating today’s illiberal sociopolitical trends. Cracks appear in the warped facade as hidden realities of New Britannia are revealed, with the omnipresent State echoing the oppressive attitudes of other dystopias in which “Everything not compulsory is forbidden.”
King is especially good at exploring the fraught intersections of the political and the personal in his story focusing on the good intentions, growing doubts and eventual comeuppance of a true-believing woman secretly working as an auditor for a leading cancellation company.
Overall, King offers an urgent warning about what might happen if government paternalism, radical egalitarianism, progressivist collectivism, identity politics and moral self-righteousness are taken to even more authoritarian extremes.
* Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books) — This inventive, far-flung first-contact story revolves around a wealthy entrepreneur using private enterprise to construct a star ship and take 100 humans, including himself, to meet non-corporeal aliens far from our sun. Each human, with the help of psychedelic drugs, interprets their contact in drastically different ways, sparking further mysteries and philosophical questions.
Like Rich Man’s Sky, McCarthy’s 2022 Best Novel winner, this sequel shows how cooperation through free markets can be successful in carrying out various projects, such as a floating Venus station and perhaps the most expensive and important scientific exploration/discovery in history.
The story takes place within the context of an ongoing space race sparked by four Earth billionaires pushing to expand humanity and space industry to new frontiers beyond our solar system. Perhaps most relevant to Prometheus themes are McCarthy’s insightful contrasts between two types of “power” – voluntary socioeconomic cooperation in business versus coercive State authority.
Despite frequent disparagement by many on Earth of the “four Horsemen,” McCarthy depicts three as quite admirable, pursuing innovations not only to realize their dreams but humanity’s future.
* Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers) — The cautionary fable takes place in an alternate-history recent America taken over by the Mental Parity movement, which denies any variability in intelligence or talent and condemns any recognition of IQ differences as bigoted discrimination.
The psychological and social drama centers on how the movement affects a radically individualist and recalcitrant teacher, her three children, husband and lifelong friendship with a high-status media star.
As the movement’s virtue-signaling foot soldiers impose the delusionary new orthodoxy, growing pressures to conform to the increasingly authoritarian movement warp language and culture. The progressive take-over of academia, media, education, medicine, and government destroys reputations, careers, families and friendships.
Darkly satirical but also chillingly poignant, Mania holds up a cracked mirror to today’s culture wars around race, gender and identity politics, where facts and objective reality are denied.
A previous two-time Best Novel finalist for The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 and Should We Stay Or Should We Go, Shriver is no stranger to pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Here she illuminates the perennial temptations of the morally self-righteous to impose their visions on others, no matter the devastating cost.
THE PROMETHEUS PRIZE AND CEREMONY
The Best Novel winner will receive an engraved plaque with a one-ounce gold coin. An online Prometheus awards ceremony, open to the public, is tentatively planned for mid-August on a date to be announced, once the winners are known for both annual categories, including the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
OTHER BEST NOVEL NOMINEES
Eleven 2024 novels were nominated by LFS members for this year’s award. Other Best Novel nominees, listed in alphabetical order by author: Time: A Novel, by Peter Grose (Merriam Publishing); Shadow of the Smoking Mountain, by Howard Andrew Jones (Baen Books); Machine Vendetta, by Alastair Reynolds (Orbit Books); The Glass Box, by J. Michael Straczynski (Blackstone Publishing); Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit Books); and The Last Murder At the End of the World, by Stuart Turton (Sourcebooks Landmark).
HOW THE AWARDS PROCESS WORKS
All LFS members have the right to nominate eligible works for all categories of the Prometheus Awards, while publishers and authors are welcome to submit potentially eligible works for consideration using the guidelines linked from the LFS website’s main page.
A 12-person judging committee, drawn from the membership and chaired by LFS co-founder Michael Grossberg, selects the Prometheus Award finalists for Best Novel from members’ nominations. Following the selection of finalists, all LFS upper-level members (Benefactors, Sponsors and Full Members) have the right to vote on the Best Novel finalist slate to choose the annual winner.
THE HISTORY AND FOCUS OF THE AWARD
The Prometheus Award, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), was established and first presented in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently given in sf. The Prometheus Hall of Fame category for Best Classic Fiction, launched in 1983, is presented annually with the Best Novel category.
The Prometheus Awards recognize outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy that dramatize the perennial conflict between Liberty and Power, favor voluntarism and cooperation over institutionalized coercion, expose the abuses and excesses of coercive government, and/or critique or satirize authoritarian systems, ideologies and assumptions.
Above all, the Prometheus Awards strive to recognize speculative fiction that champions individual rights, based on the moral/legal principle of non-aggression, as the ethical and practical foundation for peace, prosperity, progress, justice, tolerance, mutual respect, civility and civilization itself.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS:
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future.
In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.
