Should the Dragon Awards Introduce a Porno Category?

A recent turn of events persuaded me that the Dragon Awards should introduce a category for Best Pornographic Science Fiction, Fantasy or Horror Novel. Before I go on, though, I should probably establish what the Dragon Awards are (they’re an SF/F prize handed out annually at Dragon Con and voted on via a free online poll) and just which events led me to my conclusion…

Until recently the Dragons had seven book categories, ranging from big genres (Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, YA/Middle Grade) to rather more niche areas (Alternate History, Media Tie-In, Military Science Fiction and Fantasy). But just this month the Dragons announced a shake-up ready for next year’s awards. A new category, Best Illustrative Book Cover, will be introduced; the game categories have been mashed into one another (so Best Mobile Game and Best PC/Console Game are now conjoined as Best Digital Game and so forth), as have the comic categories; and two book categories — Best Media Tie-In and Best Military Science Fiction/Fantasy — have been dropped altogether.

Not everyone is happy with these changes. Or, more accurately, with that last change.

Enter Michael Gallagher, contributor to conservative sci-fi blog Upstream Reviews. (He’s also the author of a book called Body and Blood which, according to his Twitter header, was hailed as “awesome” by Upstream Reviews. Utterly unbiased acclaim, I’m sure.)

The news from the Dragon Awards prompted him to write an angry post on the topic. Ignoring the removal of Best Media Tie-In, Gallagher oddly hails the end of Best Military as the “most prominent” of the Dragons’ category changes, and theorises that the decision was made specifically to spite conservatives and authors of small-press fiction:

The Military Science Fiction category, you see, is one that consistently featured nominations from the widest variety of publishers. Self-published authors made frequent appearances on its ballots alongside top-tier tradpub offerings. 2022 featured two alone, for J.N. Chaney and Terry Maggert’s Backyard Starship and Jeffery H. Haskell’s Against All Odds. It’s also where one usually found authors known to have right-of-center sensibilities. If I had to guess, somebody at DragonCon doesn’t like all these icky troglodyte indies and Cons at their lunch table. It might be money. It might be ideology. But it’s the only way this makes any sense. The Dragons are drawing their line in the sand here. And something tells me they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.

The replies indicate that some of Upstream’s readers have simply given up hope on the Dragon Awards and want a new award to replace them (just as the Dragons supposedly replaced the Hugos and Nebulas):

The Leftist Chokehold on All Things Cultural continues to tighten… We’ll just have to make our own awards.

Wasn’t the line we once heard about the Dragon Award?

I think we need to amend the statement of making our own awards by gatekeeping SFWA SJWs and their ideological fellow travelers/ruination minions out of said awards. Neutrality’s limit has been shown.

Others, meanwhile, see a possibility of redemption. When Gallagher suggested that the Dragon Awards “don’t know what they’re getting themselves into” his readers recognise this as a call to proverbial arms:

This needs to become an all-out counterassault. As they obviously are not reading the room.

Is there a way we can contact Dragoncon and give feedback for this “interesting” choice they have made? A polite email, I mean, not a “fiery but mostly peaceful protest.

Can I participate in the exceptions to the “mostly peaceful protest”? I’m ready to flame their ass.

Another commentator to weigh in is David Weber, who was the winner or joint-winner of the Best Military category in four of its seven iterations. On Facebook, Weber likewise expresses hope that the category might be spared if enough people object to its removal:

I think it’s important for the people who are upset to understand that so far as I can tell, there is no malign intent involved in this decision. Like a lot of you, I intend to advocate to get it changed, to get our category restored to the awards, but angst and outrage are not the way to go about that.

But at the same time, he admits to receiving word from inside Dragon Con that the Best Military category was receiving the smallest number of votes and nominations (a possibility ignored in Gallagher’s post):

[T]he decision to eliminate the award for military science-fiction/fantasy was made, according to DragonCon, because this was the “least-nominated, least-voted” category, so if something was going to be pruned, it made sense to prune the award which had had the least support.

He then elaborated upon this point in the replies:

I don’t know what the EXACT vote totals were, obviously, but I do know from information coming to me out of the con that the actual vote total, the level of participation, in this award was very, very low. And, as I’ve said, that’s on us, the people who care about this category. Not naming any names for making any invidious comparisons, but if you look at some of the titles that were nominated/won, the level of their sales/readers was pretty anemic, yet THEY managed to muster the votes they needed. More than military science fiction and fantasy readers did. By definition, that means that they motivated a much higher PERCENTAGE of their absolutely smaller fan base.

All of this got me thinking. The two arguments in favour of keeping the Best Military category are that a lot of fans like reading MilSF, and that sidelining the genre is unfair to the independent authors who dominate it. But the exact same things can be said of another genre that springs to mind: pornographic SF/F.

So, if there is to be a campaign pressuring the Dragons to keep the Best Military category, then surely there is equal justification for a campaign to introduce an all-new category honouring pornographic literature?

Alas, I was unable to contact the Dragon Awards administration with my suggestion because the site’s contact form has a borked ReCaptcha that prevents any feedback from coming through (“ERROR for site owner: Invalid domain for site key”). The Save Our MilSF brigade likewise have their work cut out for them, clearly. For posterity, here’s the message I tried to send:

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Dear Dragon Awards,

Having read your update regarding changes to the categorisation system at your awards, I wanted to write in and enquire as to whether you have considered introducing a category for Best Pornographic Science Fiction or Fantasy Book.

Erotic fiction in the fields of SF, fantasy and horror forms a thriving market, with such titles as Taming the Wicked Futa Dragon, Monster Agent: Tentacled Orgasm and Minotaur’s Omega Mate: A Monster Mpreg Short having seen publication within the past few months alone. Chuck Tingle, who works in the genre of erotic SF/F, has been one of the writing world’s true superstars since his book Space Raptor Butt Invasion was nominated for a Hugo Award.

I notice that a number of commentators have expressed disappointment at your decision to remove the Best Military Science Fiction/Fantasy category, partly on the grounds that the category was beneficial to independent authors who dominate the genre in question; however, some of these commentators also acknowledged that perhaps the category was not receiving enough votes to justify keeping. If this is the case, then I would suggest that the introduction of a Best Porno category would be a win-win situation: on the one hand, erotica is another genre dominated by independent writers who would stand to gain considerable recognition; on the other,  the genre is almost certain to be more widely-read than military SF and so easier to justify.

Thank you for reading, and I hope that you take my suggestions into account. My only further recommendation would be that the category have a low minimum wordcount, as pornographic fiction tends to be somewhat short.

Yours,
Doris V. Sutherland.