Robert Snyder · Public domain

Naomi Novik built the nine-volume Temeraire series by grafting dragons onto the Napoleonic Wars as though air power had always been part of Regency-era combat, then turned to standalone fantasy steeped in Polish folklore with Uprooted and in the Rumpelstiltskin story with Spinning Silver. Beyond her own fiction, she cofounded the Organization for Transformative Works and helped build Archive of Our Own, now one of the internet's largest repositories of fan fiction — infrastructure that let a fanwriting community too often dismissed by publishing organize and be taken seriously.