Comments: The interesting thing about the 2015 list of nominees for the Prometheus Award is not who is on it, but rather who is not. Even though the set of authors that make up the core proponents of the "Sad Puppies" very clearly view themselves as being on the libertarian side of the spectrum (and in some cases they have inserted segments into their books that are clearly pandering to Prometheus Award voters), and yet, there is zero overlap between the set of books they promoted for the 2015 Hugo Award and the set of books that were chosen as finalists for the 2015 Prometheus Award. In short, despite sharing an ideological bent with many of the authors promoted by the Puppies, the Libertarian Futurist Society didn't see fit to even consider honoring any of the novels that were pushed for the Hugo ballot with a Prometheus Award nomination. If the Puppy slate is in fact about recognizing good books that the Hugo Awards have overlooked because they are supposedly ideologically biased, why is it that the works on the Puppy slates have been, with some rare exceptions, pretty much ignored by all of the other genre related awards? In fact, no one making decisions regarding other awards has seemed to think the stories promoted by any iteration of the Puppy slates have been worth nominating. It would be one thing if the works favored by the Puppies were getting nominated for many other awards while being snubbed solely by the Hugo voters. But they haven't. They have been ignored by all the major awards because they simply aren't good enough.
Note: Locus Online listed Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold as a Hall of Fame nominee for this year. However, Falling Free was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2014, which means this supposed nomination confuses me because I don't think the book can be inducted again. I have omitted the nomination for the book from this list.
Best Novel
Influx by Daniel Suarez
Other Nominees:
A Better World by Marcus Sakey
Raising Steam by Terry PratchettThe Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)
Hall of Fame
'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellison
Other Nominees:
As Easy as A.B.C. by Rudyard Kipling
Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury
Sam Hall by Poul Anderson
Go to previous year's nominees: 2014
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2016
Book Award Reviews Home
The Prometheus award is a lot more selective than just libertarian literature. "Founded in 1982 to provide encouragement to science fiction writers whose books examine the meaning of freedom..."
ReplyDelete@Charles Patterson: You've essentially described libertarian science fiction.
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