Volume 29, Number 2, Winter 2011

2011 Prometheus Award Finalists

The Libertarian Futurist Society has selected Best Novel finalists for the Prometheus Awards. Winners for Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) will be presented in an awards ceremony at Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention to be held August 17-21 in Reno, Nevada.

For the Win is Doctorow’s portrait of a future in which the world’s poor adopt entrepreneurial strategies and Internet/virtual technologies to challenge the statist status quo and achieve freedom through self-empowerment. Doctorow has been nominated several times for the Prometheus Award and won in 2009 for Little Brother.

Darkship Thieves features an exciting, coming-of-age saga in which a heroic woman fights for her freedom and identity against a tyrannical Earth. Hoyt’s novel depicts a plausible anarchist society among the asteroids. This is Hoyt’s first time as Prometheus finalist.

The Last Trumpet Project tells the story of a future in which virtual reality and uploading people’s minds into computers have merged. In this milieu, freedom struggles against a tyrannical government allied with religious zealots who will go to any length to ensure their vision of the future. The hopeful and utopian work is MacArdry’s first published novel.

Live Free or Die is Ringo’s rollicking saga of entrepreneurial humans using free-market capitalism and the spirit of old-fashioned Yankee individualism to defend Earth from imperialist aliens after first contact embroils us in galactic politics. This is Ringo’s first time as a Prometheus finalist.

Ceres, the sequel to Smith’s Prometheus Award-winning novel Pallas (1994), dramatizes a conflict between a libertarian society based in the asteroids and a statist Earth government. Smith also won the Prometheus Award for The Probability Broach (1982) and The Forge of the Elders (2001).

Ten novels published in 2010 were nominated for this year’s Best Novel category. The other nominees were Directive 51, by John Barnes (Ace Books); Zendegi, by Greg Egan (Night Shade Books); Migration, by James P. Hogan (Baen Books); The Unincorporated War, by Dani and Eytan Kollin (TOR Books); and A Mighty Fortress, by David Weber (TOR Books)

The Prometheus Award, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), was established in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently in sf. Presented annually since 1982 at the World Science Fiction Convention, the Prometheus Awards include a gold coin and plaque for the winners.

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