Here are the finalists for the 2022 Dragon awards

The science fiction world is littered with awards. There are the big three: the Hugos, Nebulas, and Locus Awards, as well as a whole bunch of others that serve increasingly-specific areas of fandom.

For going on six years now, the Atlanta-based Dragon Con has hosted its own set of literary (and other) awards: the Dragon. Initially launched in the midst of considerable drama within fandom, it was designed and envisioned as a sort of populist counter to the Hugos: anyone could vote, resulting in a "true reflection of the works that are genuinely most beloved by the core audience," a thinly-veiled thumbing of the nose at what some in fandom saw as an increasingly esoteric, politically-correct, and not-as-much-fun-as-things-used-t0-be-in-the-good-ol-days of genre.

Of course, that's not an entirely accurate picture of what was actually going on, and the awards seriously leaned into this false idea that the Hugos, Nebulas and the general WorldCon scene were not actually representative of what people were actually reading and enjoying. And, there were enough concerns that authors pulled their names from the finalist lists in that initial year.