As 2025 gets underway, the Libertarian Futurist Society has a lot of remember and much to celebrate.
Our non-profit international association of liberty-loving sf/fantasy fans is the midst of our annual cycle nominating eligible works and selecting finalists for the Prometheus Awards, now entering their 46th year and with a solid track record of 50 years within sight.
Reason magazine’s Bob Poole and three-time Prometheus winner Victor Koman added to the luster of our annual Prometheus Awards ceremony, which included an eloquent acceptance speech by two-time Prometheus winner Daniel Suarez, who won his second prize for Best Novel for Critical Mass.
The LFS continued to receive excellent media coverage about our annual Prometheus Award finalists and winners in our two annual categories for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (the Prometheus Hall of Fame) – especially from the SF/fantasy field’s two leading trade publications, Locus and File 770.
With an attractive new logo, a new series of outreach display ads to reach out to potential new members, and other outreach efforts, the LFS and the Prometheus Awards continue to raise our visibility and enhance our influence.
As highlighted in the past week or two here on the blog, the Prometheus Blog improved both the frequency, timeliness and depth of posts, including the writing of many more more full-length reviews of Prometheus Award nominees, finalists and winners.
PRAISE FOR OUR REVIEWS
Our reviews are having an impact, too, if the authors’ own responses are any guide.

Howard Andrew Jones, a Best Novel finalist for his epic fantasy Lord of a Shattered Land, called our review “thoughtful, articulate and well-considered” as well as “one of my very favorites.”
Gordon Hanka, a Best Novel finalist for God’s Girlfriend (under the pseudonym Dr. Insensitive Jerk), responded to our blog review “with the joy of somebody finally noticing and understanding what I’d done…

“It’s so gratifying to see smart people actually get it. People in my family are asking if I coached you on how to interpret the book,” Hanka wrote.
Sandra Newman, nominated for Julia, her Orwell-estate-authorized “retelling of 1984, complimented the blog review as “lovely and generous.”

Daniel Suarez, after his novel Critical Mass was selected as a Best Novel finalist and was reviewed on the blog (before winning the 2024 award), had this to say after reading the extended review:
“The depth of your review is gratifying — particularly for ancillary but important characters such as Ramon. Very few notice how integral these pieces are to the whole — so thank you for that.”
And that’s far from all the progress made within the past year.
As we look ahead to a new year of the Prometheus Awards and related LFS activities, we want to thank all the LFS members and officers, Prometheus judges, authors, publishers and publicists who volunteered their time and energy to cooperate with our awards process and help sustain one of the oldest continuing awards within the SF/fantasy field after the Hugos and Nebulas.
Happy new year – and let’s hope 2025 will open possibilities for a better and freer world.
Note: For some of the best reviews, essays, trend pieces and articles of 2024 on the Prometheus Blog, check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of our end-of-year Best of the Blog series.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS:
* 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.
* 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.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies (including the recent 2023 ceremony with inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freer and Sarah Hoyt), Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.
* 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 believe that culture matters. We understand that the arts and literature can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future – and in some ways can be even more 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.
Through recognizing the literature of liberty and the many different but complementary visions of a free future via the Prometheus Awards, the LFS hopes to help spread ideas and ethical principles that help humanity overcome tyranny, end slavery, reduce the threat of war, repeal or constrain other abuses of coercive power and achieve universal liberty, respect for human rights and a better world (perhaps ultimately, worlds) for all.