Darkship Thieves, by Sarah Hoyt won the 2011 Prometheus Award for Best Novel, while Animal Farm, by George Orwell, received the Hall of Fame Award. Full coverage of the awards presentation will appear in the next issue. In the meantime, view a video of the presentation at the LFS home page. [Here's the link]

Sarah Hoyt will receive a plaque and a one-ounce gold coin, while a smaller gold coin and a plaque will be presented to Orwell’s estate. 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, dedicated to Robert A. Heinlein, depicts a plausible anarchist society among the asteroids. Hoyt is a prolific writer of novels and short fiction, though this is her first time as Prometheus finalist.

Orwell won the Hall of Fame award for his novel 1984, fittingly, in 1984, the second year the award was given. Animal Farm has been a finalist for the Hall of Fame award multiple times. Animal Farm, a short novel, retells the story of the Russian Revolution in the literary form of a beast fable, reflecting the post-World War II disillusionment of many communists. The story introduced the phrase “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” which has been borrowed innumerable times to pillory many political movements that claimed to be fighting for equality. Orwell’s story is widely considered both a classic work, and a devastating critique of Stalinism.

In Prometheus, Volume 29, Number 2, Winter 2011, Phillip Salin wrote an appreciation of Carl Barks’ Disney cartoons, especially ones about Scrooge McDuck. Salin wrote that article several years ago, and luckily for other fans of Barks’s work, in an unexpected coincidence, the entire Carl Barks Disney Library is in the process of being released. The collection will span 37 volumes, and already the first of these, Walt Disney’s Donald Duck “Lost in the Andes”, is available for the retail price of $24.99, and the second book, Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge: “Only a Poor Old Man” is due in June 2012.