OR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 9, 2026
LFS announces 46th Prometheus awards winners:
J. Kenton Pierce wins Best Novel for A Kiss for Damocles
Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World to be inducted into Hall of Fame
The Libertarian Futurist Society (www.lfs.org), a nonprofit all-volunteer international organization of freedom-loving science fiction fans, has announced Prometheus Award Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction winners.
The 46th annual Prometheus Awards ceremony
The 46th annual Prometheus Awards will be presented online Sunday afternoon Aug. 16, 2026, in a zoom awards ceremony open to the public.
This year’s hour long ceremony, tentatively scheduled for 2-3 p.m. Eastern time and emceed by LFS President William H. Stoddard, will feature a guest speaker: Lifelong science-fiction fan Ilya Somin (George Mason University law professor, Cato Institute scholar and author), who will present the Hall of Fame award.
Updates will be posted on the Prometheus Blogover the next several weeks about additional speakers and the ceremony line-up.
The Prometheus Award for Best Novel
A Kiss for Damocles, by J. Kenton Pierce, won the 2026 Prometheus award for best novel for novels published in 2025.
The science fiction novel, published by Raconteur Press and launching Pierce’s Tales From the Long Night series, illuminates the ethics and efficacy of free trade and self-defense as a proper foundation for civilization.
Pierce’s novel is set on a remote planet where humans in towns and homesteading communities are struggling to recover centuries after a catastrophic attack and volcanic cataclysm that set back and severely limits their use of advanced technology. At the story’s heart is Shai, a young homesteader facing harsh frontier conditions, corrupt Townie politicians, dangerous native species, and sinister forces amid still-functional A.I.-powered orbiting war machines.
Pierce celebrates the self-reliance and resilience of self-regulating frontier communities that survive and evolve based on the hard-won realities of voluntarism, mutual respect and cooperation. But this is also a cautionary tale about the deceptive ideals of a command-and-control politics and the perennial tendency toward abuse of power, reflected in the Townies’ push for higher taxation, fiat money and state takeover of education to indoctrinate new generations.
Narrating from her wry but hopeful perspective, Shai becomes a leader in her community’s struggles to defend their freedom, preserve their heritage and restore their world.
Visit the Prometheus blog for a full review of A Kiss for Damocles that illuminates how it fits the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Award on quality and liberty.
The other 2025 Best Novel finalists were Storm-Dragon, by Dave Freer (Raconteur Press); War by Other Means, by Karl K. Gallagher (Kelt Haven Press); No Man’s Land, by Sarah Hoyt (Goldport Press); and Powerless, by Harry Turtledove (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy.)
The Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction
Brave New World, a 1932 novel (Chatto & Windus) by Aldous Huxley, won the 2026 Best Classic Fiction award and will be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
This dystopian classic offers 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 scientism, 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, romantic love, the family, history, and literature (including Shakespeare, which inspired the novel’s title).
Visit the Prometheus blog for a full review of Brave New World that illuminates how it fits the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Award on quality and liberty.
The other Hall of Fame finalists were The Star Dwellers, a 1961 novel (Faber and Faber; Avon Books) by James Blish; That Hideous Strength, a 1945 novel (Scribner) by C.S. Lewis; Salt, a 2000 novel (Gollancz) by Adam Roberts; and Singularity Sky, a 2003 novel (Ace) by Charles Stross.
Prometheus Awards History
The Prometheus Awards, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), were first presented in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently in sf.
For more than four decades, the Prometheus Awards have recognized outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy that dramatize the perennial conflict between liberty and power, favor cooperation over coercion, expose the abuses and excesses of coercive government, and/or critique or satirize authoritarian systems, ideologies and assumptions.
Above all, the Prometheus Awards strive to recognize speculative fiction that champions individual rights, based on the moral/legal principle of non-aggression as the ethical and practical foundation for peace, prosperity, progress, justice, tolerance, mutual respect, civility and civilization itself.
All LFS members have the right to nominate eligible works for all categories of the Prometheus Awards, while publishers and authors are welcome to submit potentially eligible works for consideration using the form linked from the LFS website’s main page at www.lfs.org
While the Best Novel category is limited to novels published in English for the first time during the previous calendar year, Hall of Fame nominees — which must have been published, performed, broadcast or released at least 20 years ago — may be in any narrative or dramatic form, including novels, novellas, stories, films, television series or episodes, plays, musicals, graphic novels, song lyrics, or narrative or dramatic verse.
The Best Novel winner receives a plaque with a gold coin, and the Hall of Fame winner, a plaque with a smaller gold coin.
For more information, visit lfs.org or contact LFS Publicity Chair Chris Hibbert (publicity@lfs.org).
According To Hoyt 
The competition this year was fierce. I don’t think any of the finalists would have been a wrong choice to win.
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c4c
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Congratulations to Mr. Pierce! I enjoyed the heck out of that book. It’s a real gem.
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I think it’s about time I got back into sci-fi reading for real.
It just suddenly hit me for real that not only are there are a LOT of good human wave writers out there (hello, Prometheus Award Winner and 2026 finalist Sarah A. Hoyt), I also have access to a couple of online communities full of discerning readers who can point me towards the best stuff. A Kiss for Damocles sounds awesome, and I’ve enjoyed the heck out of Sarah’s books so far.
Read a lot of sci-fi back in junior high (the ’60s and ’70s stuff, mostly), then got more into fantasy in high school, then into historical fiction, and then got kind of got out of the novel habit altogether by about 2010. (I still read voraciously, but it’s all short-form nonfiction on the interwebs.)
Why *did* I just stop reading fiction? Not entirely sure, but it didn’t help that almost every book I bought on a “this looks like it might be good” basis in the early 2k was not, in fact, good at all. (The state of the fantasy genre…maybe it’s changed by now, but yoicks. Just…yoicks.) Grad school was probably a factor, too; I didn’t have much time to read outside the seminars and my thesis.
Anyway, here’s to the winner and the nominees. And to READING.
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I’ve read A Kiss for Damocles and Storm Dragon, and enjoyed both. They are very different from each other. I enjoyed Dave Freer’s book more, but that might have to do with the moods I was in when I read each one.
Other than mil-sci-fi, I fell out of the genre in the early 2000s. I was burned too many times by what sounded interesting, then turned into “humans are bad, men are bad, we killed Earth with pollution and must atone for it” sorts of stories. Yuck. I found some fantasy that was OK, then started writing my own because, well, I ran out of fiction stuff to read.
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DANG! That’s a muscular Lady Liberty!
I love redheads, but she would hurt me!
And, CONGRATS to all those folks.
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You ain’t kidding. I didn’t notice before, but those are Man Muscles. 😅 Oh, well. The picture still did its job.
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This year, in particular, had exceptionally good nominees for the Prometheus Award. And there’s very little overlap with the mainstream science fiction community that competes for the Hugo and Nebula; the Prometheus Awards are more like the science fiction of the later twentieth century, before the literary critics moved in. Over the past few years, many of the older generation libertarian science fiction writers have died or stopped writing, but we seem to be having new ones emerging now, which is a good omen.
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Thank you, ma’am! And I’ll be the first to say that a certain lady with a diner who’s spent years refusing to bow to the Social Justice Mafia encouraged the hell out of me.
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I want a copy of that picture of the three of us. I don’t have Karl Gallagher’s contact, though!
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