The winners of the 2023 Dragons Awards were announced today at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia. The full list of winners may be found here.
Since it seems I’m committed/cursed to cover the Dragon Awards – coverage of previous years may be found here – let’s delve right into the categories.
The 2023 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel goes to The Icarus Plot by Timothy Zahn. This win was a bit of a surprise, because it was easily the most obscure novel in this category (and File 770 notes that it has the lowest number of Goodreads ratings in the category). And while Timothy Zahn is certainly a popular author, he is best known for his Star Wars work these days, including creating Grand Admiral Thrawn who is about to make his debut in live action. However, Dragon Con is mainly a media con, so Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars work may have given him more name recognition among casual voters. And The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, easily the most popular novel in this category, does lean more towards horror than science fiction. Plus, Baen Books, which published The Icarus Plot, traditionally has a strong presence at Dragon Con and Zahn was there in person to accept his award.
The winner of the 2023 Dragon Award for Best Fantasy Novel is Witch King by Martha Wells. This is an excellent winner and was also my personal choice. I’m a bit surprised that the much lauded Babel by R.F. Kuang didn’t win, but then Witch King came out in May 2023 and may simply have been clearer in people’s memories than Babel, which came out more than a year ago.
The 2023 Dragon Award for Best Young Adult and Middle Grade Novel goes to The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik. This wasn’t my choice, since I don’t particularly care for the Scholomance series. However, the series is very popular and both The Golden Enclaves and the entire series are Hugo/Lodestar finalists this year. The fact that The Golden Enclaves won in the Young Adult category also reinforces that a lot of readers consider the Scholomance series YA, even though others vehemently disagree.
The winner of the 2023 Dragon Award for Best Alternate History Novel is Lost In Time by A.G. Riddle. This wasn’t my choice, but the win isn’t very surprising, since A.G. Riddle is very popular and easily the best known author in this most obscure of Dragon Award categories.
The 2023 Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel goes to A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher. This was also my choice and is a very worthy winner IMO.
The winner of the 2023 Dragon Award for Best Illustrative Cover is Kurt Miller’s cover for Tower of Silence by Larry Correia, which can be seen here sans typography. Now I wasn’t wowed by any of the finalists in this category and IMO the Tower of Silence cover is one of the weakest in this category. I guess it won more because Larry Correia is a popular author with the Dragon Awards crowd than on its own merits.
The 2023 Dragon Award for Best Comic Book or Graphic Novel goes to Dune: House Harkonnen by Brian Herbert, Kevin J Anderson and Michael Shelfer. The popularity of the Dune graphic novels continues to surprise me, considering that another Dune graphic novel also won in this category last year and that yet another Dune graphic novel is also on the Hugo ballot this year. Of course, it’s possible that the Dune graphic novels are actually good – I haven’t read any of them.
The winner of the 2023 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series is The Sandman. I have to admit that this surprised me a little, for while The Sandman comic was extremely popular in its day, the TV series seemed to get less attention than most of the other finalists in this category. But then, the Star Wars and Star Trek fan votes were split between Andor and The Mandalorian and Strange New Worlds and Picard respectively, which may well be why The Sandman was able to triumph.
The 2023 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie goes to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. This is one win that makes me very happy, because Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a fun movie and finally a good Dungeons & Dragons movie. It’s also a movie almost everybody who actually watched it seemed to like, though it’s apparently considered a box office failure, because it was flattened by the Super Mario Bros Movie, which came out only a week later. Something similar happened to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, another movie almost everybody who actually watched it seemed to like, but which was squashed at the box office by the juggernaut that is Barbie. Plus, it’s great that something with “dragon” in the title has finally won a Dragon Award. It’s notable that after winning every award in the multiverse, Everything Everywhere All At Once failed to take home a Dragon Award, though I’m sure the Daniels will comfort themselves by looking at their Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTAs and every other award Everything Everywhere All At Once won.
The winner of the 2023 Dragon Award for Best Digital Game is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. This isn’t a huge surprise, because Tears of the Kingdom got a huge amount of buzz and also generally good reviews. I’m also happy that that Harry Potter game did not win.
The 2023 Dragon Award for Best Tabletop Game goes to Magic the Gathering: The Lord of the Rings. Again, this isn’t a very surprising win, because Magic the Gathering has won in the Best Miniature/Collectible Card/Roleplaying Game category of the Dragons five times in eight years now. Maybe they should just rename the category “Best Magic the Gathering Set”.
A couple of other awards were handed out at Dragon Con as well, so here is a brief rundown: The 2023 Hank Reinhart Fandom Award goes to Amanda Makepeace. The 2023 Julie Award, named in honour of Julius Schwartz, goes to Marty Krofft, one half of the Krofft Brothers TV producer duo behind many popular children’s shows. The 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award goes to “Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man” by Rich Larson, which can be read here, and the 2023 Mike Resnick Memorial Award goes to the “For the Great and Immortal” by South African writer Daniel Burnbridge. As far as I can tell, all of these seem to be good and solid choices.
In general, the Dragon Awards are continuing on their way towards becoming what they were initially conceived to be, an award for broadly popular SFF works with big fanbases. Also, this is the first year as far as I remember that women outnumber the male winners in the five novel categories with three women and two men winning. Considering that the Dragon Awards have skewed heavily white and male since their inception, this is progress, though the list of winners is still very white.
Camestros Felapton also weighs in on the 2023 Dragon Award winners here.
ETA: Doris V. Sutherland weighs in on the 2023 Dragon Award winners at Women Write About Comics.
Still, eight years into the award, the Dragons have largely consolidated themselves and become what they were intended to be.
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Timothy Zahn probably is more widely known for his “Star Wars” tie-ins, but he’s got a long history in the milSF subgenre – I still have my copy of the Venture SF edition of his novel “Cobra”, which is very much in the milSF wheelhouse.
Venture SF was a paperback imprint explicitly dedicated to hard-hitting, action-heavy, the-only-good-alien-is-a-dead-alien science fiction – two others which I have are David Drake’s “Hammer’s Slammers” and Richard Meredith’s “We All Died at Breakaway Station”, both of which are notably, well, non-pacifist. The imprint lasted from 1985 to 1989 and then just petered out, like so many specialist imprints do. This was the late 80s, and the world was still relatively sane, so Venture SF wasn’t positioning itself as The Only True Way For SF, and its demise was not ascribed to evil leftist plotting. Amazing to think of those times as the good old days.
It would be churlish of me to suggest that, with Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson doing the writing, the artwork on “Dune: House Harkonnen” must be absolutely dazzling….
Timothy Zahn also had a couple of Hugo nominations and even a win back in the 1980s, though that was just before I started reading SFF for good, so I first encountered his work via Heir to the Empire, like so many of us.
I don’t recall ever seeing the Venture SF line at all, but then the availability of English language books in German bookstores was very hit and miss pre-Internet and Amazon. They certainly published some interesting authors. I also spotted at least one other author who wrote Star Wars tie-in novels in the early days of the Extended Universe.
My thoughts regarding those Dune graphic novels are the same as yours.
That Foster-winning story is VERY deserving. What a ride! Primo cyberpunk/biopunk.
So far, I’ve enjoyed every story by Rich Larson that I’ve read. Glad to see his work get some recognition.
As I told the folks over at File 770, using Goodreads as a measure of fan enthusiasm was flawed for a reason… as is dismissing Timothy Zahn’s victory as “just because he is a Star Wars author”.
Man’s been writting world class military scifi since the 80s, was the first author Baen ever signed, and there’s a reason why his Cobra series spans 10 books, Blackcollar got a trilogy, and he’s the most published author in the Honorverse other than David Weber. Take away that he sold 20 million Star Wars books, and he’s still a giant in the field.
The Icarus Plot is a labor of love and first in a series from an author with four decades of work in the genre… and its a damn good book! Got glowing reivews from Analog and a few Booktubers, which is why I found it. If anything, I hope a lot of the folks questioning how Tim Zahn beat out a bunch of authors with more Goodreads reviews than him will pick it up and give it a fair shake. It’s some of his best work, in my humble opinion.