The Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS) has announced the finalists for this year’s Prometheus Awards—both for Best Novel and for Best Classic Fiction—which “recognize pro-freedom novels of speculative fiction or science fiction/fantasy, that dramatizes the value of personal liberty, exposes abuses of coercive power to the extremes of tyranny, offers anti-authoritarian satires or imagines a fully free future.” The awards will be handed out at Anticipation, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, which will be held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, from 6 to 10 August.
The finalists for best novel are:
Matter by Iain M. Banks (Orbit Books). “Part of Banks’ series of far-future space operas about the Culture, a utopia which reflects Banks’ interest in anarchism through its avoidance of the use of force except when necessary for protection and defense. The novel focuses on an agent in Special Circumstances, the Culture’s special forces unit, who returns to her home planet, a ‘shellworld’ with multiple layers of habitation, after her father has been killed in a coup.”
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Books). “A cautionary tale about a high-school student and his friends who are rounded up in the hysteria following a terrorist attack, the novel focuses on how people find the courage to respond to oppression.”
The January Dancer by Michael Flynn (Tor Books). “The classic space opera, set in an interstellar civilization created by a wide-ranging human diaspora, revolves around how discovery of an alien relic sends agents of a multisystem federation on a quest that exposes them to political and economic institutions of many different cultures and requires them to deal with threats to freedom, from piracy to political corruption.”
Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (Ace Books). “A robot’s adventures after all the humans in a society have died raises complex issues of ethics, duty, family, and struggle in this Heinleinesque novel.”
Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove (Penguin/Roc Books). “Set in a world where medieval Europeans discover an island continent in the Atlantic Ocean, this first novel in a new alternate-history series explores the politics of colonization and the struggle for self-determination while offering parallels and contrasts with development of the Americas.”
Half a Crown by Jo Walton (Tor Books). “The sequel to Walton’s Prometheus Award-winning Ha’penny concludes her alternative-history trilogy, set two decades after Britain reached accommodation with Hitler’s Germany in the 1940s, with a chilling portrait of people all too willing to trade freedom for security.”

The Prometheus Award for Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) honors novels, novellas, stories, graphic novels, anthologies, films, TV shows/series, plays, poems, music recordings and other works of fiction first published or broadcast more than five years ago. This year’s nominees are:
Falling Free, a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold (1988)
Courtship Rite, a novel by Donald M. Kingsbury (1982)
“As Easy as A.B.C.”, a short story by Rudyard Kipling (1912)
The Lord of the Rings, a three-volume novel by J.R.R. Tolkien (1955)
The Once and Future King, including The Book of Merlyn, a novel by T.H. White (1977)
The Golden Age, a novel by John C. Wright (2002)