2026 PROMETHEUS HALL OF FAME AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED FIVE NOVELS BY BLISH, HUXLEY, LEWIS, ROBERTS AND STROSS HONORED

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Sharing this because might be of interest to people here, but also so I have a location to share it at instapundit from — the blog post is being written, and it’ll explain SOME of what’s going on. It’s not a state of the writer, but it is a state of the writer… – SAH*

The Libertarian Futurist Society has selected finalists for the 2026 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award for Best Classic Fiction.

This year’s five finalists – first published between 1932 and 2003 – are novels by James Blish (The Star Dwellers), C.S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Adam Roberts (Salt) and Charles Stross (Singularity Sky).

Here are capsule descriptions of each work, listed in alphabetical order by author:

The Star Dwellers, a 1961 novel (Faber and Faber; Avon Books) by James Blish, revolves around a fraught potential conflict between humans and an ancient species of energy beings born inside stars. A young space cadet serving on a small scout starship finds himself alone and at a pivotal moment, prompting him to forge a friendship with one of the youngest Angels. Their efforts at communication and bargaining result in a deal that opens the door to wider negotiations toward a historic treaty of cooperation and peaceful co-existence. Powerfully but simply dramatizing how voluntary exchanges and free trade benefit both parties, Blish’s idealistic SF juvenile novel illuminates the virtues of consent and contract – two of the most fundamental ideas at the foundation of both libertarianism and classical liberalism – as the civilized alternatives to conflict and war.

Brave New World,a 1932 novel (Chatto & Windus) by Aldous Huxley, is a dystopian classic offering a still-timely cautionary tale of collectivist soft tyranny under seemingly benevolent world government and technocratic central planning. Critiquing his era’s rise of collectivism and Progressive infatuation with the racist pseudo-science of eugenics, Huxley warned about behavioral/biochemical conditioning, propaganda, censorship and manipulation of artificial wombs limiting intelligence and initiative to create and control different castes. At a time when the intellectual and artistic elite saw most forms of authoritarian collectivism as the inevitable and positive wave of the future, Huxley foresaw the dark side of utopia. The novel explicitly dramatizes how such trends deny individuality, liberty, reason, passion, romantic love, the family, history, literature (including Shakespeare, which inspired the novel’s title) and other things that enrich distinctly human life.

That Hideous Strength, a 1945 novel (Scribner) by C.S. Lewis, is the climax of the Christian libertarian’s Space Trilogy. Set mostly on Earth, Lewis’ dystopian and metaphysical vision dramatizes warring ideologies of good and evil, freedom and tyranny. The story revolves around a sociologist and his wife who discover a totalitarian conspiracy and diabolical powers scheming to control humanity in the guise of a progressive-left, Nazi-like organization working for a centrally planned pseudo-scientific society literally hell-bent to seize power. Evoking a police state in the takeover of a local village and warning about the dangers of bureaucracy, Lewis seems most prophetic today in his cautions about the therapeutic state and rising ideology of scientism (science not as the value-free pursuit of truth, but as elitist justification for social control).

Salt, a 2000 novel (Gallancz Limited) by Adam Roberts, dramatizes misunderstandings and growing conflicts between an  anarchist community and its statist neighbor. Set on a harsh desert-like colony world, Robert’s impressive first novel contrasts radically different conceptions of liberty. Evoking Ursula K. Le Guin’s Prometheus-winning The Dispossessed in its depiction of alternative dystopian/utopian societies, Roberts’ cautionary science fiction story underscores how pro-freedom rhetoric can rationalize transgressions and how skewed ideals and good intentions can lead people astray. Told in alternating chapters by the two societies’ biased leaders, this libertarian tragedy poignantly reveals how cross-cultural misunderstandings can spark the horrors of war. Although each society is flawed and falls short of respecting the individual rights, self-ownership and non-aggression principles of modern libertarianism, Salt provokes fresh thinking about the true meaning of freedom.

Singularity Sky,a 2003 novel (Ace Books) by Charles Stross, dramatizes the ethics and greater efficacy of freedom in an interstellar 25th century as new technologies trigger radical transformation – strikingly beginning with advanced aliens dropping cell phones from the sky to grant any and all wishes. Blending space opera with ingenious SF concepts (such as artificial intelligence, bioengineering, self-replicating information networks and time travel via faster-than-light starships), the kaleidoscopic saga explores the disruptive impact on humanity as various political-economic systems with varying degrees of freedom come into contact. Stross weaves in pro-liberty and anti-war insights as an observant man and woman, representing Earth’s more libertarian culture and anarcho-capitalist economy based on private contracts, interact with a repressive and reactionary colony, its secret police and its military fleet.

For full-length reviews of the finalists, which highlight how they fit the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Awards on both liberty and literary quality, visit the Prometheus Blog at lfs.org/blog/  So far, reviews have been posted of The Star Dwellers,Brave New Worldand Singularity Sky,with reviews planned by early 2026 for Salt and That Hideous Strength.
THE OTHER NOMINEES
In addition to the five finalists, the Prometheus Hall of Fame Finalist Judging Committee, chaired by LFS President William  H. Stoddard, considered four other nominees:Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a 1974 novel by Philip K. Dick; “The Kindly Isle,” a 1984 story by Frederik Pohl; Babylon 5, a 1994-1998 TV series created by writer-director J. Michael Straczynski; and Between the Rivers, a 1998 novel by Harry Turtledove.

The final vote will take place in mid-2026. All Libertarian Futurist Society members are eligible to vote. The award will be presented online, via Zoom and open to the general public, on a date to be announced (most likely on a weekend afternoon in mid- to late August.)

Eligible for nomination if first published, filmed, broadcast, staged or recorded at least 20 years ago, Hall of Fame nominees may be in any narrative or dramatic form, including stories or other prose fiction, stage plays, film, television, other video, graphic novels, song lyrics, or epic or narrative verse; they must explore themes relevant to libertarianism and must be science fiction, fantasy, or related fantastical and speculative genres.

THE FOCUS OF THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
First presented in 1979 (for Best Novel) and presented annually since 1982, the Prometheus Awards have recognized outstanding works of fantastical fiction that dramatize the perennial conflict between liberty and power, favor voluntary cooperation over legalized or criminal coercion, expose abuses and excesses of obtrusive government, critique or satirize authoritarian ideas, or champion individual rights and freedoms as the mutually respectful foundation for peace, prosperity, progress, justice, tolerance, civility, and civilization itself.

The awards include gold coins and plaques for the winners for Best Novel, Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame), and occasional Special Awards.

The Prometheus Award is one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently in sf.

HOW TO NOMINATE OR SUBMIT WORKS

Nominations for the next cycle of the Hall of Fame Award can be submitted to committee chair William H. Stoddard (halloffame@lfs.org) at any time up to Sept. 30, 2026. All LFS members have the right to nominate eligible works, while outside publishers and authors are welcome to informally submit eligible works for consideration by LFS members and judges.

The LFS welcomes new members who are interested in speculative fiction and the future of freedom. More information is available at our website, lfs.org and on the Prometheus blog (lfs.org/blog).

48 thoughts on “2026 PROMETHEUS HALL OF FAME AWARD FINALISTS ANNOUNCED FIVE NOVELS BY BLISH, HUXLEY, LEWIS, ROBERTS AND STROSS HONORED”

  1. I wonder if they know Blish may well have gotten his, “Angels,” from Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. The premise of the novel is that the Star Maker pulls intelligent beings from various species (starting with the human narrator) and sets them to witnessing the history of intelligence and intelligent species search for Him. (Spoiler: it’s not because he loves them and wants them to be happy). Late in the story planet-bound species learn the stars are intelligent beings, blessed with “angelic,” serenity, but their interactions with planetary species are tragic. Among other things, the stars are mildly embarrassed by having planets, which they see as irritating vermin.

    I’m probably noting this because Blish had only contempt for E.E. Smith, and Stapledon was about the last guy to go to for accurate science.

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      2. I found Stapledon because Poul Anderson excerpted part of Last and First Men for an anthology on Venus. Years later I got the full novel, and Star Maker, at a college bookstore.

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    3. Never read Blish’s “Angels”. The synopsis hints at the sentient star theme that Frank Herbert had in his novels “Whipping Star” (1970) and “The Dosadi Experiment” (1976); as well as E.E. Smith’s “Masters of the Vortex” (1960) which had intelligent energy beings gestating in nuclear reactors and causing them to blow up. Which makes me wonder if either or both were influenced by Blish’s story.

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      2. Vortex Blasters was likely influenced by Heinlein (it’s dedicated to him), for what it’s worth.

        Brin’s Sundiver has creatures living in the outer layers of a star, as well. It’s from 1980, iirc.

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      3. Stross is on the list for a book with a libertarian theme? The last Laundry Files novel I read was the one just before the government bureaucracy overthrows the government and replaces the prime minister with a cosmic horror (literally).

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        1. Singularity Sky is a different setting from the Laundry Files. No magic, not even the “math is magic” conceit for the LF series.

          But yes, Stross being nominated for anything libertarian is really odd.

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          1. Yeah, I know it’s a different setting. But it’s (almost) like nominating a book by Marx. It just feels *weird*.

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            1. Truer than you may know. He has confessed to being a member of the WWW, i.e. the “Wobblies”. Which are Trotskyite. Or Trotskyist, one of those is apparently an insult and I forget which one. So I’ll call him both names, just to be sure.

              The Trots were for permanent revolution, as far as I know. I.e. they were more in a hurry than the Stalinists.

              I suppose at the time he was a “tech libertarian”. In the same sense as Doctorow, i.e. “I can say what I want”. Nothing about what you can say of course.

              I read the first few books of the Laundry series and liked them. It’s right up my alley, I’m a software developer after all.

              The Merchant Princes series was where we parted ways. His BDS was ridiculous, and if I had been reading a printed copy it would have been launched.

              His point about democracies having no one to keep faith with on treaties has some merit. Though it’s not really democracies; if you consider the behavior of kings and dictators. They die, and you get a new one. Or he needs more money, or a distraction, and breaks the treaty. It’s really a problem with treaties, not democracies.

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              2. I would guess that Trotskyist is the one meant as an insult. I’ve heard people (including the late Christopher Hitchens) referred to as “self-described Trotskyite”, which doesn’t seem like the sort of term you would use if it was an insult, as opposed to merely informative.

                The only of his books that I’ve read were the Laundry books, and they were wildly erratic in quality, imo. But the good ones were good enough to keep me coming back. The last one I read was the elf invasion book. After that I set them aside for a while. When I came back to look for the next one, I found that he’d written three new books, and the next book in the series had the plot that I mentioned above.

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          2. Stross wrote ‘Singularity Sky’ before being eaten up by Trump Derangement Syndrome. His whole life and literary output seem to be focused on that now.

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            1. His derangement syndrome has been there much longer than that. I suppose it may have been in remission during the Obama years, but he was full on BDS.

              And it was probably earlier than that, but he wasn’t known to me before then.

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          1. The book doesn’t deserve the honor, either. Yes, it’s Stross’s first novel and doesn’t show the political biases that crop up eventually in all his series … but it isn’t arguing against technocracy, as Huxley and Lewis were. I’d pick either of their books over Stross’s, in a heartbeat. (I don’t know Blish’s and Roberts’ works, so I can’t speak to their merits.)

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            1. It does have explicit references to Earth being something like an anarchocapitalist society, where the hero contracts to several different organizations for different “governmental” services. But it wasn’t one of my top choices; I thought the libertarian references were more decorative than load bearing.

              Sad to say, Stross’s political outlook has darkened ever since Brexit. I remember an essay of his about what he called the “beige dictatorship” that lucidly explained British resentment of the civil servants who actually run the government there (as in the classic show Yes, Minister) and their even more oligarchic Eurocratic counterparts. But then when there was actually a vote against the beige dictatorship he was horrified, and nearly as much so by Trump. I don’t know what he expected the overturn to be like, but he apparently can’t stand the one he got.

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              1. Mm. “Political Failure Modes and the Beige Dictatorship” doesn’t talk about the civil service at all, so I don’t think it’s the essay you remember. And I don’t think it’s an especially insightful essay, because it doesn’t consider the civil service as a power center (which was the whole point of Yes, Minister‘s satire.) Indeed, even back then, I think rule by civil servants was what Stross really wanted, and that’s why the populist revolts against just that horrified him.

                Stross is actually a lot like Lovecraft IMO. He is, like Lovecraft, deeply loyal to a social order that’s manifestly failing its adherents, and cursed with enough understanding to foresee its collapse, but unable to seek out anything better. (With Lovecraft the order was Puritan New England; for Stross it’s Progressive technocracy.) It’s a mindset that naturally lends itself to cosmic horror.

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      4. I quite liked “Whipping Star”. I even tried my hand at writing a screenplay for it a couple of times, but back then it would have been unrealistically expensive for the required special effects.

        DOGE wasn’t the Bureau of Sabotage, but it was the next-best thing.

        “The Dosadi Experiment” just never clicked for me. Too much going on with no backstory or explanation, and too much grimdark. I liked the two short stories, though. They predated “Whipping Star” by some years.

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  3. Bit sorry that Babylon 5 didn’t make the final cut, because it is glorious.

    And am once again bemused that Poul Anderson’s masterpiece (my opinion, very few share it) Harvest of Stars continues to be overlooked by Prometheus. I grant that they gave the main award to the sequel(/prequel), The Stars Are Also Fire, but Harvest is the (slightly) better book, and the two read together become something even greater.

    Alas, none of the nominees is in the public domain. Or perhaps that should be “yay”, since it means I don’t have to scramble to put an edition out. :D

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      1. Probably some hesitance due to the avowedly leftist leanings of its creator, who, over the course of time has revealed that he’s perfectly fine with the Right Kind of authoritarianism.

        And I say that in sorrow, as a fan who can point to any number of facts that mark him as a remarkably decent man, whatever his beliefs, who in many ways has resisted the bubble he lives within.

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        1. That ‘didn’t stop them from nominating a book by Stross, who literally has the heroes in a government bureaucracy summon a cosmic horror to take over the government of the UK, which they work for.

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          1. Yes, I’ve seen you have your hobby horse and you’re going to ride it no matter what.

            There are any number of possible explanations for the difference, starting with that was in a book, and if Stross does activism, I’ve not heard of it, and it may be confined to Britain. JMS, on the other hand, is American, and was not quiet in his support for Occupy Wall Street and BLM.

            Doesn’t mean I’m correct. But JMS and Stross are two different people, and two seriously different sets of circumstances, so saying “But STROSSSSSSSS!!!!” isn’t terribly enlightening in either direction.

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            1. A couple of mentions on one topic is hardly a hobby horse. And he’s someone that’s been mentioned here in the past for silliness.

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      2. No mystery at all. The entire series was nominated! That’s over 100 episodes, each roughly an hour long, and the nomination came in not many months before we voted. I thought it way too optimistic to want our judges to watch that much video for a single nominee, no matter what the quality. Possibly we might do better next year with more lead time.

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  4. I had forgotten that gold coinage was part of the Prometheus award. In 1980 (I think) my wife and I gave L. Neil a French 20 Centime coin as he wasn’t eligible for “Probability”.

    I can see I need to drag up some long forgotten books.

    I was indirectly a contributor to the success of Babylon 5. I’d defined a rendering system for DEC that scaled nicely and pitched it to the studio. Understandably, they elected to use Alpha clones rather than our pricer boxes but were delighted with the results. They were producing rendered frames for their weekly show that would have been great 2 years before in a film.

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      1. yes. They wound up with 10+ racks full of Alpha clones rendering. NT ran on Alpha and there were a number of apps running too. The dragonfly lead in for “Men In Black” was done on Alpha as well. I ended meeting Ed Solomon the writer of MIB at a Writers Guild event. That part of my life was more fun than legally allowed!

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        1. The pace of progress for software and hardware was very fast then. A decade after Babylon 5, Samuli Torssonen did “Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning” on some used PCs under his kitchen table and some off-the-shelf software. That was 20 years ago, and even today it looks pretty good.

          Unfortunately he got backers for his next movie, which led to “those who have the gold…” and “too many cooks” compromises, and “Iron Sky” bombed.

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    2. VAX/VMS was a big part of my first full-time IT gig. It included one Vax Alpha. (and a bunch of other non-Alphas.)

      Somewhere at home, I have a box of “Dizzy Bus” channel ID number plugs. (DSSI bus, versus the better known SCSI “scuzzy” bus)

      Ah the good old days……

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  5. The award will probably go to Brave New World due to its fame, but That Hideous Strength deserves it more. Read That Hideous Strength and you’ll be amazed at how much the N.I.C.E. resembles certain organizations of today, in spirit if not in detail.

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      1. I’ve been chairing the committee that selects Hall of Fame finalists for between one and two decades, and I’ve never seen it nominated in that time. It certainly didn’t get the Hall of Fame before now.

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        1. Honestly, that Orion Shall Rise got one last year is remarkable, given how much Anderson seems to be fading away (quite unjustly).

          But I’m cranky. My opinions are the Right Opinions, and Harvest is therefore his masterwork. ;)

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          1. (OK, this wasn’t meant as a non sequitur. WP showed your comment to me as a response to one of my comments about Poul Anderson. To look a little less insane and more on point, I’ll just say that I’m gratified that Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day got the nod before Huxley.)

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  6. Hopefully not the Blish. His writing was fine – so long as someone else handed him the plot. Otherwise, it turned into a tedious slog. (The ones I had were culled at least a half dozen shelf cleanings ago.)

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    1. Setting the memory blaster to spring, 1970. Finals week in high school, and I finished doing whatever I thought was necessary for the English final, so I cracked open one of the Cities In Flight books to read a bit before sleep. 6:00AM and the alarm goes off, with RCPete finishing the book. Oops.

      Still aced the final.

      Pre/postscript: Some years before, I picked up The Triumph of Time when we (family) were going camping on a rainy weekend. I had no idea it was part of a series and was thoroughly confused. When I found the omnibus in paperback, I had to read the earlier books.

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    2. I read a lot of Blish’s stuff – before the internet, when SF was on paper and bookstores are rare – I read *everything*. But I found his work to be distinctly second-rate despite the inexplicable fondness some people have for “Cities in Flight.” Which I re-read just to see if I’d missed something. (not that I can tell)

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      1. The concept of the “spindizzy,” which allowed entire cities to travel, was a great concept. Otherwise, all that’s stuck in my mind was the end, with the Mayor literally playing God by blowing himself up and initiating a Big Bang.

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  7. I wonder why none of Mackey Chandler’s stuff has made the cut. E.g. April, or Family Law.

    It’s probably not well known enough. I mean he’s still writing new books, and they’re self-published.

    Or possibly that the April series is now 14 books and Family Law is 8. Which one do you nominate?

    For libertarian philosophy and where it leads though, and its interfaces with other systems, I don’t think you can do better.

    The single books are good for satire, or a “Looking Backward” survey, but for showing later consequences of earlier decisions, you likely need more than one.

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    2. The first April book came out in 2012, and it’s an early book in Chandler’s ouevre. He hasn’t been writing long enough for a Hall of Fame award.

      If we’re considering recent work? Chandler’s good, but Devon Erikson’s Theft of Fire is much better – and it’s his first and (so far) only novel. If he can sustain the level he reached there, we’ll be considering him for the Hall of Fame in 20 years.

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      1. Yes, impatiently waiting for the next book. No, it’s not a sequel as such; I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the story isn’t finished being told.

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