We interrupt your regularly scheduled Toyplosion coverage, because the winners of the 2024 Dragons Awards were announced today at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia. The full list of winners may be found here. For my thoughts on the 2025 Dragon Award finalists, see here.
I’ve been following the Dragon Awards since their inception in 2016, so I guess I’m committed/cursed to cover the Dragon Awards at this point.
Not a Dragon Award, but a gorgeous golden Schleich dragon and the Masters of the Universe Classics Jitsu who has claimed the dragon as his personal steed.
However, I had a busy weekend, so let’s delve right into the categories:
Best Science Fiction Novel
The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel goes to This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman is the latest book in Dinniman’s popular Dungeon Crawler Carl LitRPG series.
I have to admit this win surprised me a little, because at least for me, this was the most obscure book in this category, but then LitRPG really isn’t my subgenre. That said, it’s interesting to see that indie books, who dominated the early years of the Dragons, can still win a Dragon Award in 2025.
Best Fantasy Novel
The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Fantasy Novel is The Devils by Joe Abercrombie.
Personally, I was rooting for Shadow of the Smoking Mountain by the late Howard Andrew Jones, especially since this is the last chance to honour Howard Andrew Jones.
However, Joe Abercrombie is very popular and exactly the sort of author – very popular, but overlooked by other awards like the Hugos or Nebulas – the Dragon Awards were made for.
Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel
The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Young Adult and Middle Grade Novel goes to Sunrise of the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. This win isn’t remotely surprising, since Sunrise of the Reaping is a prequel to Suzanne Collins’ extremely popular Hunger Games series and also a book that people who are not regular YA/middle grade readers will have heard of.
Best Alternate History Novel
The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Alternate History Novel is The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal. This was also my vote and I’m happy that it won.
But the Dragon isn’t the only award Mary Robinette Kowal won this weekend, for she also won the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction for her story “Marginalia”, which was also a Hugo finalist this year. It’s a very good story, too, about a young woman, a former chambermaid, who uses her knowledge to save a knight as well as her little brother from a giant snail.
Best Horror Novel
The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel goes to Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle.
For those of us who’ve been following the Dragon Awards since the beginning, this is a beautiful case of poetic justice. Because the Dragon Awards grew out of the Sad and Rabid Puppy mess and while they were billed as an award for broadly popular SFF overlooked by other awards, the Dragons were also very much positioned as a sort anti-Hugo for conservative and right-wing SFF. And indeed the first Dragon Award winner for Best Horror Novel wasn’t even a horror novel, but a religious space opera by a very Catholic and very rightwing indie writer.
However, once the Dragons escaped containment, the ballot began to more closely resemble what the award set out to do, namely honour popular works frequently overlooked by other awards. The Dragon ballot is still more white and more male than many other genre awards and there still are right-leaning works on the ballot, but they’re by highly popular authors rather than obscure puppy hangers-on.
As for Chuck Tingle, he first came to many people’s attention when Vox Day slated him onto the Hugo ballot for his satirical erotica story “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” and Chuck Tingle proceded to royally troll the Puppies, which won him a non-slated Hugo nomination the following year. Chuck Tingle is also a horror writer, so for him to win an award initially pushed by the Puppies with a gay horror novel is not only poetic justice, but also proof that love is real.
Best Illustrative Book Cover
The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Illustrative Cover is Michael Whelan for Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson. Michael Whelan is of course an SFF art legend and this was by far my favourite covers of all the finalists in this category.
Best Comic Book/Graphic Novel
The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Comic Book or Graphic Novel goes to Daredevil: Cold Day In Hell by Charles Soule and Steve McNiven. I haven’t read this comic or indeed any Daredevil in thirty years, so I can’t say any about it.
Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series
The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series is Andor. This is an utterly unsurprising win, because Andor is the one Star Wars series that almost everybody likes. In fact, I’m something of an outlier, because while I like Andor, I don’t love it as much as many others seem to. And in fact, I voted for Murderbot.
Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie
The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie goes to Deadpool and Wolverine. Again, this is far from surprising, because Deadpool and Wolverine was extremely popular and probably the highest grossing movie on the ballot aside from Wicked. And the fact that Wicked is a) a musical and b) focussed on two women may have given Deadpool and Wolverine the edge here.
Best Digital Game
The winner of the 2025 Dragon Award for Best Digital Game is Assassin’s Creed Shadows. As I always say whenever this category comes up, I’m not a gamer, but even I have heard of Assassin’s Creed.
Best Tabletop Game
The 2025 Dragon Award for Best Tabletop Game goes to Magic the Gathering: Final Fantasy. This is another win that’s not even remotely surprising, because both Magic the Gathering and Final Fantasy are extremely popular. Magic the Gathering has also won the Dragon Award in this category before and was represented with two sets on this year’s ballot.
Other Awards
There were a number of other awards given out at Dragon Con as well.
As mentioned above, the 2025 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction goes to “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal.
The winner of the 2025 Mike Resnick Memorial Award for the best unpublished science fiction short story by a new author is “Elsewhere” by Anaïs Godard.
The 2025 Julie Award, named after Julius Schwartz, goes to Dave Goelz and the 2025 Hank Reinhardt Fandom Award goes to Mike Hannigan. Dave Goelz is a puppeteer with the Jim Henson Company who brought Gonzo the Great to life among others.
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The Dragon Awards are now in their tenth year, well established and they pretty much do what they were intended to do, namely award broadly popular SFF works with big fanbases. It’s notable that this year’s Dragon Award winners are a lot more male dominated than last year’s, but then the Dragons tend to skew more male than most other genre awards.
I haven’t seen any reactions beyond some social media posts by happy winners so far, but I will link any reactions I find here.
ETA 09-02-2025: DragonCon issued a press release about the various awards handed out at the convention, including the Dragons.
Two bits stand out. The first is this quote:
The Dragon Awards were created in 2016 as part of Dragon Con’s 30th anniversary celebration.
The interesting thing of course is that there is zero mention of the Puppies or the late Eric Flint who apparently was instrumental in the establishment of the Dragon Awards. Instead, the Awards are linked to DragonCon’s thirtieth annviersary.
The other interesting bit is that “Nearly 6,000 fans cast ballots for this year’s Dragon Award winners…” which is as close to nomination and voting data we will ever get for the Dragons.
Though Camestros Felapton points out that the number of voters given in 2023 and 2024 was 7000 and in 2018, it was as high as 11000. The numbers are still higher than the Hugos normally get, largely because the Dragon Awards are free to vote and nominate for and don’t require a convention membership. However, they’re dropping, but then the number of Hugo votes went down this year as well.
ETA 09-01-2025: Camestros Felapton briefly weighs in one the 2025 Dragon Awards and notes that the winners are mostly very popular works with big fanbases. So in short, the Dragons are doing what they were supposed to do.
Regarding the 2025 Dragons, Doris notes that the winners are mostly broadly popular works with big fanbases. She’s also surprised at Matt Dinniman’s win in Best Science Fiction Novel, since she’d never heard of Dinniman before. I had heard of him, but I had no idea he was that popular. So I guess Matt Dinniman is an author who really appeals to a certain niche and is little known outside it, though his fanbase is big and vocal enough to win him a Dragon and push him onto the Hugo longlist for Best Series.
So far, there hasn’t been anything from the far right side of the genre. Though it is very telling that ten years after their inception, the Dragon Awards are doing exactly what they were designed to do, namely honour popular works with big fanbases that are often overlooked by other awards.
However, the former Puppies aren’t winning any Dragons or even get nominated with the exception of authors like Larry Correia who has a big fanbase that extends beyond the puppy sphere.
What is more, the former Puppies also mostly abandoned the Dragons, once it became clear that they couldn’t win them anymore and that maybe, they were not the silent majority of SFF fans they thought they were.
ETA 09-02-2025: Doris V. Sutherland dug up this Twitter conversation, wherein users PulpArchivist and Fiannawolf, subtitle “Questing for the Superversive”, discussed their disenchantment with the Dragon Awards back when the nominations came out.
Also weighing in is self-published, rightwing and very Catholic SFF writer and unlikely story inspiration Declan Finn who notes that he has lost interest in the Dragons. This is significant, because Declan Finn was a Dragon finalist in the first year and spent subsequent years eagerly campaigning for a Dragon nomination. Declan Finn also used to post recommendation lists the Dragons.
Doris V. Sutherland notes that there are six people who dutifully chronicle the Dragon Awards – Doris herself, me, Camestros Felapton, Mike Glyer, Ray Radlein and Sean C.W. Korsgaard, the last two of whom also live tweeted the winners well before Dragon Con officially announced them. None of us are Puppies or former Puppies and Mike, Cam and I are people the former Puppies actively dislike and I’m pretty sure they don’t like Doris and Ray either. That leaves Sean Korsgaard who is a former Baen employee and current editor of Battleborn Magazine. However, he wasn’t involved in the Puppy wars, because not everybody working at Baen is/was a Puppy.
sending...
“I have to admit this win surprised me a little, because at least for me, this was the most obscure book in this category, but then LitRPG really isn’t my subgenre.”
It really isn’t that obscure if you hang around Reddit. Almost every request for a recommendation is someone saying “DCC!!” with many upvotes. It gets tedious. I listened to the first and it wasn’t my thing, but my nephews loved it so I persevered. I’m up to book 5 and it’s OK. It has its good amusing moments, but yeah, litRPG isn’t my thing either.
My nephew attended worldcon with me and one of the draws, besides Martha Wells, was Matt Dinniman. The line for his autographs was very long and most of his panels were well attended.
Matt Dinniman clearly is very popular and also made the longlist for the Best Series Hugo. I still doubt that I will read the Dungeon Crawler Carl, unless they actually make the Hugo ballot, but then not everything needs to be for me.
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LitRPG isn’t my thing, persay, but I ended up copyediting a bunch of them, which has given me some knowledge. Then I went out and read a few out of curiosity . . .
Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl series is one of the better intros to LitRPG if you want to try it (I keep meaning to get a list on my weblist for the curious). I did a panel with Matt at Capclave last year, and it turns out he’s also a really nice guy, so congrats to him!
Thanks for reporting on these. Otherwise I might miss them entirely.