Pornokitsch

» see pornokitsch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The name was the argument. Pornography plus kitsch, because genre fiction gets filed as the kitsch of the literary world, and the people running the site had no interest in apologizing for reading it. Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin started publishing in 2008 out of London: reviews and long arguments about the books the literary pages were not going to cover seriously.

It got taken seriously anyway. The British Science Fiction Association shortlisted it for best non-fiction in 2011. It won the British Fantasy Award for non-fiction in 2013. In 2014 it made the Hugo shortlist for Best Fanzine, which is the closest thing the field has to a formal acknowledgment that an unpaid website is doing the work a magazine used to do. Becky Chambers wrote for it before The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and so did Molly Tanzer and Kuzhali Manickavel.

On 31 March 2018 the last new piece went up. There was no falling-out and no funding crisis to report, because there had never been any funding. Two editors ran out of the particular kind of time a decade-old blog needs, which is the way almost all of them end.

~ the record ~

~ the kitschies ~

From 2009 Pornokitsch ran an annual award of its own for the year's most progressive and entertaining books containing something speculative. The prizes were the Red Tentacle for best novel and the Golden Tentacle for a debut, with an Inky Tentacle added for cover art, and the trophies were literally tentacles, made by hand, different every year. It was the least stuffy book prize in Britain and it was taken seriously by publishers who would not otherwise have gone near a blog.

The Kitschies outlived the site that made them. Blackwell's picked up the sponsorship, the award moved out on its own, and it kept running under other people. Whatever else Pornokitsch was, it built an institution and then handed it over intact.

~ jurassic london ~

In 2011 the same two people started a small non-profit press called Jurassic London, commissioning original anthologies rather than reprinting. It published for museums and it published on themes nobody else would have paid for, and it stopped commissioning after a few years and a couple of dozen books. Almost nothing about this operation was visible from outside Britain.

Which is my honest distance from all of it. This was a London literary scene running on pub launches and word of mouth in a language community I read but was never inside, during years when I was working as an engineer in Ankara. I knew the Hugo categories existed. The fanzine ballot is not something I ever followed, and the first time I read a word of Pornokitsch was in an archive capture from 2025.

~ the second death ~

The site sat there after 2018 with everything still on it, hosted on TypePad, which is what a lot of mid-2000s blogs were built on. Six Apart closed TypePad on 30 September 2025. The last working capture of pornokitsch.com is from 7 September 2025 and its front page is titled "Bye!". By the middle of October the domain was redirecting to typepad.com, and today it answers a bare request with a Cloudflare block.

Ten years of criticism went with it. There is a partial copy in the Internet Archive and nothing else, which is the same position most of the blogs that hosted somewhere convenient are now in.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »