Storm-Dragon, a 2026 Prometheus Best Novel finalist, offers an entertaining tale embodying golden-age SF themes of initiative, imagination, resilience and self-reliance.
Dave Freer’s Young Adult novel appeals to adults, too — especially those of us who grew up reading YA novels by Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton.
The novel revolves around a boy who adopts an intelligent-alien pet on Vann’s World, an ocean-dominated planet with a small human colony facing dangers alien and human, visible and hidden.
After finding and saving a half-dead tiny creature outside his settlement’s walls, Skut names him Snarky and hides the orphan in his shirt. As he sneaks outside the settlement to feed Snarky, Skut befriends Podge, a new kid whose refugee family survived a planetary invasion. Together, the middle-school boys fish the forbidden lower jetties, where marine life and tides can be deadly.
Concise at 248 pages (202 pages in Kindle format) and including interior black-and-white illustrations in both editions, Freer’s well-paced novel sustains its propulsive energy with emotional epiphanies and credible plot twists.
With its saga of survival and friendship on the frontier amidst formidable obstacles, Storm-Dragon is perhaps closest in spirit to the problem-solving of Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky. (That 1950 YA novel focuses on a teenager emigrating with his family to a colony terraforming one of Jupiter’s moons.)
YOUNG CHARACTERS TO CARE ABOUT
Meanwhile, Storm-Dragon brims with the affectionate overtones of classic “boy and his dog” alien-pet tales, reminding me in some ways of the pleasures of Alan Dean Foster’s interplanetary Flinx and Pip novels about a boy and his mini-dragon.
Similarly, Skut and Podge interact and learn to communicate with their orphaned young “dragon,” an electrosensitive six-limbed alien creature that may be more intelligent and formidable than it appears.
As they make friends with each other and others, Skut and Podge further navigate the ocean’s dangerous shores. Their classes pose other dangers, though, with class bullies and repressive, suspicious teachers who run public schools like prisons.
With Skut a sympathetic and believable character to whom it seemed that “he’d been in trouble since the day he arrived,” the story is relatable to anyone who’s ever felt different, like an outsider or misfit, while growing up.
Podge, meanwhile, is wary because he’s learned from seemingly benevolent but deceptive kids and adults that “it’s easier to cope with nasty than nice.”
COMING OF AGE IN A DANGEROUS WORLD
Above all, Storm-Dragon is fun to read. It’s full of action, adventure and character – most notably, likable, hard-working people of good character pushed far enough to organize against an abusive central authority.
Ultimately, Freer shapes something of a coming-of-age story that charts the boys’ dawning awareness that not all adults are good or fair or reasonable – as Skut, Podge, their friends and families cope with mob behavior and suffer from the arrogance and corruption of local officials.
“The government won’t let us…” becomes a not-uncommon refrain.
Worst of all for the boys, bureaucrats try to prevent Skut from keeping his baby animal – which would have died without his intervention and remains too young to survive on its own.
Eager to explore the world, Podge discovers to his dismay that going Outside is strongly discouraged:
“We’re not supposed to go there,” Skut said.
“Yeah. Another thing we’re not supposed to do. If it is interesting or fun, you can’t do it,” said Podge, irritated.
A FASCINATING MARINE ECOLOGY
Freer – whose ingenious world-building contributed much to his inspiring and humor coming-of-age SF story in Cloud-Castles, the 2021 Prometheus Best Novel winner – again conceives a fascinating planet and biosphere in Storm-Dragon.
With a strong family and career background in fishing and marine biology and oceanography, Freer focuses more on the vivid alien ecology and boy-centered adventure than the politics of this plausible frontier planet, while allowing his live-and-let-live, peace-and-freedom themes to emerge naturally.
One of the first books published by Raconteur Press, which is targeting a new generation of readers aged 8 to 18 (and boys in particular), Storm-Dragon avoids explicit ideology.
THE CULTURAL VALUES OF INDIVIDUALISM
Even so, its compelling depiction of courage and cooperation among young adults as they master necessary social and technical skills is compelling. Through this story and these characters, Freer concretely depicts the cultural and psychological constellation of values of individualism, which are at the foundation of any credible philosophy of freedom and responsibility.
With enough developing drama and growing relationships to keep readers of any age eager to keep reading, Storm-Dragon gradually expands to include parents, administrators and other adults enmeshed in the colony town’s daily struggles to survive and thrive amid increasingly transparent abuses of local power.
THE HIDDEN THREATS OF POLITICS
Making such challenges even worse are the onerous regulations, taxes and property confiscations that threaten the livelihoods and daily life of the farming and fishing families and make it difficult for small businesses to scrape by.
When one boy asks his father why the local administrators are so petty and irrational, his father shrugs. “We have less than one thousand people here. They have twenty people in their Council office,” he said. “Not enough work, too much power, and a bad leader.”
The fraught situation gets worse – and worse:
A petty bureaucrat makes an ultimatum, demanding a permit for “these structures” or they must be demolished within 48 hours,” she said.
“But what structures?” said Skut’s father, puzzled.
The woman pointed at papa’s neat raised-bed garden. “That…”
“It’s just a garden. Many people have gardens. It is not hurting anyone, surely…:
“You didn’t follow the procedures required… It doesn’t matter what the outcome is, procedures must be followed. A complaint has been made, and now you have forty-eight hours to produce the permits required, or demolish these illegal structures,” she repeated.
To add insult to injury, Skut than explains that there actually was no complaint – that the whole incident was triggered as petty and childish punishment for the woman’s daughter getting detention in school the day before “because of Podge and me.”
THE DYSFUNCTIONAL CULTURE OF COERCION
Thus Freer, who has faced petty bureaucrats delaying efforts to rebuild his own home, dramatizes in concrete detail the infuriating and dysfunctional pattern of coercive government when it becomes excessive, abusive and seemingly impervious to reason, practicality or objective reality.
Interestingly, many of the abusive administrators turn out to be the parents of the bullies, which dramatically links the bad behaviors of authoritarians young and old in psychologically compelling ways. When Podge reports the bad behavior of the bullies to a friend’s mother, she observes “I think I understand where this is coming from, at least. The kids are just acting out their parents’ attitudes.”
Ultimately, an aggressive raid by the predatory Ghats (the same slavers who’d previously made Podge’s family refugees) threatens the colonists’ broader rights.
The invasion sparks an uphill battle among the boys, their parents and allies that highlights their resourcefulness and bravery – and their implicit libertarian attitudes:
“Maybe they get shot, but it is better than being a slave,” one of the boys’ fathers says approvingly.
“She has too much power, I am afraid,” a mother observes, relating another incident.
A SATISFYING ENDING FOR YOUNG READERS
Although some may find the ending a bit rushed and too neatly wrapped up, Freer ties up his multiple plot and character threads in ways that should not only satisfy but delight younger readers.
With the two boys remaining at or near the center of the action even as the colonists fight the invaders, what boy or girl wouldn’t enjoy it? Personally, I would have loved reading Storm-Dragon when I was eight to 14 years old – and would have enjoyed it as much as the Heinlein juvenile SF novels that I devoured in my youth.
That comparison makes sense. After all, Freer has long considered himself a huge fan of Heinlein, not coincidentally the most recognized author in the 46-year history of the Prometheus Awards.
As Freer said from his home base Down Under in Tasmania in an email interview previously published on the Prometheus Blog, Storm-Dragon “is my attempt at writing a Heinlein ‘juvie- – a book aimed specifically at teen boys – a much-neglected reader section – to get them interested in sf.”
In that primary goal of good YA fiction, Freer succeeds handsomely.
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