(I’d say, too, that some of John Fowles’s work hints at the fantastical — The Magus, say, and certainly A Maggot, which can be considered science fiction, even.)

This nitpicking doesn’t detract from your excellent points.

Is that you, that mild middle-aged gentleman on the photo next to your… opinion? And a click on your name seems to redirect one to a “Writer’s Colony”… Well now, for all that, mister, you’re sho nuff frikkin stupid. Hope your virtual head is sturdy though, if you by any chance decide to write here again, cause you obviously don’t know Hal.

This is really a difference between philosophists and philistines, between a middle-class and middle-brow approach to literature which panders to the intellectualist with chin-strokes, and a less bourgeois, low-brow approach which panders to the sensationalist with eyeball-kicks. Leaving aside the discourse of abjection inherent in the notion of the “genre writer” — as if Doris Lessing, say, were essentially defined by the presence of a certain quality in herself, rather than being simply a writer who works in various genres, sometimes using SFnal or fantastic conceits, sometimes not — the sweeping claim that no writer of fictions sold with a commercial category label would dare to step beyond the limits of formulaic product reveals a stupefying level of ignorance. Have you actually read any Ballard, say? Delany’s DALGHREN? Moorcock’s Cornelius books? Even a single story by Kelly Link?

You talk as a bourgeois fool, sir, a boor of very little brain.

Within commercial category fiction, certainly the pressure toward formulation has its detrimental effect, and there are indeed many readers so bound to “story” that they’ll kick up an almighty stink at the merest whiff of anything more complex. This is something I’ve covered at length in previous columns. But the real deciding factor in this dichotomy has been the pressure outside commercial category fiction to avoid any literary shenanigans that might displease a bourgeois audience trained to read for edifying “insight” — that pressure, the equation of realism and relevance, and the backlash against Modernism. The result of the trite suburban mindset born of that privileging of the ponderous was, in the late 20th Century, a largely hostile environment for the most radical and innovative works anywhere outside commercial category fiction — unless such works proffered themselves as mere ludic gameplaying, declawed by their posture of ironic detachment, safe in their postmodern pretence. Meanwhile, as the New Wave amply demonstrates, all the qualities you extol were actively fostered in the ghetto, where the steady market for “more of the same” played carrier to a market with a rapacious appetite for “something different.” Experimentalists were appreciated where, like Bester, they also satisfied that desire for “a good story,” but they were also appreciated where, like Delany, they offered works which piss on Romantic plot-dynamics. Where some readers reviled (and still revile) such ambitious works as DALGHREN, more often than not those innovators were lauded as everything SF could and should be. Crucially, in the ghetto they weren’t hamstrung by petit bourgeois standards of literary propriety. Trust me, as someone who’s published two works of non-linear experimentalism best described with terms like “cubist” and “pataphysical,” I know first-hand the openness within the “genre fiction” you dismiss.

For sure, that restrictive mindset outside the ghetto is visibly changing. With the popularity of writers like McCarthy, Palahnuik, Roth, Atwood and so on, even when — or especially when — they turn their hands to narrative techniques previously tainted by association with “genre,” it appears middle-brow readers are finally catching up, being taught to appreciate substantial experimentation with style, subject matter and form. But then when you actually read a writer like Kelly Link, it’s hard not to appreciate the scope of this “genre fiction” that’s produced the best short story writer of our generation.

“One cannot be taken seriously in literary fiction unless one experiments with style, subject matter, and form.” Tim, I take it you haven’t read Vellum and Ink, then, by that ranter above? Experiments with form, there; literary cubism. Also let me refer you to The Stars Our Destination by Bester, and Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny for experimentations with style. Moorcock’s Cornelius Chronicles; character. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; subject matter, specifically morals. The whole corpus of Philip K Dick, in fact, for subject matter.

And while we’re on the subject of experiments, and the point of the essay above, how about Virginia Woolfe’s Orlando? A novel about an immortal who also regularly changes gender, what is that if not a fantastic conceit used by a literary writer? Are you going to say, “but that’s good, so it can’t be SF”? And are you going to call Philip Pullman a pulp writer?

There are writers of SF who happily produce pulp fiction, acknowledge it as pulp and have no problems with classing themselves as equivalent to thriller writers, although they tend to envy Dan Brown’s income. And there are writers of SF and other strange fiction who are continually experimenting with style, subject matter and form. If they are not performing those experiments according to the conventions of the ‘literary’ genre, they nevertheless deserve critical acceptance as writing good work.

Why is it that such snootcocking snipewankery comes without a question mark? Could that be an inadequacy in your polished prose, precious?

Sorry to be rude, but you see my point, yes? If your rhetoric is meant to imply the utter folly of the SF writer’s delusions of literary skill, it doesn’t do much for your case if you open with a shoddily-constructed sentence.

What makes the difference is not realism or naturalism…

Yes. That would be the point of my reference to Rushdie winning the Booker of Bookers.

… or whatever style of literature you care to demean with the epithet of genre.

Nice. Do you also use “coloured” as a demeaning epithet? Because all works of literature have a genre, Tim, just as all human beings have a skin tone. The sonnet, the rondel, the ballade — these are genres of poetry. If nothing else, a work of prose fiction is going to be in the genre of the novel or short story, or some other higher level classification. Just as white people do actually have a colour to their skin, so works lacking the labels of commercial category fiction do actually have genres.

Again, you’d do better for your case that “literary fiction” deserves its place of privilege over “genre fiction” if you demonstrated an understanding of what these terms mean. As it is, you’re simply exemplifying a discourse of abjection paralleling that by which “coloured” ceases to actually mean “having a colour” and comes to mean “having one of a particular set of colours.” Such shifting of meaning is, in both cases, designed to construct an artificial dichotomy, with the “non-coloured” person, the “non-genre” work of literature, defined by negation; the point is, of course, to abject one set of people or works as being essentially inferior, made so by the presence of this “quality” — colour, genre — while the other is privileged as essentially superior in the absence of any such baseness. Compare the term “coloured music” for a discourse that applies a more blatantly abjecting and objectionable “demeaning epithet” on certain genres of work in a different medium.