Sequels are increasingly popular these days – especially within the fantastical or speculative genres of science fiction and fantasy.
Among this year’s recently announced five Prometheus Best Novel finalists are two sequels: Alliance Unbound and Beggar’s Sky.
Of the 11 2024 SF/fantasy novels nominated for this year’s 45th Best Novel award, four are sequels – including Shadow of the Smoking Mountain and Machine Vendetta.
Each sequel navigates a tricky balance between the fresh and the familiar.
Each can be enjoyed by newcomers as a stand-alone book. Yet, each is enriched by previous world-building and continuing characters that makes them rewarding for the author’s ongoing fans.
How each novel builds on its predecessors, or in some cases departs from them, varies in ways that help illuminate the appeal of sequels and their challenges.
Alliance Unbound is the sequel to Alliance Rising, which won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2020. It appears that this may be the second volume of a trilogy, as the final pages leave important issues unresolved.
Taken together, these novels form a prequel to Cherryh’s Alliance/Union series, one of the larger future histories in the past few decades. (It began in 1981 with Downbelow Station, which won her first Hugo Award for best novel.)
The crucial fact driving its events is scarcity.
There are only three planets with biospheres: Earth, Pell’s World, and Cyteen. Orbital habitats in other solar systems — notably Alpha Station, located at Barnard’s Star, where Alliance Rising was set — are ultimately dependent for supplies, especially biomass, on those three systems; Alliance Rising’s plot turned on Earth’s starving Alpha Station of resources to advance its own goals, and a key point in Alliance Unbound is the discovery of nearly priceless Earth goods on Downbelow Station, which orbits Pell’s World.
Cherryh and Fancher’s characters are well aware of such issues of scarcity and value, being interstellar merchants who spend their lives going from solar system to solar system, with holds full of high-value cargo and computer memories full of equally valuable data.
This year’s five Prometheus Best Novel finalists plausibly imagine everything from dystopian Earth scenarios sparked by authoritarian true-believer cults to more positive but challenging interstellar futures for humanity.
C.J. Cherryh, left, and Jane Fancher (Photo courtesy of Jane Fancher)
Works published in 2024 by C.J. Cherryh & Jane S. Fancher, Michael Flynn, Danny King, Wil McCarthy and Lionel Shriver will be competing for the 45th Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Two-time Prometheus winner Michael Flynn (File photo)
First presented in 1979, the Prometheus Awards have recognized hundreds of authors and a dizzying variety of works. This year’s slate of finalists embrace the old and the new.
Of these authors, British writer Danny King is new to our award, being recognized for the first time as a Best Novel finalist.
British writer Danny King (Creative Commons license)
Lionel Shriver, a Portugal-based American writer who’s lived in Nairobi, Bangkok, Belfast and London, is being recognized for the third time as a Best Novel finalist.
Wil McCarthy, and writing partners Cherryh and Fancher, each previously won a Prometheus Award, while Flynn (1947-2023) is a two-time previous Best Novel winner being recognized posthumously for what may be his last work.
Novelist Wil McCarthy (Photo courtesy of Baen Books)
In brief, here are this year’s Best Novel finalists, in alphabetical order by author: * Alliance Unbound, by C.J Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (DAW) * In the Belly of the Whale, by Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy) * Cancelled: The Shape of Things to Come, by Danny King (Annie Mosse Press) * Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books) * Mania, by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins Publishers)
Without a commitment to reading, the Prometheus Awards couldn’t have been sustained for 46 years. That commitment is about to be put to the test, once again.
To assist Prometheus voters, we offer below a few tips to enhance your reading habits amid life’s busy home and work demands.
This is a timely moment to offer such encouragement. After a considerable degree of reading, discussion and related efforts by the LFS’ two awards-finalist-judging committees over the past half year or more, we are now on the verge of entering the final stage of judging the Prometheus Awards.
A hidden threat to humanity’s independence and very existence energizes Machine Vendetta, one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Both an epic space opera and a detective-driven murder mystery, the Orbit US novel by British author Alastair Reynolds is of additional interest to freedom-loving SF fans because of the intriguing implications of its quasi-libertarian world-building.
A deft SF police procedural with a twisty plot and credible characters who have legitimate reasons to mistrust central authorities, Machine Vendetta gradually expands into a wider drama about a desperate struggle to preserve humanity’s freedom.
An illustration in Dave Freer’s novel Storm-Dragon (Image provided by author
Prometheus winner Dave Freer has a new novel coming out soon.
Storm-Dragon, to be published April 11, 2025, by Raconteur Press, is a relatively short novel (with illustrations) geared toward a young-adult audience – and especially targeted at boys and teenagers.
“It is my attempt at writing a Heinlein “Juvie” – a book aimed specifically at teen boys (not their scene) to get them interested in sf,” Freer said in an email from his home base Down Under in the Australian state of Tasmania.
Oh, what a brave new world Danny King charts in Cancelled – now a Best Novel finalist.
Framed initially as a visionary utopia that fully embraces love, inclusion, social justice, and a triumphant institutionalization of progressive-left politics maybe not that far beyond current norms, this New Britannia initially might seem appealing.
Yet, cracks inevitably appear in the facade, as hidden realities are revealed in this gripping SF-enhanced dystopian fable, one of 11 2024 novels nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Several Prometheus-recognized authors are included on New Scientist’s intriguing list of the 26 best science fiction/fantasy stories of all time.
Ray Bradbury (Creative Commons license)
E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” is the only story on the magazine’s list previously inducted into the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Hall of Fame. Yet, several other enduring and Prometheus-winning authors have classic stories on the magazine’s list – just not the ones our award has recognized.
Among them: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut.
It’s interesting to see which of their stories are recognized by the magazine, and why.
A genre-smashing, bestselling and award-winning novelist, Stuart Turton is widely hailed for his speculative tales of mystery, imagination and human complexity.
The Last Murder at the End of the World, one of 11 Prometheus Best Novel nominees from 2024 and the first work by Turton recognized by our awards, offers the satisfactions of several types of works in one strange but compelling hybrid.
It’s an ingenious murder mystery, an imaginative work of science fiction/fantasy, a suspenseful story of survival, a cautionary dystopian tale, a haunting memory piece and a gripping drama.
Lionel Shriver, arguably the world’s greatest living libertarian novelist, has found another timely subject worthy of her illuminating insight and piercing wit.
Living up to her iconoclastic reputation, the British-American novelist finds satirical, intensely dramatic and gut-wrenchingly personal dimensions to bring to life in Mania.
The cautionary fable depicts a slightly different but recognizable contemporary world where good intentions have gone terribly astray.
Set in the recent past and present but in a wryly revealing alternate history, Mania portrays an America taken over by a new ideology: the Mental Parity movement.
Warning: Any resemblances to any cultlike trends or movements of today or just yesterday are purely intentional.
