I Am Dragon’d

by wjw on August 14, 2021

Fleet Elements has been nominated for a Dragon Award, given at Dragoncon in Atlanta over Labor Day Weekend.

It’s been nominated in the Military SF category, which I suppose ends the discussion over whether the Praxis series is MilSF at all. I’ve always maintained the book isn’t about the military, but about people who happen to be in the military.

But there’s no category for “Epic Multi-Volume Far-Future Science Fiction,” so I guess the voters worked with what they had.

If you voted, I thank you. But even if you haven’t voted, you can still vote for the winner even if you aren’t a member of the con. All you need is an email address, and you can sign right up.

In fact I believe you can sign up once for every email address you happen to possess, which means you can vote multiple times. For me, of course.

I wonder if my old CompuServe address still works?

M August 14, 2021 at 6:32 am

That’s a good point – a book about people most of whom happen to be police is not categorized as “police fiction”. If it included a romance between officers while solving a case I suspect it might be classified romance rather than suspense or mystery (although that might depend on the emphasis given the various elements).

The only other genre like this I can think of like this might be westerns, and that’s more like a setting – a book set in Kansas in the 1800s would likely be a “western” while something set in London during the same period would not be.

I suppose in the end genre is intended as advertising to allow people to find the book. Is classifying it as “milSF” making it more popular than putting it in another genre?

bookworm1398 August 20, 2021 at 9:10 pm

@M. Actually police procedurals are a listed sub category of mystery. I used to read a lot of those and they definitely have their own tropes and conventions.

@WJW Personally I categorize Praxis as military sci-fi, it has battles and descriptions of weapons. How do you define military sci-fi?

wjw August 20, 2021 at 10:40 pm

To be honest, I haven’t read that much MilSF, but what I’ve read seems very action-oriented. Some kind of combat every other chapter.

While it’s true that procedurals are a recognized sub-genre of mystery, not every story featuring police is a procedural. See TV’s Mike and Molly.

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