Westmoreland County Native Wins Science Fiction’s Prometheus Award

 

A Gulf War veteran, Pierce has said his fiction is shaped directly by where he’s from. His writing focuses on blue-collar characters, rural life, hard choices, and the indomitable spirit he saw in Western Pennsylvania’s mill and coal towns.

 

A Kiss for Damocles follows Shaifennen Roehe, a young homesteader on a war-scarred colony world who becomes an unlikely catalyst for her community’s survival: not the “chosen one”, just someone in the right place with the right instincts at the right moment. It’s the first book in Pierce’s “Tales from the Long Night” universe, which continues with The Warlord of Greenline Town and the newly released Stormjammer.

 

“I’ve lived a lot of places, but I’ve always come back to Southwestern PA,” said Pierce. “2 a.m. fries at The O, coffee at The Beehive, chestnuts roasted outside Delallo’s, and fresh maple sugar from the sugar camps in Meyersdale…this region settles into your bones, and bits come out in my stories sometimes. For me, old brick buildings and rust aren’t the sign of dead or dying towns, they’re history that helped build the foundations of Greenline Town and Twelvety Homestead.”

 

The Prometheus Award has been presented annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society since 1982, honoring science fiction and fantasy that explores themes of individual liberty. Past winners include Neal Stephenson, Poul Anderson, Vernor Vinge, Terry Pratchett, and Cory Doctorow.

 

Pierce is published by Raconteur Press, a three-year-old independent press based in Texas that has worked with more than 400 authors across adult fiction, anthologies, and its Boy’s Adventure line.

 

The Prometheus Awards will be presented at the Libertarian Futurist Society’s annual online ceremony, open to the public, on Sunday afternoon Aug. 16, 2026.

 

A Kiss for Damocles is available in paperback and ebook at Amazon and in paperback at IngramSpark.

 

 

Raconteur Press is a Texas-based independent publisher founded in 2022. The press publishes genre fiction anthologies, novels, and a Boys’ Adventure line, with all books unapologetically designed to entertain. Raconteur operates on a philosophy of radical transparency, publishing sample contracts publicly and sharing its operational playbook openly with the indie publishing community. Learn more at raconteurpress.substack.com.

 

 

The Libertarian Futurist Society is a nonprofit organization dedicated to honoring science fiction and fantasy that explores themes of individual liberty. The Prometheus Award has been presented annually since 1982. Learn more at lfs.org.

 

 

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