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.
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.
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF MICHAEL FLYNN
Michael’s brother Kevin, himself a former journalist and non-fiction author, was eloquent, poignant, and often amusing in paying tribute to the three-time Prometheus Award-winner.
In his acceptance speech, Kevin shared family stories about Michael’s childhood, coming of age and illustrious career. Revelatory in its biographical details, the speech illuminated a great deal that was previously unknown to Flynn’s fans about his philosophy, character and approach to science fiction.
“You know well of Michael’s passion for learning, for liberty, for liberation of the mind and pushing back on authority in pursuit of freedom of thought and expression,” Kevin said.
But it’s what we didn’t know that made his speech so fascinating.
Some tidbits from Kevin’s speech:
“His first work… was to be published in a startup magazine… But the magazine folded before the short story could be published. Many years later Michael told an interviewer, ‘My brothers, ever willing to offer encouragement, suggested the magazine folded because they had been reduced to the desperation of buying my story.’ “Slan Libh” eventually was Michael’s first published short story, in Analog in 1984, his first steps on a brilliant career.
“When his planned Firestar trilogy led to a fourth novel, Falling Stars, I kidded Michael that he didn’t quite nail the definition of trilogy.”
“In his blog The TOF Spot,… Michael frequently used his libertarian leanings like a matador’s muleta, and he would enjoy the engagement no matter which ox – or bull – was gored. Daughter Sara remarked that her father would argue positions in which he had no stake, just for the intellectual exercise. Some people would find that upsetting but in fact he was simply trying to learn more. He didn’t have a malicious bone in his body.”
THE IDEAS OF DAVID FRIEDMAN
Meanwhile, our guest awards presenter this year was especially impressive and stimulating.
David D. Friedman is a leading libertarian theorist (The Machinery of Freedom), economist (Price Theory: An Intermediate Text) and law-and-economics professor (Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters), and Prometheus-nominated sf/fantasy novelist (Harald, Salamander, Brothers).
Friedman presented the Hall of Fame category. His speech discusses the works of Poul Anderson (whose novel Orion Shall Rise was inducted this year into the Prometheus Hall of Fame), Robert Heinlein and Vernor Vinge.
In the process, David revealed how science fiction influenced his thinking – most notably, in the development of his more radical anarchy-capitalist views.
“As some of you may know, Vernor’s story “The Ungoverned” (inducted in 1994 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame) is about a stateless society, modeled on my ideas, being invaded by an adjacent state,” Friedman said.
“Seeing that society through the eyes of a novelist rather than an economist showed me things about it that would not have occurred to me… What it might feel like to live in it, how the way its inhabitants would look at the world and differ, would not have occurred to me without that.”
Friedman’s speech, posted on the blog in a video and in text, was fascinating enough. But in the Q&A session at the end of the ceremony, Friedman commented on quite a few of his favorite science fiction writers, explaining what he admired of their work (and in a few cases, what he doesn’t.)
Friedman’s post-ceremony remarks were so interesting, amounting in some cases to mini-reviews, that we decided to post a series of later blogs focusing on different writers.
One post was devoted to Friedman’s admiring view of the novels of frequent Best Novel finalist Karl K. Gallagher (the Torchship trilogy, and the ongoing Fall of the Censor series.)
Another Friedman post was devoted to C.J. Cherryh, co-writer with her partner Jane S. Fancher of Alliance Rising, the 2020 Best Novel winner. It’s the first novel in their Hinder Stars trilogy, which includes Alliance Unbound, a 2025 Best Novel finalist.
Another summed up Friedman’s comments on Lois McMaster Bujold, L. Neil Smith, J. Neil Schulman, Robert Heinlein and other Prometheus-winning writers.
Reading Heinlein’s Hugo- and Prometheus-winning novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress fundamentally changed Friedman’s view of what might be possible in a fully free society.
“Before I read it, my view was that the free market, voluntary exchange, was the right way to produce things, but that it required a legal framework produced and enforced outside the market – a government. That view was in tension with my moral intuitions, which found no basis for taxes, government authority, no obligation to obey the law merely because it was the law,” Friedman said.
“Heinlein’s book was set in a society where the legal order was endogenous – produced from within the society. So far as I could tell, it was an internally consistent picture. If the society he described existed, there was no reason why it could not have functioned as he described. If that society could function as described, it could not be true, as I had believed and thought I could prove, that all societies required a legal framework produced by government,” he concluded.
For further reading
Regarding Friedman’s own sf/fantasy novels, read our March 2025 post “David Friedman: Why isn’t one of the leading libertarian theorists better known as a fantasy novelist?”
Meanwhile, check out our post about how Friedman analyzes and views TANSTAAFL, a popular libertarian acronym popularized by Heinlein.
ABOUT THE LFS AND THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
* 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 international 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 a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in 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. This page 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 the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
