Tuesday, December 31, 1991

1991 Prometheus Award Nominees

Location: Unknown.

Comments: Through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, the members of the Libertarian Futurist Society seem to have been playing a game with themselves. They repeatedly nominated works like Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Levin's This Perfect Day, and Zamyatin's We, and then turned around and voted for books like Wilson's An Enemy of the State to be inducted into the Prometheus Award Hall of Fame. This pattern seems to me to be the result of the voters nominating works that they think they should be reading, but when the time came to vote for the winner, they voted for the books they were actually reading, leading to a collection of high-quality nominees losing out to an array of mediocre winners.

Best Novel

Winner:
In the Country of the Blind by Michael F. Flynn

Other Nominees:
The Cybernetic Shogun by Victor Milán
The Tery by F. Paul Wilson
Under the Yoke by S.M. Stirling
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

Hall of Fame

Winner:
An Enemy of the State by F. Paul Wilson

Other Nominees:
Circus World by Barry B. Longyear
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
This Perfect Day by Ira Levin
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Go to previous year's nominees: 1990
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 1992

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