By Michael Grossberg
The Libertarian Futurist Society has established two higher LFS membership levels: Gold and Silver Benefactors.
The new Gold Benefactor and Silver Benefactor levels will offer more ways for LFS members to show their support for our programs and awards.
Unless they prefer to remain anonymous, Silver and Gold Benefactors will receive recognition annually on the Prometheus Blog, while Gold Benefactors also will be thanked publicly during the annual Prometheus Awards ceremony.
By Michael Grossberg
Barry B. Longyear (1942-2025) has passed.
The prolific sf author, who won the 2021 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for The War Whisperer, Book 5: The Hook, died May 6 at the age of 82.
Longyear is perhaps best known for “Enemy Mine,” an sf story about a risky confrontation but ultimately life-saving friendship between a human pilot and an alien fighter stranded on a harsh and distant planet.
“Enemy Mine,” part of Longyear’s first story collection Manifest Destiny, achieved the rare feat of science fiction’s Triple Crown by winning a Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award.
According to an obituary/tribute in Mike Glyer’s File 770, “fans sealed their approval of his amazing output by voting Barry the John W. Campbell Award as best new writer in 1980 (now the Astounding Award).
Continue reading Award-winning libertarian author Barry B. Longyear, R.I.P.
By Michael Grossberg
With the Libertarian Futurist Society on the verge of sending Prometheus Awards ballots to LFS members, here’s a quick-reference guide to this year’s finalists.
This guide offers LFS members a timely summary of this year’s finalists in our two annual categories: Best Novel and the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
Again this year, the Prometheus Blog was able to publish in-depth reviews of each of the finalists to add context and perspective on why each work deserved our recognition. So also included here, for the convenience of Prometheus voters, are links to each review.
Plus, this guide will offer tips on the availability of finalists – including links to those available free and online.
One aspect of fantastical fiction that can make it especially vivid and dramatic is when authors create an imaginative story with epic scope.
A work of fiction that offers such a vast and even cosmic perspective can enhance that distinctive sense of wonder that has defined some of the best science fiction or fantasy.
Each of this year’s Prometheus Best Novel finalists benefits in some ways from aspiring to and achieving great scope.
Quite a few Prometheus Award Best Novel winners, while not sequels themselves, have inspired subsequent novels that have received further Prometheus recognition.
Such winners by Sarah Hoyt (Darkship Thieves), Victor Milan (The Cybernetic Samurai) and Dani and Eytan Kollins (The Unincorporated Man) were examined in the previous post of this ongoing series about sequels.
Let’s turn our attention here to Prometheus-winning works by Ramez Naam and L. Neil Smith. Both authors were inspired to write more than one follow-up novel to their initial Prometheus-winning novels.
While Naam framed one complex story for his near-future Nexus trilogy, Smith conceived a variety of zestful and rambunctious stories all linked within his alternate-universe North American Confederacy series.
Quite a few good novels have inspired sequels that won a Prometheus Award – 11, by my latest count and all discussed in previous parts of this ongoing series.
When SF/fantasy authors conceive original stories that imagine fresh worlds and compelling characters for the first time, it’s not surprising that they occasionally choose to return to those worlds and characters for a sequel – especially if the first novel receives wide readership and acclaim.
One such source of recognition is a Prometheus Award – and quite a few Best Novel winners, while not sequels themselves, have inspired sequels that have gone on to further Prometheus recognition at different levels.
Previous posts in this series on sequels have explored two outstanding Prometheus-winning examples of this pattern: Travis Corcoran’s The Powers of the Earth and its sequel Causes of Separation; and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and its sequel Homeland. All four novels ended up winning the top Prometheus Award for Best Novel – a rare feat in our award’s 46-year history.
Yet, several other Prometheus-winning authors have accomplished something approaching that feat – including Sarah Hoyt, Victor Milan and the brothers and co-authors Dani and Eytan Kollins.
Quite a few outstanding SF/fantasy novels have inspired sequels that have won a Prometheus Award – 11, by my latest count, and more than I’d remembered or imagined.
In a few especially notable cases, writers have conceived Prometheus-winning novels inspired by previous successes and subsequently inspiring worthy sequels – several of which went on to receive further Prometheus recognition at different levels.
This blog post will discuss such sequel novels by two of our most widely praised and bestselling authors: Vernor Vinge and F. Paul Wilson.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that both writers have won multiple Prometheus Awards – including for several entertaining, thought-provoking and mind-expanding works set within the same future history.
When a sequel novel is part of a trilogy or series, it can help broaden the scope of a narrative and its world-building while providing a bigger canvas to explore more characters and subplots in greater depth.
Two internationally acclaimed science fiction writers who achieved such goals in Prometheus-winning Best Novel sequels are Poul Anderson and Ken MacLeod.
Previous articles in this series on Prometheus-winning sequel novels explored winners by Daniel Suarez (Critical Mass), Barry Longyear (The Hook), Travis Corcoran (Causes of Separation), Cory Doctorow (Homeland), Jo Walton (Ha’Penny) and Neal Stephenson (The System of the World).
Part 5 will discuss Anderson’s The Stars are Also Fire, the 1995 Best Novel winner, and MacLeod’s The Stone Canal, the 1998 Best Novel winner.
Both sequels are key works in their respective tetralogies.
Did you know that a third novel belatedly has been published in the late Prometheus-winning writer L. Neil Smith’s “Ngu Family Saga” series?
The Libertarian Futurist Society recognized the first two novels in that series – Pallas and Ceres – but we didn’t become aware of the third novel, Ares, until recently.
Each of the three novels is set primarily on a different asteroid or dwarf planet in our solar system, but linked together by continuing central characters drawn from the Ngu family of pioneering solar-system settlers.
Continue reading Ares: An overlooked sequel to L. Neil Smith’s Prometheus-winning Pallas
A zest for life, a sense of humor, a taste for rollicking adventure, curiosity, mystery, imagination, ingeniously varied aliens, heroic and villainous humans, a passion for justice, individual rights and other libertarian themes mark the novels and legacy of L. Neil Smith.
Smith was born May 12, 1946, and died at 75 in 2021 at his longtime home in Fort Collins, Colorado. Arguably one of the most significant libertarian novelists of the past generation or so, Neil was a writer that libertarian SF fans should remember (and consider rereading) on his birthday.
For one thing, Smith is one of only a handful of writers (most notably, along with Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Vernor Vinge and F. Paul Wilson) to win five Prometheus Awards – or more.
Continue reading Remembering five-time Prometheus winner L. Neil Smith on his birthday
