How did Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress give leading libertarian thinker David Friedman the radical idea that society can develop just laws and functional legal systems without government?
What life events, travels, famous scientists and space projects helped shape the late Poul Anderson’s 1983 novel Orion Shall Rise, the 2025 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner?
How did the late Michael Flynn’s childhood lead him to become an award-winning science fiction writer?
Why does Flynn’s CAEZIK SF & Fantasy publisher view him as one of the most underestimated sf writers of his generation?
What Prometheus-winning sf/fantasy authors rank high among Friedman’s favorites – and why?
To find out, watch the recorded YouTube video of the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony:
Sadly, this was the first Prometheus ceremony in which both winning novelists were recognized posthumously.
Yet, that also made possible some of the most eloquent, personal, revealing, poignant (and occasionally amusing) tributes by the family members who loved them.
To whet your appetite to watch the entire 45-minute video, which includes a fascinating Q&A afterwards with Friedman, here are a few representative excerpts from the recorded Aug. 30, 2025 ceremony:
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy publisher Shahid Mahmud on Michael Flynn:
“I am not saying this because I published him: Michael was one of my favorite authors. I think he was one of the most underrated authors in the genre, in terms of how well he was known among the readers. I think his work holds up to some of the best science fiction I’ve ever read.
But let me warn you about something. He loved killing characters.
If you remember his novel The Wreck of the River of Stars, nearly everybody dies. You get invested in his characters, because he wrote good characters, and then he kills them almost all off.
And this is an absolutely true story: I once asked him to write a number of novellas for me for a collection. And I told him, ‘please, please, Michael, just don’t kill off your characters.’
Soon enough, I got a message from him: ‘Shahid, I have to kill off the baby.’
I said: ‘No, no, Michael, you can’t kill the baby! You can’t kill off babies in stories. People don’t like it.’
But he insists. And then he sends me the story…. and he had to kill off the baby.
So rest in peace, Michael, and thank you for all the joy – and the sadness, with his onus for killing off those characters.”
David D. Friedman’s speech on libertarian science fiction:
“Heinlein’s book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a major influence on my views. 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. Right and wrong are not made by act of Congress.
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.
A theorem is refuted by a single counter example – in this case, a fictional counterexample, but one that appeared to me to be internally consistent.
If a stateless legal order was not impossible, it was worth trying to imagine what such a thing could be like in something closer to the real world. That was the origin of the model of anarcho-capitalism, a stateless legal order in my first book (The Machinery of Freedom.)”
Astrid Anderson Bear on her father Poul Anderson and his novel Orion Shall Rise:
“My parents went to Cape Kennedy many times to watch rocket launches, from Apollo in the 1970s and on to some shuttle launches in the 1980s as well. Friendships with rocket scientists, physicists, and scientists of all stripes are all in the mix that went into this book.
And of course Orion, the nuclear pulse powered spaceship that — spoiler alert — does rise as the novel concludes, is closely modeled after the designs of Project Orion from the late 1950s. I’m not positive that my dad and Freeman Dyson ever met, but it is likely, and Dyson is called out in the text of the book.
At the end of Orion Shall Rise, the pleas for nuclear power to be used solely in peaceful ways, especially for space flight, are set against the pervasive desires of humans to seek power and domination over each other.
Will we evolve our thinking enough to be able to do this? We are left to wonder and hope.”
Kevin Flynn on Michael Flynn:
* “It sounds odd to say but I am so happy for Michael even though he’s left us, because he lived exactly the life he wanted to live. From his youngest days, he wanted to be a science fiction author, in collaboration with his Irish twin brother Dennis.
Michael and Dennis grew up in the mid-50s at a time when kids enjoyed significantly more freedom than kids seem even to want these days. They don’t know what they’re missing.
With the neighborhood gang they named The Adventure Club, complete with their self-designed “AC” flag, they explored the nearby woods and hillsides, roasting crabapples by a mountain spring, making up scary stories and coming home only when the lightning bugs appeared. You couldn’t call them latchkey kids because in those days, no one locked their doors.”
* “Michael explored sociological themes while constructing a fantasy science, such as the cliological masters controlling world events behind the scenes in his first novel, In the Country of the Blind, for which he won his first Prometheus Award in 1991.
He introduced dizzying arrays of personalities in order to explore how different people in different ages and different circumstances might respond to adversity and challenges.
Reading his books, I sometimes had no idea how he could keep them all in a straight line through the story.
One of my two true-crime books had 27 essential characters for readers to follow. Michael could introduce more characters in just his first chapter. In fact, in In the Country of the Blind, my youngest brother Patrick and I ARE among the characters.”
Michael Grossberg on Flynn’s first Prometheus Award:
“When Flynn won his first award in 1991 for In the Country of the Blind, novelist Bob Shea (co-author of the satirical Illuminatus! trilogy, an early Prometheus Hall of Fame winner) presented the award to him at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago.
Shea observed that “Flynn’s novel dealt with a conflict between free will and historical determinism.”
In his acceptance speech, Flynn said he was glad to finally learn what the novel was about.”
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 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.
