Comments: In 1984 Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 was honored by the Libertarian Futurist Society as a Hall of Fame selection for the Prometheus Awards. This seems to me to highlight one of the inherent tensions contained in the Prometheus Awards. Bradbury's novel is thought by many to express an anti-censorship theme (although Bradbury seems to have had different ideas), which is more or less in line with libertarian thought, but it is by no means a view that is exclusive to libertarians, and is held by large numbers of people who are not only not friendly to libertarians, they are actively hostile to them. But in order to have worthwhile honorees, the Prometheus Awards have to cast their net so broadly that they catch not only works of libertarian fiction, but works that are so tangentially related to libertarian fiction that the paucity of high quality work in the subgenre is revealed.
Best Novel
The Rainbow Cadenza by J. Neil Schulman
Other Nominees:
Double Crossing by Erika Holzer
The Nagasaki Vector by L. Neil SmithOrion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson
Thendara House by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Hall of Fame
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George OrwellOther Nominees:
None
Go to previous year's nominees: 1983
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1985
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