When Libertarian Futurist Society members vote to select annual winners from the slate of Prometheus Awards finalists for Best Novel or the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction, that really means something.
That’s because it’s the highest level of recognition possible by the LFS as a whole – and those two awards come with an engraved plaque and a gold coin prize.
Similarly, the annual slates of (typically four or five) finalists mean a lot, too. Achieving Prometheus finalist status can bring a worthy work or an emerging author to wider attention, not only by LFS members but the wider communities of SF/fantasy fans and libertarians.
Prometheus finalists are selected by hard-working LFS members appointed to the committees that judge each year’s Prometheus nominees in our two annual awards categories, with the wider LFS membership then having several months to consider and rank the finalists on the final ballot to choose the winners.
As such, and unlike a basic nomination, the slate of Prometheus finalists represents the first stamp of approval from the LFS itself as a nonprofit international association of freedom-loving SF/fantasy fans.
For a variety of good and practical reasons, the LFS embraces a broader and more inclusive approach in order to ensure that worthy candidates aren’t overlooked.
Thus, all current LFS members have the right to nominate eligible works for any category of the Prometheus Awards – including both annual categories for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction and our occasional Special Awards. (In addition, publishers, authors and other non-members are welcome to submit works for consideration by LFS members, who may well go on to nominate them.)
That first step definitely means something.
At the very least, a nomination means that at least one LFS member enjoyed and respected a particular novel or classic work of fiction enough to formally nominate it for a Prometheus Award.
Practically speaking and perhaps more important, our awards couldn’t operate as well as they have for more than four decades without the broad support of our members – including whenever they come across a potentially eligible work and bring it to our attention, whether informally via an email alerting us to check out the work as a candidate for nomination, or more formally with a nomination.
Of course, such nominations by LFS members only reflect the opinion of those members.
Thus, a nomination by itself does not carry the same level of recognition and, most importantly, does not reflect any consensus by LFS members, which remains to be determined through our multi-stage judging process.
Nominated works only reach the first level of broad and official recognition reflecting the Libertarian Futurist Society as a whole when the LFS’ delegated members on our Prometheus Award finalist-selection committees carefully read, weigh, compare and discuss each year’s nominees and ultimately rank the nominees to select a slate of finalists.
Ultimately, the highest level of official LFS recognition is reached through the final stage of awards voting, when LFS members (not just our awards judges) read and rank the finalists in each category and vote to choose the annual winners.
FINDING NEEDLES IN THE HAYSTACK
Yet, perhaps more than most other literary awards, the Prometheus Awards and its multi-stage submissions, nominations and judging process face a daunting and perennial problem, equivalent to the difficulty of trying to find just a few needles in a large haystack.
Given the way that the SF/fantasy field has expanded and diversified over the decades, not to mention the ways that publishing itself has become so decentralized with many more small presses and self-publishing authors, one of the biggest challenges any award for speculative fiction faces is simply discovering worthy works to consider.
For example, the Hugo and Nebula awards focus broadly on simply the best sf/fantasy of each year.
Similarly, the Oscars draw their nominees from a large pool of all of the year’s feature films and traditionally have strived (while often failing, especially when viewed in retrospect) to recognize the best movies of each year (at least, they once did, before political correctness and moral posturing began to increasingly dominate the list of major contenders while actually prohibiting some good films from even being eligible for nomination).
By notable contrast, the Prometheus Awards have a distinctive dual focus – on both quality and liberty.
Only works that fit both aspects of that focus are even eligible for nomination by LFS members.
Among other things, that means that LFS members read, enjoy and often admire quite a few works of speculative fiction each year – some of which end up being nominated for and becoming finalists in the Nebulas, Hugos or other awards, but most of which simply don’t fit the specific parameters of the Prometheus Award.
Our double filter – requiring a work to be very good overall in its story, world-building, characterization, plotting, imagination and freshness while also dramatizing small-L libertarian and/or anti-authoritarian themes – is a big part of what makes the nominating and judging process of the Prometheus Awards especially challenging, perhaps even more than other literary awards.
Finally, that means that the Libertarian Futurist Society and its members have a lot to be proud of, in having faced and surmounted the myriad challenges in sustaining our award for 45 years, and counting.
ABOUT THE LFS AND 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 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.
* 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.
