2026 Prometheus Awards announced

[Again, the relevance to this blog is that Illuminatus! won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, Robert Shea was involved with the Prometheus Award and I am currently one of the judges -- The Management.]

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 hourlong 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 Blog over 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.

Michael Johnson on RAW's memorable trips

A belladonna plant (Creative Commons photo, source). 

Michael Johnson has a new Substack issue out, "Robert Anton Wilson: Two Formative Drug Trips," with the usual careful research you expect when Michael writes about RAW. Here is a good observation:

"There seems something paradoxical about drug writing: reading about Bad Trips often seems more interesting than reading about Good Trips. Hey, I want all of your trips to be good ones: emotional breakthroughs, sudden realizations that change your life for the better, the feeling of being connected with everyone, every living thing, the biosphere, and the universe, all that really Good Stuff. But it’s at times not gripping reading. Bad trips very often, I find, make for a cracking good read. I read and I think of a line from DFW: well…here’s a supposedly fun thing I’ll never have to do. (He said “never do again” but ya know?)"

As I remark in the comments, the link Michael provides to an R.U. Sirius bad trip has some pretty memorable lines, e.g. when the hospital authorities look at his fake IDs: "Since the admission authorities knew I wasn't Ho Chi Minh, they figured the other ID must be the correct one. I was admitted as Frank Zappa." Also: "The arrival of the ambulance got the attention of my parents."

Lost Leary-Wilson book now available

 

Using the Timothy Leary archives at the New York Public Library, Bobby Campbell has made available a lost book, The Periodic Table of Energy, by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. 

A download of the PDF and Bobby's explanation of how he recovered the document and made it available can be found at Bobby's post at the Only Maybe blog. Note that it's a hefty file, 158 MB. The cover, which I show above, was created by Bobby.

Discussing the manuscript, Bobby writes, "I haven't done a detailed comparison yet, but from a decent skimming of these pages and my memory of The Game of Life and Info-Psychology, I would say The Periodic Table of Energy represents a distinct formulation of Leary's ideas, though clearly early drafts of concepts that he would revisit, and further develop, in later works."

In the first comment, quackenbush writes, "This is definitely a proto version of the Game of Life, an occult transmission, and not a proto-Exo-psychology, which is more of 'scientific' presentation. Curiously, he lists other books, and it appears that 'Interstellar Neurogenetics' is the proto-Exo-Psychology."

More information here. 

A Grateful Dead history

 

The Grateful Dead in 1970. Public domain publicity photo, source. 

Despite getting a strong recommendation from Tracey Harms to check it out, it took me awhile to get to the "Dark Star" by the Grateful Dead episode in Andrew Hickey's  A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast. In podcast form, it's four hours and 39 minutes long. I saved myself considerable time by reading the transcript, available at the link.

Tracey mentioned that it would give me background on the California  milieu of Robert Anton Wilson, and in fact Wilson is mentioned in the podcast. While the song "Dark Star" is duly covered, the podcast in fact is a long history of the band.

I am not particularly a Grateful Dead fan -- I did the bulk of my listening to the Dead when I was in high school and college, before 1980, because I had friends who listened to the records -- but I thought the podcast was very interesting, and I read the whole thing. Some fine research. I had no idea, for example, that two members of the band, Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten, had ties to modern classical music and knew Steve Reich. Even as a transcript it took quite a bit of time to get through the podcast, but I read it eagerly. 

Before offering another theory on why Silicon Valley became such a technology powerhouse -- because so much defense spending was focused there -- host Andrew Hickey offers this:

"Many people who were influential on the Californian ideology, like the postmodernist science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson, would argue that if you plotted a timeline of the most innovative people in human history, that timeline would slowly move west and slightly north, accelerating over the centuries, as the most radical thinkers followed the Sun, so in the last few centuries the greatest innovations had come from Greece, then Italy, then France, then England, then New York, and then finally the West Coast of the USA. According to Wilson and his friends like Timothy Leary, now that wave had finally reached the Pacific there was only one place left to go, and so humanity would fulfill its manifest destiny and head up into the stars."

Jerry Garcia was only 53 when he died after years of neglecting his health. The story is very sad. The band should have let him stop touring and get his life together. I plan to check out more episodes of the ongoing podcast and if you get interested in it, you can get bonus episodes by supporting Andrew Hickey on his Patreon. 

'The Classical Style' reading group, week seven

 

II  THE CLASSICAL STYLE 

2.  Structure and Ornament 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

The references to Rossini on page 101 makes me think of the popularity of his “The Barber of Seville” in the mid-twentieth century from Bugs Bunny in “The Rabbit of Seville” to Alfalfa of the Little Rascals singing “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro”. Joseph Kerman has written about how people have complained about the “death” of classical music for over a hundred years. Kerman notes that classical music survives, but often not in the way some people wish it would. In his wonderful (non-technical) book  Opera and the Morbidity of Music Kerman notes the surprising revival of the popularity of opera in the 1990’s and the popularity of the Three Tenors and the CD Chant. 

The discussion of ornamentation in this chapter makes me think about popular music in the last forty years, especially post-Mariah Carey, post-Whitney Houston singing, where singers typically add more ornamentation than in the music of the seventies and eighties. Watching American Idol in the 2000’s I noticed how young singers tended to add way more ornamentation than I tended to like. I think about changing performance styles of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.  

I love the Heisenbergian tone of pg. 104, with Rosen’s uncertainty about how to find an accurate interpretation of music especially when it comes to knowing what kind of ornamentation Mozart would have liked in the slow movements of his piano concerti. 

The first 108 pages of this book have laid the groundwork for appreciating the classical style. We have  reached the top of the roller coaster. Enjoy the ride!  

Erik Satie, surrealist composer?

A portrait of Erik Satie by the artist Santiago Rusiñol.

When I recently read The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore, I was pleased but a bit surprised to see Erik Satie as practically the only composer who gets much attention in the book. Satie is described as a Surrealist composer and his music is recommended for one of the magical workings the authors describe.

Erik Satie (1866-1922), is a kind of ambiguous figure in the history of classical music. On the one hand, he isn't terribly famous. He doesn't get a huge amount of airplay on classical music radio. He is not an international superstar composer in the way that French contemporaries such as Debussy and Ravel were.

On the other hand, it is hard to exaggerate how influential he is on modern classical music. The Wikipedia bio gives some sense of this, but there is a good explanation in Virtual Music, a book that the modern American composer William Duckworth (1943-2012) gave to me years ago. Duckworth explains that Satie was a big influence on John Cage, who in turn influenced many other composers (such as Duckworth). 

Satie, for example, invented "furniture  music," music to be played in the background, rather like Brian Eno's ambient music. It was written for the two intermission of a play, and when members of the audience stopped talking and began to listen, Satie ran around saying, "Talk, keep on talking. And move around. Whatever you do, don't listen!"

Satie's titles for his music included "Desiccated Embryos," "Veritable Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)" and "Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear," the latter written after  his buddy Debussy told him his music lacked shape. Duckworth doesn't mention this, but doesn't that sound like the kinds of titles Frank Zappa has for much of his music?

Duckworth also relates that Satie wrote a short piano piece called "Vexations"  and directed it be played 840 times. John Cage organized the first concert to carry that out, in 1963; it took more than 18 hours. There have been other such concerts  since then, see this Alex Ross piece. 

Satie is mostly known for his piano music,  but he also also wrote a ballet called "Parade," which featured sets and costumes designed by Picasso. I saw a video clip when I attended a Picasso exhibition a few months ago at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the absurd costumes did give the performance a Surrealist air.

Bonus link: My new Substack piece on "Five modern composers you should know."  I mention Duckworth, and if you don't know what the "angel music" is that was used to comfort dying AIDS patients, you might want to read my article. 

A Picasso costume from "Parade"

Schism in the Catholic Church

Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, Paris, occupied by the SSPX since 1977, Wikipedia says (public domain photo).

If you follow the news, you have have noticed that the Catholic Church has excommunicated six bishops in the ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), e.g. the "Latin mass folks." 

Eric Wagner, the author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson and Straight Outta Dublin: James Joyce and Robert Anton Wilson (the latter with Michael Johnson) wrote to me and suggested I mention the news:

"Bob wrote a ton about challenges within the Catholic Church in the 1970's surrounding the P2 conspiracy and the death of Pope John Paul I. The SSPX schixm, which goes back to the 1960's and Vatican II, makes me think about the whole history of the Catholic Church during our lifetimes. Also, the conservative group Opus Dei got some press when the Da Vinci Code movie came out, and it seems like Dan Brown read Bob Wilson. I don't know how all these puzzle pieces fit together." 

What we read last month

A Hilaritas Press book, information here. 

Mark K. Brown's reads and re-reads in June:

Elevated: Cannabis as a Tool for Mind Enhancement by Sebastian Marincolo  6/6 
The Neutronium Alchemist, Part 2: Conflict  by Peter F. Hamilton  6/13   
Mount Analogue by Rene Daumal  6/16   
Writing on Drugs by Sadie Plant  6/17   
Out of the Dead City by Samuel R. Delany  6/21   
The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster   6/24

What I read (or re-read) last month:

The Amazing Editorials, Ted White
Roman Conquests: Britain, Simon  Elliott
The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, Alan Moore and Steve  Moore
New Hampshire, Robert Frost

Feel free to share in the comments what you read  in June. 

An obituary mentions RAW

Annabelle "Joanne" Bates

An obituary for a lady named Annabelle “Joanne” Bates, 98, a resident of Norfolk News in Virginia, captures my attention with this line:

"In 1987, Joanne hosted author Robert Anton Wilson during his visit to the area, who loved her crab cakes."

Perhaps that is another sign that Wilson has not been forgotten since his death in 2007? 

Maybe Day is drawing near

Just a reminder that Maybe Day, e.g. July 23, is drawing near, and Bobby Campbell is inviting everyone to post something cool and perhaps host or attend a public event. Bobby will be holding an exhibition of his own artwork in Wilmington, Delaware. Bobby also is planning a 24-hour broadcast. 

Here is my previous post, and here is Bobby's Maybe Day website.

I am planning a couple of special articles, I hope some of you will like them. I am planning on posting them that day. 

Scott Sumner on cannabis legalization

Photo from Unsplash 

While cannabis legalization has been an ongoing trend in the United States, there has also been a backlash -- voters in Massachusetts apparently will be asked this fall whether to roll back legalization. 

So it caught my eye when Scott Sumner, one of my favorite Substack bloggers, argued in favor of legalization (some of this may be behind a paywall): 

"The partial legalization of pot has been a big success. We should embrace that success by doing further pot legalization in other states and at the federal level."

His piece (second item) begins, 

"I cannot prove this, but I strongly suspect that drug addiction in America is on the way down. Here are my claims; you tell me if I’m mistaken:

1. There is less alcoholism than in the past

2. Smoking is declining fairly dramatically

3. Opioid drug abuse is declining

4. Marijuana abuse is increasing

'Now I’d like you to consider two different social science hypotheses and tell me which one better fits the data:

1. Pot is a “gateway drug”, which leads to even more harmful forms of drug abuse.

2. Pot is a substitute for other types of drugs, and legalizing pot would tend to reduce other (more serious) forms of drug abuse."

He also writes, "Before pot was legalized, we were told that two things would happen. It was claimed that pot use among teenagers would increase. It was claimed that legalizing pot would lead to increased crime. Neither of those things happened."

There's more, but I don't want to quote too much behind the paywall.

Sumner's piece brings up something that's been bothering me. I keep reading scare stories about cannabis in outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, feeding the backlash.

Obviously, cannabis has its drawbacks from a health standpoint. But still (1) there is a difference between moderate use and being stoned 24-7, every day,  and (2) the anti-weed pieces never put the issue in perspective by discussing other substances, such as alcohol, which by itself kills about 178,000 people in the U.S. every year. 

'The Classical Style' reading group, week six

Joseph Haydn in England in 1791 (John Hoppner painting)

The Classical Style: Part II – THE CLASSICAL STYLE 

1.The Coherence of the Musical Language 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

This chapter title makes think of how Aristotle and Aquinas’s ideas of coherence influenced Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

Foreshadowing: In the last chapter of this book Rosen discusses a piece by Schumann that alludes to the final song in Beethoven’s “An Die Ferne Geliebte”, “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder”. I plan to listen to his song a few times a week for the next hundred days so that I can hopefully recognize the allusion when we reach the final chapter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsgS3I1NORY&list=RDRsgS3I1NORY&start_radio=1 

For anyone struggling a bit with this text, I suspect it will get easier when we get to the Haydn chapters. In these early chapters, Rosen deals with a wide variety of music from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries discussing topics like ”The Coherence of the Style”. When he focuses on one set of pieces by one composer, I think things will make more sense. I think books like this reward rereading because they cover such large topics, and I think Rosen covers them very well.  

Pg. 68: Rosen says of the classical style that “a single movement longer than twenty minutes is beyond its reach,” but the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony tends to run over 24 minutes. 

July 4, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Pg. 94 mentions “the ferment that followed the American Revolution.” I feel this book suits the troubled times of 2026, I feel grateful for the people reading along with us. 

An Australian historian on conspiracy theory -- and Carl Oglesby

 Perhaps this might be of interest to Illuminatus! fans? Jesse Walker, an expert on the subject himself, pens a review of The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg. declaring the book " the most original study of the subject to come along in years."

McKenzie-McHarg, an Austalian historian, researches the history of the term "conspiracy theory" and related terms. But Jesse adds, "But this book is also about what we mean by such terms, and how those different meanings have intersected with one another."

As Jesse writes, McKenzie-McHarg finds an actual Illuminati double agent. "Convinced that the secret society was still active in the 1790s—or, at the very least, convinced that it was useful to have people believe the Illuminati were still active—Grolman decided to form a secret 'counter-association' against that 'devilish union.' "

The book also has a chapter  on Carl Oglesby, the historian discussed by Robert Anton Wilson who discussed recent American history as a battle between competing conspiracies, the Yankees and the Cowboys. 

More here. 

And I have a bonus link:  LitHub has just published McKenzie-McHarg's chapter on Carl Oglesby from the book! Or at least an article adapted from the book. So if  you've read what RAW wrote about Oglesby, you can read an interesting article. Carl Oglesby's son pops  up in the comments. 

Jesse's own book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, remains available. 

Mr. McKenzie-McHarg's internet biographies are (perhaps appropriately)  confusing, but the just-published Lit Hub article says he is at the "Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome." 

Footnote: Jesse Walker says the LitHub piece is "was based on the chapter but is far from the whole thing."