Prometheus Awards 2020

The Prometheus Award nominees for 2020 have been announced by the Libertarian Futurist Society in two categories:  Best Novel, and Hall of Fame.  The deadline for voting, by voting members, is 4 July.  

The Prometheus Best Novel Award goes to a science fiction or fantasy novel published in the previous year that features libertarian themes, i.e., strongly pro-liberty and/or anti-authoritarian.  The Prometheus Award for the Hall of Fame goes to older works with the same libertarian themes, but in addition to novels they can be short stories, plays, film, TV, graphic novels, song lyrics, verse, etc.

Five nominees in each of the two categories are selected as finalists out of a larger field of nominees.  The Prometheus Awards – both the winners and nominees – have introduced me to some very enjoyable reading over the many years. 

Although I am not on the finalist judging committees deciding the five finalists, I am an Early Reader volunteer helping to screen possible nominees and sometimes nominating novels for consideration by the committees myself.  I have already read three of this year’s Best Novel finalists, and I screened and nominated two of them. 

1. One of my nominees was Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, a long-awaited sequel to her 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale (which has been made into a TV series recently), which I had read back in the day because it was a Prometheus Award finalist in 1986.  This sequel is even more libertarian than the original, portraying freedom-loving individuals who risk all to smuggle women out of the misogynist theocratic American totalitarian state of Gilead into Canada in an “Underground Femaleroad” – much like the abolitionist network of the 19^th century -- as well as dissidents in positions of power within the Gilead tyranny who work behind the scenes.  It is a great closure to The Handmaid’s Tale.  Very well written. 

2. The second finalist novel that I screened and nominated is Ruin’s Wake by Patrick Edwards.  On a future Earth under a dystopian tyranny much like North Korea or Stalinist Russia, several interesting characters each try to achieve freedom while uncovering the secrets of Earth’s long-ago historical collapse into barbarism. 

3. Alliance Rising by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher is a stand-alone novel in a series about the Merchanter Alliance, a loose network of independent trader spaceship families who are way out in the black far from Earth.  They try to preserve civilization by maintaining rights, consent, free trade and cooperation, while resisting oppressive monopolistic forces such as the centralized statist tyranny of the distant Earth that wants to take control of everybody.  A very good read. 

I have not yet read the other two finalists, but will start them soon.  They are: 

4. Luna:  Moon Rising by Ian McDonald is the third in his Luna trilogy about colonies on the Moon, with struggles over control waged between factions and family dynasties.  Individual freedom is at risk, and one of the threats, of course, is from those damned Earth governments. 

5. Ode to Defiance by Marc Stiegler sounds good.  Many adventurous humans have escaped the impoverishment of the United States’ socialist regime and have gone into space, living and working on an independent fleet of seastead spaceships.  But maintaining freedom is never easy.  This novel is part of Stiegler’s “Brain Trust” Universe series. 

The five Hall of Fame Prometheus nominees include three short stories, one novel, and the lyrics of a song.  They are: 

“As Easy as A.B.C.” by Rudyard Kipling (1912).

“Sam Hall” by Poul Anderson (1953).

“Lipidleggin’” by F. Paul Wilson (1978).

A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg (1971).

“The Trees” a song by Rush, from their Hemispheres album (1978), lyrics by the late Neil Peart. 

It will be difficult to vote among all these nominees in both categories because they are so good! 

-Zenwind. 

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