Annal:1983 Prometheus Award for Best Novel

Voyage From Yesteryear

James P. Hogan

• 1983 Prometheus winner
• Score: 10.33

As nuclear war looms, a probe has discovered an Earthlike planet waiting with open biosphere; and the Americans launch a crash project to colonize Chiron. Science can’t yet transport living humans between stars, but it can send DNA codes to become children who will be raised by humanlike robots. Amazingly, it works. The colonists are everything their home-planet could hope for—except that they really mean it about all that liberty stuff. But now the Earthmen have had their war, survived, rebuilt—and sent ships to Chiron. They’re the government. They’ve come to help. But the colonials have such an attitude.

Friday

Robert A. Heinlein

• 1983 Hugo-Novel nominee
• 1983 Prometheus finalist
• 1982 Nebula nominee
• Score: 18.33

Friday is a secret courier. She is employed by a man known to her only as “Boss.” Operating from and over a near-future Earth, where chaos is the happy norm, she finds herself on assignment at Boss’s seemingly whimsical behest. From New Zealand to Canada, from one to another of the new states of America’s disunion, she keeps her balance nimbly with quick, expeditious solutions to one calamity and scrape after another.

Not since Valentine Michael Smith, hero of the bestselling Stranger in a Strange Land, has Robert Heinlein created a more captivating protagonist. Friday proves once again why Robert Heinlein’s novels have sold more than 50 million copies, have won countless awards, and have earned him the title of Grand Master of Science Fiction.

“Friday is a Superbeing…. Engineered from the finest genes, and trained to be a secret courier in a future world of chaotic ferocity and intrigue, she can think better and make love better than any of the normal people around her.” —The New York Times Book Review

Fire Dancer

Ann Maxwell

• 1983 Prometheus finalist
• Score: 6.33

 

The Many-Colored Land

Julian May

• 1983 Prometheus finalist
• 1982 Hugo-Novel nominee
• 1982 Mythopoeic-Adult finalist
• 1981 Nebula nominee
• Score: 24.33

When a one-way time tunnel to Earth’s distant past, specifically six million B.C., was discovered by folks on the Galactic Milieu, every misfit for light-years around hurried to pass through it. Each sought his own brand of happiness. But none could have guessed what awaited them. Not even in a million years….

Oath of Fealty

Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

• 1983 Prometheus finalist
• Score: 6.33

A few years after tomorrow, above a ruined Los Angeles where crime, violence, pollution and poverty rule the streets, a Utopia rises.

Todos Santos. A thousand-foot-high single structured city. The perfect blend of technology and humanism, offering its priviledged dwellers everything they could want in exchange for the oath of allegiance and their constant surveillance.

But there are those who would see Utopia destroyed. Those who would tear down the hope of tomorrow in violent act after violent act. And they have just entered Todos Santos.