The Ultimate Fantasy Series Ranking

Author page

Naomi Novik

4 universes Last reviewed 2026-08-06

Naomi Novik was born in New York to a family of Lithuanian Jewish paternal and Polish Catholic maternal heritage, and grew up in Roslyn Heights on Long Island. She earned a BA in English Literature from Brown University and an MS in Computer Science from Columbia University, working as a computer programmer and contributing to the design and development of the video game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide before turning to writing full time. She is best known for the Temeraire series (2006-2016), an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars featuring dragons, and the Scholomance trilogy (2020-2022), a dark fantasy set in a lethal magical school. Her standalone novels Uprooted (2015), set in a fantasy world inspired by the Kingdom of Poland, and Spinning Silver (2018), a Rumpelstiltskin-inspired retelling, won her some of fantasy's highest honors, including the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the British Fantasy Award for Uprooted, plus multiple Locus Awards, Mythopoeic Awards, an Alex Award, an Audie Award, and a Compton Crook Award for her debut His Majesty's Dragon. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2007 and has received three Hugo Award nominations. Beyond fiction, Novik co-founded the Archive of Our Own (AO3) fan-fiction platform and helped establish the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works. She is married to entrepreneur and writer Charles Ardai and lives in Manhattan.

Universe(s)

Temeraire

  • Core Canon books: 9
  • Current rank: #421 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 3.99
  • Award recognitions: 3 won, 2 nomination

Uprooted

  • Core Canon books: 1
  • Current rank: #388 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 4.01
  • Award recognitions: 4 won, 2 nomination

Spinning Silver

  • Core Canon books: 1
  • Current rank: #140 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 4.17
  • Award recognitions: 3 won, 3 nomination

The Scholomance

  • Core Canon books: 3
  • Current rank: #302 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 4.05
  • Award recognitions: 2 won, 2 finalist mention, 7 nomination

Books

Aggregate across all universes

These are separate, unrelated universes; the totals below are plain sums of already-published per-universe facts, never a blended or averaged score across them. See each universe's own figures above.

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