Camestros FelaptonWhen Being an Award Finalist Is Bad News
On Bluesky there is a bit of a Dungeon Crawler Carl discourse going on. The short version is people pointing out that first book in the series is bad, and defenders of the series claiming that it gets better. I should add that yes, book 1 is rough and yes, it does get better but it is a few books in before I’d say it is actually good. It’s sort of like a trashy sci-fi TV series or cartoon that overtime builds up some depth of character and deeper themes almost by accident.
Runalong Womble aka Matt is a reviewer who I enjoy and their review of Book 1 in the series is scathing https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2026/6/14/dungeon-crawler-carl-by-matt-dinniman …but I think that’s a fair review. I read the first book with low expectations, a high tolerance for humour, and via the audiobook version which has its own merits.
What has provoked the discourse is the surprise nomination of the book for the prestigious Clarke Award. That certainly surprised me. The book qualified despite being first published in 2020, because the series had only recently been published in the UK. Regular readers of my blog will be aware that a later book in the series won a Dragon Award last year for Best Science Fiction. However, let’s note that a. that was book 7 in the series and b. all sorts of stuff wins Dragon Awards and some of it has been genuine crap. So, a much better instalment of the series crossed the much lower bar of the Dragon Award, and the roughest book in the series is up for the Clarke Award, an award that skews towards the literary.
Which takes me to my actual point, which is not about Dungeon Crawler Carl and may even be about a more polished book that I’m reading right now.
A novel being a finalist in a notable award is not necessarily good news for the book.
Lots of people read through the finalists of an award, and publish reviews. I’m doing that currently with the Hugo Awards. There are books that I might look at the premise and think “not for me”, that I will read because it is an award finalist. Sometimes, that’s great. I absolutely would not have read The Everlasting if it wasn’t a Hugo finalist, but it turned out that I really liked it. However, it also means I end up reading books that I find a bit weak or even bad. If it was just a book I’d picked up incidentally, I wouldn’t necessarily write about it – sometimes I get that I’m just not the audience for a particular book. However, for a Hugo finalist novel I will write some sort of critical evaluation.
Put another way, nominating a book for an award means that you are knowingly putting a book under a critical spotlight. It will be read and written about by people who would not have picked it up organically. It is making a claim for a book that is not just popular, but also has some aesthetic or moral quality to it, and that it merits comparison with other finalists.
I’m part way through a Hugo finalist Best Novel and unless it makes a remarkable turn for the better, my review of it isn’t going to be a good one. If I’d read it for some other reason, I probably just wouldn’t have written a review. It’s not terrible. It is definitely more polished than Dungeon Crawler Carl book 1, but I’m in “I’ll give it a few more chapters, it might improve” mode. I have the audiobook version and I’m tempted to increase the playback speed, which is not a good sign.
Awards mean scrutiny and for some books that’s not in their interests.
#bookReview #bookReviews #books #fantasy #mattDinniman
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman — Runalong The Shelves
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