Camestros Felapton

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Dragon Awards 2015! Sorry…Dragon Awards 2021!

The sum total per year of my moaning about the Dragon Award has decreased but it remains a frustrating thing to follow. Consider this, the following day from the announcement, the Dragon Award website doesn’t list the winners yet and the press release from Dragon Con Media Relations is still about the 2020 award https://web.archive.org/web/20210906184551/https://www.dragoncon.org/mediarelations/ Even Larry Correia doesn’t have a post about on his blog! And here are the official Dragon Con social media account Tweets on the award:

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This year’s winners were a mix of the predictable to the good. The good being T.Kingfisher aka Ursula Vernon who scored wins in both YA and Horror. http://file770.com/2021-dragon-awards/

However, what really struck me about this year’s winners, including the estimable Red Wombat, was that if I’d gone to sleep at the end of 2015 and had not woken up again until the Dragon Award winners were announced, I’d feel like nothing much had changed. Correia, Butcher, Flint, Gannon but also Andy Weir and Ursula Vernon (as two people pushed off the Hugo ballot by Puppy antics) were all significant names in the events of 2015.

Now, the Hugos have their own tendency towards favouring past winners, Best Novel this year may well go to a past winner, but it would be weird for this to occur across multiple categories. No, I’m not saying any one of these winners is bad because they were around six years ago, just that, as a whole, this points to the Dragons still being stuck in the past.

In the ultimate irony, one of the few works to win, whose title or author wouldn’t be instantly recognised by the time-traveller from 2015 was the Netflix movie The Old Guard.

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12 responses to “Dragon Awards 2015! Sorry…Dragon Awards 2021!”

  1. Re The Old Guard: Except when you are a comicfan and you mention that it is based on a comic by Greg Rucka, who was a big deal even then (and was the writer of the movie and mentioned on the Hugo Award Page). That name could be know to a 2015 fan.

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    • If only there *were* some conservatives left — their name has been stolen and trampled through the mud by reactionaries and fascists, who ARE racist and misogynist.

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  5. I’ve debated for several days over whether I should even comment about the list. I’m trying to not post as much negative shit on here as I sometimes do, on the grounds that I should try to be a nicer person online, since there seem to be so few of them..

    But I just can’t help myself. I can’t figure out how in god’s name the Flint/Gannon book won. I’ve liked a fair amount of Flint’s 1632 series, but I think it’s clear that the series as a whole is in decline. If I’ve counted correctly, there are something like 25 books in the series that come BEFORE the latest Flint/Gannon. I think Flint has lost a step or two, and he and his various co-authors end up relying on info-dumps galore in order to situate whatever narrative chunk is newly out. I bought the book. I’ve bounced off of it twice now. I’m unlikely to try again. And for the life of me I’m trying to envision someone really reading and enjoying it.

    I can’t. I think I’m a really bad person. Please help.

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    • This is Flint’s 5th appearance on the Dragon ballot, but his first win. I’ll just point out that he appeared in a promo video for the awards a few years ago with the person who I think is running the awards and leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.

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      • I view 1632 as one of those things whose popularity simply eludes me, because I couldn’t even get through the first one because it was so riddled with errors.

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        • Cora –

          You don’t like it because you’re not Amurrican, by God. It’s all about how working class cis-het (i.e., ‘normal’) men and women from West Virginia mining country promote liberalism and democracy the way God intended. It’s much harder to buy into that perspective after 4 years of Trump and the self-inflicted pandemic deaths, but maybe that just means that reality finally caught up to Flint’s vision.

          Jesus. I’m getting harsh again. Sorry, folks.

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      • Particularly as the correct answer to this category is clearly “The Relentless Moon”, which is not only better-written, it has good characterizations, no factual errors, is only the 3rd book in a series, and is a good mystery novel along with being alternate history.

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