Prometheus Awards for Libertarian Science Fiction

[Eric P]

Prometheus Awards Winners

The Libertarian Futurist Society has released winners of this year's Prometheus Awards in advance of the planned awards ceremony at the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver next month.

For the first time in the history of the award, there is a tie this year for Best Novel. Winners and finalists are as follows:

NOVEL (tie)
  # The Gladiator, Harry Turtledove (Tor)
  # Ha'Penny, Jo Walton (Tor)
  # The Execution Channel, Ken MacLeod (Tor)
  # Fleet of Worlds, Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner (Tor)
  # Ragamuffin, Tobias S. Buckell (Tor)

HALL OF FAME
  # A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  # As Easy as A.B.C., Rudyard Kipling
  # The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
  # The Once and Future King, T.H. White
  # That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis



The Hall of Fame category includes works sometimes nominated year after year until they win; Burgess' novel was a finalist in the category in 1999, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007.

The Prometheus Awards were established in 1979. Winners receive a plaque and a one-ounce gold coin.

The Gladiator

The Soviet Union won the Cold War. The Russians were a little smarter than they were in our own world, and the United States was a little dumber and a lot less resolute. Now, more than a century later, the world's gone Communist, and capitalism is a bad word.
 
For Gianfranco and his friend Annarita, a couple of teenagers growing up in Milan, life in a heavily regimented, surveillance-rich command economy is just plain dreary. The eventual withering-away of the state doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon.
 
Annarita's a hard-working student and a member of the Young Socialists' League. Gianfranco is a lot less motivated--but on the other hand, his father's a Party apparatchik. The biggest excitement in their lives is a wargame shop called The Gladiator, which runs tournaments, and stocks marvelous complex games you can't find anywhere else.
 
Then, abruptly, the shop is shut down. Someone's figured out that The Gladiator's games are teaching counterrevolutionary capitalist principles. The Security Police are searching high and low for the shop's proprietors, who've not only vanished into thin air, but have left behind sets of fingerprints that aren't in the records of any government on earth.
 
Only one staffer is left: Gianfranco and Annarita's friend Eduardo. He's on the run, and he comes to them in secret with an astonishing story: he's a time trader from our own timeline, accidentally left behind when the store was evacuated. The only way Eduardo can get home to his own timeline is if Gianfranco and Annarita can help him reach one of the oth

Ha'penny

In 1949, eight years after the "Peace with Honor" was negotiated between Great Britain and Nazi Germany by the Farthing Set, England has completed its slide into fascist dictatorship. Then a bomb explodes in a London suburb.
 
The brilliant but politically compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists, of staunch King-and-Country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen, to murder Britain’s Prime Minister and his new ally, Adolf Hitler.
 
Against a background of increasing domestic espionage and the suppression of Jews and homosexuals, an ad-hoc band of idealists and conservatives blackmail the one person they need to complete their plot, an actress who lives for her art and holds the key to the Fuhrer's death. From the ha'penny seats in the theatre to the ha'pennys that cover dead men's eyes, the conspiracy and the investigation swirl around one another, spinning beyond anyone's control.
 
In this brilliant companion to Farthing, Welsh-born World Fantasy Award winner Jo Walton continues her alternate history of an England that could have been, with a novel that is both a critique of the classic detective novels of the thirties and forties, and an allegory of the world we live in today.

[Mandark]

No Vinge, no sale!

[MrAngryFace]

AN OUNCE OF GOLD

[Eric P]

No Vinge, no sale!

# 1987 - Vernor Vinge, Marooned in Realtime
# 2000 - Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

Hall of Fame Award recipients

# 2004 - Vernor Vinge, The Ungoverned

[Eric P]

AN OUNCE OF GOLD

that made me laugh

as well as all the time Heinlein tied with Rand for the hall of fame awards

[Howard Alan Treesong]

I am currently writing a short story about a parallel universe where Ron Paul fails to win the 2008 Presidential Election, sending our world spiraling into poverty and destruction

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Twist: the world is our own

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[Eric P]

I am currently writing a short story about a parallel universe where Ron Paul fails to win the 2008 Presidential Election, sending our world spiraling into poverty and destruction

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Twist: the world is our own

[close]

you too should incorporate a random system of numbers which will appear to be incomprehensible to most readers but are actually quite structured and easy to follow

i suggest nyse

[Joe Molotov]

I am currently writing a short story about a parallel universe where Ron Paul fails to win the 2008 Presidential Election, sending our world spiraling into poverty and destruction

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Twist: the world is our own

[close]

"This was not the future my mother warned me about. I don't know if we can win this war. Ron Paul was not the hero we deserved, but he was the hero we needed."

DUN DUN DUUUUN DUN DUN DUN! DUN DUN DUUUUN DUN DUN!

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]