Storm-Dragon

Winner of the First Special Prometheus Award for Young Adult Fiction 2026.

Skut Harkkson has been stuck at Highpoint Station for eighteen months, locked inside a concrete dome while his family's farm sits three hundred miles away. The frontier colony of Vann's World is alive with three moons, massive tides, and predators that make the inside walls feel almost reasonable. Almost.

Then Skut finds the creature — half-dead on the lowest tide-flat, surrounded by predators, furious and starving. A storm-dragon. Small, electric-blue, and capable of talking directly into his mind. He names it Snarky. He hides it in his shirt. And for the first time since leaving Faraway Station, he has something worth getting up for.

His new friend Podge Greene survived a Ghat planetary invasion at age ten. The two of them, with Snarky riding shotgun and fishing the forbidden lower jetties, start to build something that resembles a life. Snarky grows. Snarky learns. And it turns out that five hundred volts of bio-electric discharge is genuinely useful when alien slavers arrive under false papers and lock down the whole settlement.

What follows is old-school boys' adventure: two kids who actually know what they're doing, fighting to free nine hundred hostages on a world that the invaders don't understand and can't survive. Vann's World kills the careless and the ignorant. Skut and Podge are neither.

Storm-Dragon is a fast, funny, dangerous standalone novel built for readers who are tired of being condescended to.

For boys ages 10 to 17.