The Dragon Awards, presented annually at Dragon Con in Atlanta, have announced their 2024 finals – and one of this year’s Prometheus Best Novel finalists is among them.
Plus, among its finalist competitors is an author and her series previously recognized as a Prometheus Best Novel finalist.
So congratulations to Devon Eriksen and Martha Wells!
ERIKSEN’S THEFT OF FIRE
Devon Eriksen’s Theft of Fire is one of seven 2024 Dragon Award finalists in the highly competitive and top category of Best Science Fiction Novel.
Taking place mostly on an asteroid-mining ship diverted to reach what may be hidden alien technology, Eriksen’s chamber-sized space opera is set within an anarchocapitalist-style frontier where industrialization and colonization have spread throughout the solar system.
Both formal and informal contracts are central here, with free-market innovations and alien artifacts unleashing vast wealth and progress as independent Belters conflict with enforcers hired by corporate elites.
Conflicts (and sexual tensions) develop between the ship’s stubborn captain (a resourceful loner operating as an occasional pirate) and the robot-protected, super-smart, pint-sized SpaceX heiress who has taken over his ship and locked him out of its computer controls.
Notable for the originality and plausibility of Leela, an A.I. character, the novel offers a complex portrait of the pros and cons of its free-wheeling future while offering insights into agency, ethics, free will, contracts, property rights and other human rights.
Read the Prometheus Blog review by Eric S. Raymond and Michael Grossberg of Theft of Fire.
WELLS’ SYSTEM COLLAPSE
Also recognized as a finalist is Martha Wells’ System Collapse, the latest novel in her Murderbot series.
Wells also has been recognized in the Prometheus Awards for her bestselling series about a quirky self-aware robot.
The Murderbot Diaries – including All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy – were combined into one nomination and selected by judges as a 2019 Prometheus Best Novel finalist.
In addition, Well’s Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel was nominated in 2021 in the Prometheus Awards’ Best Novel category.
Her Murderbot series charts the emergence of humanity, empathy, self-awareness and free will in an android, whose origins are partly biological and partly cybernetic.
The android, who guiltily dubs themself “Murderbot” because of their past acts of violence while enslaved, fights for their independence but also is motivated to save lives by growing awareness of the value of human life and human rights in an interstellar future of social cooperation through free markets driven by contracts, insurance-bond penalties, and competing corporations.
In System Collapse, which follows the events in Network Effect, Murderbot navigates to protect a newly-colonized planet in peril while struggling to fix themselves when they discover they’re not running within normal operational parameters.
ABOUT THE DRAGON AWARDS AND DRAGON CON
First presented in 2016 on the 30th anniversary of Dragon Con, the Dragon Awards recognize “excellence in all things Science Fiction and Fantasy.”
Under the rules, each voter can nominate one work in every category.
Generally, more sf/fantasy fans vote on Dragon Awards than vote on the Hugos or any other sf/fantasy or literary award, with more than 11,000 voters casting a ballot annually by 2018.
That reflects the vast popularity of Dragon Con, which typically attracts an unprecedented sf/fantasy convention crowd, which reached more than 85,000 people in 2019, just before the COVID pandemic.
Since the pandemic, attendance at Dragon Con has been rising again, from 42,000 people in 2021 and 65,000 people in 2022 to more than 70,000 people in 2023.
Expect a further rise in attendance at this year’s Dragon Con, scheduled at five hotels in downtown Atlanta with thousands of hours of programming for fans of SF, fantasy, comic books, movies, gaming and other aspects of fan culture.
The 38th annual Dragon Con, a four-day event, is scheduled to run from Thursday Aug. 29 through Monday Sept. 2, 2024 at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta and other downtown hotels.
Among the authors who will speak and sign autographs as Dragon Con guests of honor: Kevin J. Anderson, Nancy Kress (a 1994 Prometheus Best Novel finalist for Beggars in Spain), Jody Lynn Nye, Robert J. Sawyer, John Scalzi (a Prometheus Best Novel nominee), Michael Stackpole, S.M. Stirling (a 1991 Prometheus Best Novel finalist for Under the Yoke, David Weber (a five-time Prometheus Best Novel nominee) and Timothy Zahn.
Among the several hundred other speakers, guests, comics creators, writers, TV/film screenwriters and artists, selected somewhat subjectively as personal favorites: Monty Python actor-comedian John Cleese, Serenity actor Nathan Fillion and Star Trek actors Jonathan Frakes, Michelle Hurd, John de Lancie, Gates McFadden, Anson Mount and Brent Spiner. Plus actors from most major recent sf/fantasy films and TV series, too many to mention.
For more information, visit dragoncon.org
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.
Technically, Leela is not an AI as that expression is usually understood: that is, she’s not a data structure that created itself by going through a learning process while interacting with data, people, or the physical world. Rather, she’s a data structure that digitally copies the mind of a human being; that is, she’s a recording of a natural intelligence in a digital medium. That has a lot to do with her distinctive personality.