First Dragon Awards Presented

Dragon Con announced the winners of the inaugural Dragon Awards at a ceremony on September 4 emceed by Bill Fawcett.

John C. Wright, Larry Correia, Terry Pratchett and Naomi Novik were among the winners.

In terms of victories for publishing houses, Vox Day’s Castalia House picked up two awards, Baen, Tor and Del Rey one each, and a self-published book won.

Sad Puppy Declan Finn was shut out again – though only because Superversive’s Brian Niemeier won the category they were both nominated for.

Best Science Fiction Novel

  • Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm, John C. Wright (Castalia House)

Best Fantasy Novel

  • Son of the Black Sword, Larry Correia (Baen)

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel

  • The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry Pratchett (Harper)

Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel

  • Hell’s Foundations Quiver, David Weber (Tor)

Best Alternate History Novel

  • League of Dragons, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

Best Apocalyptic Novel

  • Ctrl Alt Revolt!, Nick Cole (Castalia House)

Best Horror Novel

  • Souldancer, Brian Niemeier (Self-published)

Best Comic Book

  • Ms. Marvel

Best Graphic Novel

  • The Sandman: Overture, Neil Gaiman & J.H. Williams III (Vertigo)

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series

  • Game of Thrones

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie

  • The Martian

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy PC / Console Game

  • Fallout 4 by Bethesda Softworks

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Mobile Game

  • Fallout Shelter by Bethesda Softworks

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Board Game

  • Pandemic: Legacy by ZMan Games

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Miniatures / Collectible Card / Role-Playing Game

  • Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game (7th Edition) by Chaosium Inc.

Fran Wilde posted a photo of the awards ready to be given out.

Ray Radlein made a funny. (There was no category File 770  could have been nominated in.)

591 thoughts on “First Dragon Awards Presented

  1. This conversation has reminded me of the embarrassingly long amount of time I thought Tracy Hickman was female.

    Not SF, but I woke in the middle of the night to hear an interview with a US politician called Lindsey Graham, saying disrespectful things about Mr Trump. Apparently also not female. Who knew?

    ETA: Checks Wikipedia. Apparently his parents are Millie and Florence. What is this things of Americans calling boy children by girls names?

  2. I read a few Dragonlance books (I still have my 1st printings of the original trilogy) and some Forgotten Realms, and even a few Greyhawk, but the problem I ultimately had with the D&D books (and most other tie-in fiction, for that matter), was that I’d pick up a book from the shelf, and based on the back cover copy it’d be exactly the sort of thing that I wanted to read, but then I’d flip through the opening section or a few random pages in the middle, and the actual words-on-pages writing was … not good.

    In recent years I’ve had better luck — found some decent Warhammer novels, and I’ve enjoyed the Pathfinder tie-ins I’ve read, and some of the D&D Eberron books were reasonably entertaining.

  3. I’ve seen quite a lot of Baen books in Glasgow. Forbidden Planet has lots, some other comic shop used to have a lot of them, Waterstones has some.

    Have to say despite not liking his online persona at all, I’m kind of interested in Wright because I’ve seen some indication that he can be good.

    James Stoddard praised one of Wright’s earlier books on his site but appears to have left that mention off his redesigned site.
    Raphael Ordonez praised Wright’s Null A sequel.
    I haven’t read fiction by either of these authors but I’ve heard only good things and Ordonez writes a very insightful blog including a few posts defending abstract art against a very unreasonable Wright.

    If editors like Mike Allen, John Joseph Adams, GRR Martin, Dozois and Hartwell put Wright in their anthologies, he can’t be completely incompetent surely?

    I know there’s probably hundreds of writers I would enjoy more but his case still interests me.

  4. ETA: Checks Wikipedia. Apparently his parents are Millie and Florence. What is this things of Americans calling boy children by girls names?

    Many names that are now regarded as “girl” names used to be boy names or unisex names: Stacy, Tracy, Lindsay, Ashley, Addison, Aubrey, Beverly, Hillary, Kendall, Leigh, Lesley, McKenzie, Shelly, and so on. Most “crossed over” from being primarily male names to being primarily girl names in the twentieth century.

    Lindsay Graham is a southerner. In the southern U.S. many wealthy families have naming traditions in which people are named for an older relative, which has served to keep older versions of names alive longer. I went to school at a boarding school that was populated primarily by the children of wealthy southerners. I had a lot of classmates who had archaic names followed by a number like III or IV.

  5. If editors like Mike Allen, John Joseph Adams, GRR Martin, Dozois and Hartwell put Wright in their anthologies, he can’t be completely incompetent surely?

    As a rule of thumb, the older a book by JCW is, the better it is likely to be. He started out looking like a kind of promising author, and his work has generally slid downhill in quality since the early years.

  6. JCW found God and lost his talent recently.

    The Golden Oecumene (yes I had to look up the spelling) trilogy isn’t bad – there are a few head on desk moments but the ideas are widescreen enough. That was 14 years ago though. Lead character is a libertarian ass (though, to be fair, so is the society) and female characters are disposable, however.

  7. Never really got into RPGs (until post Baldur’s Gate CRPGs anyway), but was an avid reader of Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms. Never heard of Mr Elmore.

    Baen does get stocked in the more international bookseller chains – Weber, Bujold, Flint as the mainstays, and a handful of ancillary ones. The domestic shops and franchises don’t really have them available. Mind you, for the latter, SF is primarily tie-in and George RR Martin

    In all honesty, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Correia on the shelves in any bookshop, and that kinda confused me when he was referred to as a top seller. I’ll take a look when I’m back in office next week.

  8. Non-gamer, big reader of SFF in the 80s and 90s – I never picked up a Dragonlance book. I just now looked up the cover art on the first one, and it looks like something aimed at gamers, not me, so I am not surprised that I never picked one up.

  9. I got into Feist for a bit after Betrayal at Krondor came out (which he later novelized, but at the time was a CRPG set in his novel universe). I eventually tired of him as a writer, but I really liked the game and the world for a while.

  10. In all honesty, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Correia on the shelves in any bookshop, and that kinda confused me when he was referred to as a top seller. I’ll take a look when I’m back in office next week.

    I’m sure Correia’s response, short version, would be: “THAT’S BECAUSE ALL MY BOOKS HAVE SOLD OUT!!! I’M A BESTSELLING, AWARD-WINNING WRITER THAT’S MORE POPULAR THAN ALL OF YOU LOSERS, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”

    Or something like that.

    I also hear Trump’s voice when I read it. Sheesh.

  11. @ NickPheas

    [re: Lindsey Graham] ETA: Checks Wikipedia. Apparently his parents are Millie and Florence. What is this things of Americans calling boy children by girls names?

    (resident name geek checks in again)

    Lindsey and Florence are not “girls names” in any linguistic sense. Neither is Kimberley or Meredith. Similarly, the supposed gender distinction between “Frances” and “Francis” is unhistorical. But one of the interesting features of at least American naming is that once a name given to both genders achieves a threshold level of use for girls, it becomes identified as “essentially feminine” in some fashion and typically rapidly falls out of use for boys.

    My perception is that this phenomenon is less common in Britain, where there may be more awareness of the historic scope of names (rather than viewing them more strongly in terms of snapshot contemporary use). But I could be entirely wrong about that.

  12. In all honesty, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Correia on the shelves in any bookshop, and that kinda confused me when he was referred to as a top seller.

    Correia gets a lot of love at the Barnes & Noble here. It seems like the store always stocks four or five of his Monster Hunter books and other Baen authors are also well-represented. I wonder if it’s because we’re close to Jacksonville, which has a big Navy port.

  13. British name assumptions, from Aaron’s list, though somewhat off the cuff.

    Stacy, Tracy, Lindsay, Ashley, Addison, Aubrey, Beverly, Hillary, Kendall, Leigh, Lesley, McKenzie, Shelly,

    Ashley is relatively common and could be either. Hilary and Leigh (see also Lee) somewhat less common, can be either, slight female leaning.
    Stacy, Tracy, Lindsay, Beverly, Shelly – female only.
    Aubrey – male only
    Lesley is female, Leslie, pronounced the same is male.
    Addison, Kendall, McKenzie – these are surnames, not first names.

    Parents apparently had friends at university who were Leslie (or perhaps Lesley) and Hillary, and they could never remember which was which.
    I did have an elderly distant cousin Sally who was male.

  14. I’ll just point out that the list I gave was from a mostly American perspective. All of them have seen use as first names in the U.S., either as unisex names or male names in the past, and as female names now.

    For the record, I have a cousin named Kendall and a niece named McKenzie.

  15. NickPheas, Lesley is female, Leslie, pronounced the same is male.

    Interesting. The gender coding in America is backwards from that; if I saw a “Lesley” I’d assume male, and “Leslie” I’d assume female, absent other information. Probably because the male Lesley that I know spells it differently from the female Leslies that I’ve know.

  16. @Peter Sylvester: “I would argue that people who name the publisher, but not the designer/author of their nominated games, is not really a gamer – but that may just be me…” Well, that gets into “Robin Laws, Rob Heinsoo, and I were swapping letters following up on fanzine comments when Robin was working at a video store after college and Rob was still struggling with his anthropology degree” and “I edited and developed Chuck Wendig’s first published writing” (for added enrage-Puppies value!). 🙂

  17. Unisex names – the novelist Evelyn Waugh’s first marriage was to Evelyn Gardner.

    Of Nick Pheas’s list, I have a male cousin called Lindsay, and the palaeontologist Beverley Halstead was pretty definitely male. And I’ve also come across McKenzie (or possibly Mackenzie) used as a given name (female).

  18. (is is possible I have my Leslies backwards. And that the rule’s so freaking obscure that it’s been lost.)

  19. Once upon a time my family was on vacation in Vermont, and the folks in a nearby cabin had a son named Hunter John and a daughter named Connor Mackenzie.

    I don’t know why these WASPs can’t give their children normal, respectable names, like Menachem Mendel and Chayya Mushka.

  20. Every now and then I hear a name I associate with horny handed miners or balding grocers used by an American woman and I have to stop and recalibrate. Just because Reece Witherspoon uses a variant spelling did not make the name any less jarring for me. as for things like Bronwynne. How can you stick a male ending on a female name than give it to women? Cats and Dogs Living together! Still I expect the Russians feel the same about Sasha.

  21. Scotland sees a lot of nominal surnames used as forenames: Cameron, Campbell and Menzies (pronounced Ming-ess)

    Doubling up of female names seemed to be a West of Scotland thing for a time too: Lesley-Anne and definitely not either Lesley or Anne.

  22. Larry Correia is a bestselling author in the US. That he isn’t elsewhere might have more to do with Baen’s generally poor distribution than anything else, but that’s not provable. And I realized yesterday that I’ve never read any of the Liaden or other Baen books because the eye-searingly awful covers signal “junk inside.” Someone must have highly recommended or shared Bujold to get me to overcome that bias. Also, as I think was true of someone else, I never read a Dragonlance book precisely because they were shelved in their own section and looked remarkably like special interest publications (I suspect I thought they were DM handbooks or something).

    @Simeon Beresford – Must say I was amused at the reactions of people defending their nerdhood after accusations that they were not gamers. No one likes to be called a fake geek.

    Maybe. Or maybe someone was being wrong on the internet. Me, I’m female, so my credentials have been checked with tiresome regularity and any impulse I ever had to argue was worn away decades ago.

  23. every time I look at those Dragon Awards I think, “Come on WFA it’s not that difficult.”

  24. Ctrl Alt Revolt! was (and remains) self-published by Mr. Cole back in February; the print editions from CH appeared in midsummer.

  25. I actually knew perfectly well who Elmore was, but I was on the art side (and read a lot of Dragonlance as a kid.) He did a couple of non-TSR book covers, but the only one that I remember was the rather strange novel “Heroing.” (Mostly what I remember is the cover of Shadowrun second edition!)

    Honestly, if we’re going with “everywhere In the Eighties” as artist qualifier, I’d have gone with the late great Keith Parkinson.

  26. I took a break from lurking here after the Hugos, but I find myself back anyway. Anyway, this is to explain that I’m asking a question about something discussed a couple of days ago: does the Safehold series have as many annoying infodumps about politics and how anyone who supports any sort of progressive tax structure, let alone an effort to do any sort of redistribution of wealth is either a dupe or a plant? I really liked the Honor books when I first read them, but I find the only one I can really re-read is Echoes of Honor, as it contains only a minimal section praising the virtues of unrestricted capitalism as a universal good that will lift all boats and not harm even the smallest kitten.

  27. I admit to still being amused by George R.R. Martin’s description of Elmore’s “accountants at a RenFaire” style. But that points at something that is good about his work: he does have some more body diversity than many fantasy artists.

  28. To correct the little anecdote I entered yesterday about flawed Baen copy editing: The book I was thinking of is Mission: Tomorrow, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. On the back cover there is a selection of praise from reviewers for books edited by “Thomas Bryan Schmidt”, i.e. the order of the names is flipped but they’re not misspelled.

    The theme of the book is near-future, non-NASA space exploration. It actually looks like it might be fun. I may buy a copy.

  29. @RedWombat

    Michael Whalen I think of as The cover artist of the 80s/90s.

    Elmore also did illustrations for the first couple of novels in the Shannara series, which were pretty big and ended up in a lot of fantasy art compilations. If you were into fantasy and/or gaming, there’s a pretty good chance that you’d recognize his work, even if you didn’t know him specifically.

  30. Chris S on September 7, 2016 at 7:24 am said:
    JCW found God and lost his talent recently.

    The Golden Oecumene (yes I had to look up the spelling) trilogy isn’t bad – there are a few head on desk moments but the ideas are widescreen enough. That was 14 years ago though. Lead character is a libertarian ass (though, to be fair, so is the society) and female characters are disposable, however.

    I remember that I read and enjoyed The Last Guardian of Everness when it came out in 2007, high fantasy with a nod to the classics, maybe a little clunky in places but overall the kind of thing I’m likely to like.
    As I recall, and it’s going back a ways, the second volume just didn’t work for me, achieving not so much I don’t care about these characters, as these characters actively creep me out.
    I think it just didn’t feel comfortable to be in the protagonist’s head, which tended to retroactively kill the first volume, so the pair of them went off to the library sale at some point.
    Life is too short to revisit them in order to work out more closely what it was that put me off.
    I looked at another of his series – Chaos? – but didn’t bite.

    So, if you are curious, yeah, you might take a look at some of his earlier work.
    They aren’t as self-indulgent as the current lot.
    But a head full of his more recent stuff from reader packets, though, might affect how the earlier stuff reads, since his current issues (stiff characters, verbosity, message fiction) are all there from the beginning.

  31. IanP on September 7, 2016 at 9:20 am said:
    Scotland sees a lot of nominal surnames used as forenames: Cameron, Campbell and Menzies (pronounced Ming-ess)

    Doubling up of female names seemed to be a West of Scotland thing for a time too: Lesley-Anne and definitely not either Lesley or Anne.

    That’s interesting. The U.S. South (Southeast, really) has a lot of double names, to the point they get made fun of by non-Southerners. (Insert rant about anti-Southern bigotry and assumptions of stupidity here.) The South also attracted a lot of Scots settlers back in the day, though I don’t know what part of Scotland they came from, or if it was from all over. Maybe that’s where the naming habit came from.

    My Dad’s family does the surname as forename thing, too. My father’s name is Randolph after an old family name, and it’s very common to preserve female line surnames in the first or second name of the children. Sometimes the kid gets called by the second name. One of my uncles had his mother’s family name, Roddey, for his second name, and ended up being called by it.

    I happen to have an aunt and uncle and first cousins-in-law in Scotland through my English mother-in-law’s sister (Edinburgh and Dundee, but they grew up in Aberdeen), and when my late husband and I went to my aunt and uncle’s anniversary party, the dancing reminded me strongly of Southern country dancing. Especially the reels. I feel very at home with that family. We don’t agree on house temperatures, though. I am an effete American and don’t want to wear my winter coat indoors.

    I’m only sort of Southern. I’ve lived in the North (Michigan and New Jersey) since 1975, and lived in Japan my first six years. But I did live in Georgia and North Carolina from age 6 to 17, my parents are from Norfolk, Virginia, and I have a large mostly Southern family on my Dad’s side. So I’m definitely Southern-influenced at least.

  32. Not sure if it’s worth still bringing up, but I was told that a big problem with the pre-WotC TSR was that they had no idea how to price their merchandise–they had some books that they sold at a price point that actually lost them money on every copy sold.

    Also, it occurred to me last night that the Puppies line of argument is basically, “I don’t need the Hugos, I’ve got a better award now, it’s an awesome amazing fantastic award that’s way better than the Hugos and–you disagree? Sounds like sour grapes to me!” And I just burst out laughing. I think that at this point the whole Puppy thing has moved out of tragedy and comedy and into farce.

  33. @snowcrash

    If you read many of the Dragonlance books then you saw some of Elmore’s work on the covers. He was all over Dragonlance and set the art style for the setting. Sort of like Tony DiTerlizzi did for Planescape.

  34. @ John: Well, since their basic reasoning is “Everybody has the same tastes”, we must have been blown away by their award. If we dont immediatly say “Yeah, youre right. These are much better than the Hugos”, were clearly just jeaolous or something. Its a logical way of reacting to our criticsm. Its just that their assumption is wrong.

    (BTW: When did “Oh, these liberals should read XY it will blow their mind” actually became “Everybody who deoes not like x/ claims liking Z is just virtue signalling”?)

  35. @ rcade, Aaron: Larry Elmore was also a common and visible name in convention art shows in the 80s and 90s, which means that anyone who pays attention to art shows was going to know about him. That’s certainly where I know him from; I knew about the Dragonlance books, of course, but they didn’t pass my shelf test. (Looked at the back cover, looked at the front excerpt, said “meh”, put it back on the shelf.)

    I have 2 art books by Elmore, and one book for which he did the cover art — Mathemagics, a humorous portal fantasy (part of the “Chicks in Chainmail” line) published by Baen.

  36. @JJ
    They made all kinds of noise about how important Larry Elmore is because “he was everywhere in the 80s” — that is, if “everywhere” consists of the artwork for a certain segment of gaming.

    Elmore has done a ton of cover art for genre books. A big chunk is gaming related, but a whole lot isn’t.

  37. Some of have suggested TSR was done in by their fiction in that they decided to get into expensive hardcover editions and were sunk when the returns came back from the big chain stores.

  38. @ Lenore: The South does double-barreled first names; the Brits do double-barreled last names (e.g. Arthur Conan Doyle). That was part of the reason that my gender-ambiguous first name became so much more of a problem when we moved from Detroit to Nashville; it was a combination of that plus unfamiliarity with Dutch names plus the whole double-barreled thing.

    The middle name on my birth certificate is a family name from my father’s side, but I’ve done my best to excise it from my life completely. Honestly, what were my parents thinking?

    English and Scottish country dancing evolved into period Southern dancing of the upper classes, then into contradancing, then into Southern square dance. Modern/Western square dance is what happens when people decide to take an established art form completely over the top.

  39. I roomed with a woman for a year in grad school named Bobbi Sue van den Aaren. *Nobody* could get her name right.

    edit: and I’ve got one of those middle names that’s a family tradition, and I went and inflicted it on my son. Mwahahahaha.

  40. @Lee, my sisters didn’t like their middle names, either, and have dispensed with them. Both of them were old family surnames from one side or the other. I find the practice charming, but I might feel differently if I’d gotten one. I got my mother’s two perfectly ordinary names, reversed, instead. The Lenore was originally after a great-aunt’s first name. I am not sure if Jean was borrowed from anyone or de novo. My sisters each got a grandmother’s first name, and my brother got all my Dad’s names in full.

    We have a lot of Lees in our family, usually as middle names. I was told it was from a somewhat dubious claim to be related to Robert E. Lee. I don’t think anyone went by it.

    Southern Square Dance is what I learned during my years in the South. Mostly at church? I think. My memory works oddly and I don’t always remember things like that unless there are strong emotions attached.

  41. the Rule of Names: filers have indentified several interacting phenomena: the tendency of words to become “feminized” when associated with women/girls (e.g. “Girl” originally meant a young person; now it means a female young person) and the Southern USian habit of keeping family names alive by using them as first names or in double-barreled names.
    Gender operates in a weird way in the latter. In my experience, the surnames used as first names are generally the maiden names that used to disappear when a woman married. For example, my paternal grandmother’s maiden name became both my middle name and my cousin’s first name. On the other hand, until pretty recently, some Southern girls received some variant of their fathers’ names as first names; that same grandmother’s first name was “Will”, same as her dad. And why any Southern man should ever have been called Shirley, I’m darned if I know.

    Baen availability: my local SF store (in the EU) carries Mostly American books, so there’s lots of Baen (Ringo and Weber). Thanks to filers’ recommendations, I’ve stopped letting Weber’s prejudices, and Baen’s appalling covers and typos put me off of writers like Bujold and Nagata. Thanks, people!

  42. @ John Seavey:

    Also, it occurred to me last night that the Puppies line of argument is basically, “I don’t need the Hugos, I’ve got a better award now, it’s an awesome amazing fantastic award that’s way better than the Hugos and–you disagree? Sounds like sour grapes to me!” And I just burst out laughing. I think that at this point the whole Puppy thing has moved out of tragedy and comedy and into farce.

    I don’t even feel a need to disagree with the Puppies about the Dragon Award. If they view is as way better than the Hugos, I am happy to let their assumption stand, in hopes that such belief will convince them to stop running orchestrated block-voting campaigns for Hugo nominations. If they think I feel sour grapes, they are free to think so, since what they think doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is that they cease trying to manipulate the Hugo Awards and that they let fans just return to voting for their favorite works without the interference of the Puppies organized special-interest group.

    I never found the Puppies comedic or tragic. Just tiresome. “Farce” is apt only in the brief moments when their foolishness is hilarious. The rest of the time, they are much too unfunny to be farcical. Just tiresome.

  43. I have my mother’s maiden name for my middle name. Went by it through sixth grade and several of my relatives still call me by it.

    @Msb:

    On the other hand, until pretty recently, some Southern girls received some variant of their fathers’ names as first names; that same grandmother’s first name was “Will”, same as her dad.

    I give you Lorrie and Larry, The Collins Kids!. (I’m a Collins on my mom’s mom’s side, but despite them being from my part of the world, more or less, the Collins Kids are not, so far as I know, family of mine.)

  44. @Lenore Jones

    Yeah you see the mothers family name as middle name here too. My mother’s given names are Dorothy Jean Drummond. I’ll leave out the surname for security purposes…

    Incidentally the reason for the pronunciation of Menzies is due to it really being Men?ies, the z being used by printers to replace the extinct letter yogh from Old Scots and Middle English. Same for Dalziel, pronounced Dee-ELL.

  45. Oh, that’s pretty much how I hand write a z. It was how I was taught as a child and I wonder if that was an influence.

    Speaking of names, I have my uncles name as he always said it was a girl’s name. It didn’t stop him giving it to one of his sons. My son gave it to his daughter.

    The odd thing is that in the Irish spelling it is a male name, but seen as female on the internet, probably from the “ie” at the end. In the English spelling it’s not a traditional name, but I sometimes had a job to convince others that yes that was me and no I’m not a man. Of course on Usenet I didn’t even try to.

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