FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, April 15, 2025

2025 PROMETHEUS AWARD FINALISTS CHOSEN FOR BEST NOVEL

Works by Cherryh & Fancher, Flynn, King, McCarthy and Shriver selected as finalists

The Libertarian Futurist Society, a nonprofit all-volunteer international organization of liberty-loving science fiction/fantasy fans, has announced five finalists for the Best Novel category of the Prometheus Awards.

Here are the Best Novel finalists in brief, in alphabetical order by author: Alliance Unbound, by C.J Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW); In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy); Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press); Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books); and Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers).

Full-length reviews of each Best Novel finalist, explaining how each fits the distinctive focus of the Prometheus Awards, have been (or in one case, soon will be) posted on the Prometheus Blog. Meanwhile, here are capsule descriptions of all five finalists:

• Alliance Unbound, by C.J Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW) — Set within Cherryh’s Alliance-Union future history series, Book 2 of The Hinder Stars projected trilogy and the direct sequel to Alliance Rising, the 2020 Prometheus Best Novel winner, this interstellar science fiction saga dramatizes how an evolving alliance of free traders strives to preserve its independence, freedom and survival amid machinations from an intrusive Earth. Starting out on the ship “Finity’s End,” en route to Pell Station, the ongoing drama is bolstered by shipboard challenges and relationships, military maneuvers and a mystery that unfolds as observant crew notice Earth-based goods that shouldn’t have been able to reach a distant station. Merchanters must strategize amid uncertainties in the human colonies about the game-changing possibility of new jump points opening up a faster-than-light route from Earth. Perhaps most notable with regard to Prometheus themes, Cherryh and Fancher continue to dramatize how the ethics and benefits of voluntary cooperation and free thought advance merchanter culture, even amid station tensions and competing interests. Focusing more on the personal than the political, the novel highlights both the daily challenges of freer societies and the authoritarian and dysfunctional tendencies within bureaucracies, military commands and other coercive systems.
• In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy) — The posthumous work by two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn (In the Country of the Blind, Fallen Angels) explores the complex lives, work, challenges and conflicts of 40,000 human colonists aboard a large asteroid ship two centuries into a projected eight-century voyage to Tau Ceti. With its intricate world-building, believable characters in conflict, and profound grasp of human nature, the epic social novel freshens the SF subgenre of the multi-generational colony ship while raising deeper questions about the enormous difficulties of our species expanding beyond our solar system. Beyond the usual technological and interpersonal issues of maintenance and survival that naturally arise, the colonists suffer from a dysfunctional bureaucracy, crew class divisions, and a traditional shipboard command structure that calcifies into an authoritarian hereditary aristocracy with enforced eugenics and a loss of focus on the mission goal. Without sustaining the culture of liberty, self-reliance and voluntary cooperation that helped lift Earth civilization to unprecedented levels of knowledge and prosperity, humanity may be doomed even if such ships reach their distant destination. The enduring theme of Flynn’s ambitious, multi-focused saga of power, decay and revolution: The price of freedom (and survival) is eternal vigilance.
• Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press) — The gripping SF-enhanced cautionary fable is framed as a brave new utopia embracing love, inclusion and social justice, but reveals progressive politics warped into a totalitarian pseudo-religion in the name of women and minorities. Anyone can be cancelled for suspect behavior or old-fashioned attitudes in such personal areas as sex, food, manners and language. With its subtitle referencing H.G. Well’s 1933 novel foretelling a “history of the future,” King’s disturbing but satirical novel feels similarly prescient in extrapolating today’s illiberal sociopolitical trends. Cracks appear in the warped facade as hidden realities of New Britannia are revealed, with the omnipresent State echoing the oppressive attitudes of other dystopias in which “Everything not compulsory is forbidden.” King is especially good at exploring the fraught intersections of the political and the personal in his story focusing on the good intentions, growing doubts and eventual comeuppance of a true-believing woman secretly working as an auditor for a leading cancellation company. Overall, King offers an urgent warning about what might happen if government paternalism, radical egalitarianism, progressivist collectivism, identity politics and moral self-righteousness are taken to even more authoritarian extremes.
• Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books) — This inventive, far-flung first-contact story revolves around a wealthy entrepreneur using private enterprise to construct a star ship and take 100 humans, including himself, to meet non-corporeal aliens far from our sun. Each human, with the help of psychedelic drugs, interprets their contact in drastically different ways, sparking further mysteries and philosophical questions. Like Rich Man’s Sky, McCarthy’s 2022 Best Novel winner, this sequel shows how cooperation through free markets can be successful in carrying out various projects, such as a floating Venus station and perhaps the most expensive and important scientific exploration/discovery in history. The story takes place within the context of an ongoing space race sparked by four Earth billionaires pushing to expand humanity and space industry to new frontiers beyond our solar system. Perhaps most relevant to Prometheus themes are McCarthy’s insightful contrasts between two types of “power” — voluntary socioeconomic cooperation in business versus coercive State authority. Despite frequent disparagement by many on Earth of the “four Horsemen,” McCarthy depicts three as quite admirable, pursuing innovations not only to realize their dreams but humanity’s future.
• Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers) — The cautionary fable takes place in an alternate-history recent America taken over by the Mental Parity movement, which denies any variability in intelligence or talent and condemns any recognition of IQ differences as bigoted discrimination. The psychological and social drama centers on how the movement affects a radically individualist and recalcitrant teacher, her three children, husband and lifelong friendship with a high-status media star. As the movement’s virtue-signaling foot soldiers impose the delusionary new orthodoxy, growing pressures to conform to the increasingly authoritarian movement warp language and culture. The progressive take-over of academia, media, education, medicine, and government destroys reputations, careers, families and friendships while ruining the economy and sabotaging the smooth functioning of everyday services. Darkly satirical but also chillingly poignant, Mania holds up a cracked mirror to today’s culture wars around race, gender and identity politics, where facts and objective reality are denied. A previous two-time Best Novel finalist for The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 and Should We Stay Or Should We Go, Shriver is no stranger to pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Here she illuminates the perennial temptations of the morally self-righteous to impose their visions on others, no matter the devastating cost.

Eleven 2024 novels were nominated by LFS members for this year's award. Other Best Novel nominees, listed in alphabetical order by author: Time: A Novel, by Peter Grose (Merriam Publishing); Shadow of the Smoking Mountain, by Howard Andrew Jones (Baen Books); Machine Vendetta, by Alastair Reynolds (Orbit Books); The Glass Box, by J. Michael Straczynski (Blackstone Publishing); Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit Books); and The Last Murder At the End of the World, by Stuart Turton (Sourcebooks Landmark).

The Best Novel winner will receive an engraved plaque with a one-ounce gold coin. An online Prometheus awards ceremony, open to the public, is tentatively planned for mid-August. David Friedman, an SF/fantasy novelist and a leading economist and libertarian thinker, will be this year’s celebrity guest presenter. The date of the ceremony will be announced once the winners are known for both annual categories, including the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.

The Prometheus Award, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), was established and first presented 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 given in sf. The Prometheus Hall of Fame category for Best Classic Fiction, launched in 1983, is presented annually with the Best Novel category.

The Prometheus Awards recognize outstanding works of speculative or fantastical fiction (including science fiction and fantasy) that dramatize the perennial conflict between Liberty and Power, favor voluntarism and cooperation over institutionalized coercion, expose the abuses and excesses of coercive government, and/or critique or satirize authoritarian systems, ideologies and assumptions.

Above all, the Prometheus Awards strive to recognize speculative fiction that champions individual rights, based on the moral/legal principle of non-aggression, as the ethical and practical foundation for peace, prosperity, progress, justice, tolerance, mutual respect, civility and civilization itself.

All LFS members have the right to nominate eligible works for all categories of the Prometheus Awards, while publishers and authors are welcome to submit potentially eligible works for consideration using the guidelines linked from the LFS website’s main page.

A 12-person judging committee, drawn from the membership and chaired by LFS co-founder Michael Grossberg, selects the Prometheus Award finalists for Best Novel from members’ nominations. Following the selection of finalists, all LFS upper-level members (Benefactors, Sponsors and Full Members) have the right to vote on the Best Novel finalist slate to choose the annual winner.

Membership in the Libertarian Futurist Society is open to any freedom-loving science fiction/fantasy fan interested in how speculative or fantastical fiction can enhance an appreciation of the value of liberty and broaden public recognition of the dangers and evils of tyranny and the abuses more prevalent under the State’s centralized and coercive powers.

For a full list of past Prometheus Award winners in all categories, visit our site. For reviews and commentary on these and other works of interest to the LFS, visit the Prometheus blog. For more information, contact LFS Publicity Chair Chris Hibbert (publicity@lfs.org).