Twice. Because it’s up for the Special Award (for YA) and also the Prometheus itself.
I’m flattered, but I wrote it with the intent of getting more boys reading and enjoying reading. If this pushes more young men to try it, I’ve won. We need young people reading. It’s the one way you can future-proof your kids, because it is the one thing that will make them flexible enough to cope with whatever the future throws. It will give them advantages in learning – far more than schooling will.
Boys, we know, have been considered expendable. It’s the sort of thing that those who can’t think beyond first-order consequences (if that far) think is a good idea. Unfortunately, I am a writer, and, if you’re going to do that even half-way competently you need to project your mind several orders beyond that and get the ramifications of actions, even the indirect ones, or your book starts to be ridiculous.
Even if you only have daughters, you do not want them growing up in a world where men do not read. Have you thought what else people get from reading? Second to none, the ability of words to be translated not just into images but into whole, complex worlds. Have you ever thought about what that does to the brain? You should.
That’s without the fact that reading better than video elicits independent thoughts – video constrains the idea, but text… text results in different interpretations from every single user. The Gandalf my mind conjured from the book was not your Gandalf – but if we saw the movie… they’re quite close. If you can’t see the value of a verisimilitude of mental interpretations and the variations that come out of that, let’s NOT talk about the evolution of ideas that push us into new inventions, that drive everything from engineering to fiction. Because you probably don’t get that this is like actual evolution – millions – indeed trillions of genetic variations are tried. Almost all fail. The few that work, push things forward. It’s a numbers game: the more there are throwing new ideas up, the more likely that 1 in million is to come up. Anyone happy to strip out 50% of the possibilities, doesn’t understand math… and is probably too dim to add anything of value.
We could go on. Reading puts the reader inside the heads of others. It teaches one to imagine the feelings and thought-processes of others. Do you want your daughter to end up with a partner to whom other people are something they have some chance of understanding, or not?
And then we get to actual knowledge. Movies are (written scripts) so much shorter than novels. They have to be. Some of the information is carried visually, but a lot is just skipped. So: non-readers end up with the Cliffe’s Notes. You want the best out of them to build your world, or your kids world? That’s not how to get it.
Boys are falling off the reading ladder. It’s a grim reality. You can either not think forward, and go ‘La la la’ it doesn’t affect ME and MINE. Or you can think and confront it.
I did. That’s why I decided to try do something about it : Write books for that target and make them fun.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “STORM-DRAGON is up for the Prometheus”
Congratulations, Dave! Storm Dragon is a fabulous book, and this is so well deserved.
Congratulations indeed!
Funny about Jackson’s LOTR. Just imagine if Christopher Lee and Ian McKellan had swapped roles for Gandalf and Saruman (And apparently Lee was a dyed-in-the-wool LOTR geek who REALLY wanted the Gandalf part.) It would have been a much different movie, even though it was the same story.
As wonderful as McKellan was, I long to see what Lee would have done playing against type. The way they cast was safe (and understandable, given that even as is, production stumbled hard in the first week, leading to a beyond-last-minute recasting of Aragorn, so “safe” probably seemed a good thing to everyone involved), but giving seasoned performers a chance to spread their wings very often pays off in unexpected ways. And Lee as a man was warm and gentle, I have no doubt he could have brought that to the screen.
Congrats!
It’s not just young men who need men’s fiction. Young women need it, too. Girls have to understand the motivations for The Three Musketeers and all the other male-oriented classics (old and new) for men. It’s a fundamental requirement of fiction. The darkest ones have an “ick” factor, but even that is important to understand as part of the human spectrum.
This is where tomboys come from, and that’s a healthy thing for eventual male-bonding women to understand. It’s a piece of our civilizational knowledge.
It’s a funny thing, but I can’t make the matching parallel to boys reading women’s young and classic fiction. I mean, it’ll do no harm, but I don’t think it has anything like the same benefit. They may appreciate the adventure stories, and the rescue-and-family-career-founding stories, but not, perhaps, the detailed social analysis of others and understanding of matching motivations. Still, anything that passes along a clue is worthwhile.
Stories mostly without men lose some of their salt, even for women, while stories mostly without women don’t (so much). But there’s a reason that the stories of mixed pair detectives/cops/adventurers/explorers, etc., stories have strong followings on both sides, sort of like targeted social research/homework. And the research starts young, and with empty slates — fill those slates variously and well.
My wife was a tomboy in her youth. Gave us a lot of shared experiences. Tomboys make great spouses. We had a great marriage for over 40 years, until she died.
Give them Tamora Pierce’s young adult books. Absolutely wonderful. Guys (like me) might like them too!
This is very well deserved, Dave. Way to go. ~:D
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