Of course the real question though is how do we know it wasn’t the real Dick all along? Andis it now striding through a village campfire scattering embers among the terrified Eskimos.

And if you like a bit of Dick, why not check out one of his acolytes Tim Powers or the initimable Jack Womack who took the mise en scence of “The Man In The High Castle” ten steps further to the sun.

Incidentally someone here once recommended Peter Hamilton’s “Pandora’s Star.” Who was it? C’mon, own up. Boy, was that a crock of shit. Like Iain M Banks without the wit or imagination. Or E E “Doc” Smith without the energy.

However that was owes me $24.95. Or they should go out and buy Ian MacDonald’s “River of Gods.” and read how to handle really big ideas in an understandable but still shocking future.

But that’s the real snobbery - the literary fiction shelf. Every bookshop I’ve been to has one, and also a general fiction shelf. I can’t give you examples off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are many authors who have started in one, and should mostly be in the other one. But I suspect that there is a lot of the literary shelf that gets bought by people who believe that’s what they should be reading, not because they actually enjoy it.

I’m a voracious reader who does like good writing, but generally likes either plot or character or ideas to go with it, and too often literary fiction seems to be written by people who believe sentence structure is enough.

As for awards Handmaid’s Tail won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year, and was a finalist for the Nebula Awards. Oryx and Crake appears to be have shortlisted for some Canadian SF awards but other than that I don’t of any.

It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians. As with The Handmaid’s Tale, it invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent.

It’s in the running for the Booker et al - is it up for an SF gong?

(Sturgeon’s Law is very usefully trotted out in arguments with literary snobs.)

The late Octavia Butler wrote as sharply about the subaltern experience of colonisation as just about anyone else, but it’s much harder to imagine her being awarded the Nobel Prize than some of her contemporaries who deal with the same psychological territory, because her colonisers are giant tentacled tri-gendered slugs called Oankali.

But there are also those genres which just about everyone (except their enthusiasts) is keen to disavow: in particular, the chick lit / romance spectrum. That’s a “female” genre, by and for women: SF used to be just as strongly coded male - technology, exploration, the public sphere - and while that’s not quite how it’s perceived any more, I don’t doubt that the manliness associated with SF helped break it out of the ghetto in a way that woman-genres will find much more difficult.

This isn’t the first time these kinds of battles have been fought in the literary arena; two hundred years ago everyone read Gothic fiction and historical romances, but the tastemakers managed to convince everybody that those were bad, girly books and novels about individuals in conflict with social systems were the only ‘good’ reading matter.

putting my nerdy self back in the box now

C’mon this is the internet. Us nerds can be out and proud!

Thanks for the thoughts, I had been sitting on this for a while not entirely happy with what I was trying to say, but thought it might be a good time to break from discussing more heated political topics and to hell with worrying about badly thought out ideas!

Anyway, yes you make a good point about genre being different from subject and also about style. Although not only about style China Meiville’s stuff is written much more in a literary style and even to some extent in themes, even if the setting and plot is pure fantasy. Also interesting your point about literary prizes going to what could be considered a specific genre.

Its true that also bookstores are trying to sort them in the way that sells most books rather than infer something about the works quality. However perhaps they are still reflecting people’s ideas about what is quality. Or perhaps I’m generalizing from individuals I know who think this way and would read say Attwood writing SF, but never something of a SF shelf.

As for Neal Stephenson’s annecdote. I can only say it was from an interview a few years ago, about a conference that happenned sometime earlier so he may have been less well known.

My Atwood example was merely a result of me reading Oryx and Crake and thinking why is this not sitting on the SF shelves. Kurt Vonnegut is actually the person I find most confusing placed generally.

Moorcock’s interesting too - shortlisted for the Booker, and some bookstores will place some of his stuff in the “sf/fantasy” shelves and others in the “literary fiction” shelves whereas others place it all under sf/fantasy.

I think the reason why SF and fantasy fans in particular find this so exasperating is because it happens so regularly.

I know this is a decidedly low-brow example, but last year fantasy author Terry Pratchett took JK Rowling to task because JK Rowling said, “oh, I didn’t realise I was writing fantasy novels when I wrote Harry Potter, I just write about wizards and so forth.”

Coverage here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4732385.stm

Rowling also wrote about trying to ’subvert’ the genre which, considering she doesn’t read the genre, strikes me as a bit odd.

Pratchett hit back essentially saying, “of course you write fantasy novels, and fantasy can be deeply subversive, writers have been subverting if for years, and didn’t you think the wizards etc gave you a clue that you were writing a fantasy novel?”

And I’d personally say Pratchett’s work, (along with China Meiville and Susannah Clarke and Neal Stephenson and Ray Bradbury and so on) is far more subversive of the genre and its traditions, as shallow as they may be, than Rowling’s ‘famous five with magic in’ series. I mean, I enjoyed Harry Potter and I read the children’s editions on the bus and all; but they were just reasonably pacy well-written children’s books. Maybe if Harry comes out as a gay wizard and runs off with Voldemort to open an alternative magic shop in San Francisco we might be onto something…

Anyway, I’m not an obsessive SF and fantasy reader, I don’t consider it “my genre”. However, I really enoy a lot of SF and fantasy and it bothers me immensely that this immediately makes my taste suspect. It bothers me when someone who writes fantasy wants to disown it as thoroughly as Rowling does.

*putting my nerdy self back in the box now*

Of course Laura makes several far more intelligent points about how genre is merely one way of classifying novels. I’ll have to read that story in the Australian but right now I’m reading several novels so it might have to wait…

Last week I had difficulty in finding “The Best Australian Stories 2005″ Edited by Frank Moorhouse published Nov 2005 and “Do Not Disturb - Is the Media Failing Australia?” Edited by Robert Manne published Aug 2005.

The publisher, Black Inc, (who also publish ‘The Monthly’ and ‘The Quarterly Essay’) do not sell books directly to the public.

I eventually located copies at GleeBooks who are now trying to find “The Best Australian Stories 2004″.

Incidentally, these story collections are excellent with the two mentioned here being better collections than the earlier ones edited by Peter Craven. Moorehouse has included stories by new writers which is a nice change from short story collections which include the same-old.

Ivor Indyk is represented as having said that Australian Literature is no longer taught as a standalone discipline in universities - I don’t understand what that means. Does it mean you can’t major in Austlit anymore but once upon a time you could? Because depending on where you go to study, it would be quite easy to construct an English major that consisted of units solely or mostly about Australian literature. Long way of saying, he’s wrong.

The issues facing the Australian literary world are both more and less complicated than that article really explains.

In any case it’s a very different kettle of fish to debating whether the high modernist novel is no longer the uncontested king of the literary pile. If people are buying and reading fewer “quality” novels than formerly it is almost certainly because genres once considered lesser - biography, literary journalism, SF - now openly compete for the same slice of the market.

It’s very rare that these systems have any internal hierarchy of quality going on. There is no sign in the bookstore that says “true crime (crap) down the back…Booker Prizewinners (worthy) on the left.” The bookstore just wants you to buy something, anything. The hot books of the moment are piled near the cash register.

Where exclusions and rankings come into play is in deciding what will get into the bookstore or library in the first place. Again the logic is utilitarian, I think, rather than strictly evaluative. Publishers are interested in books they think they can sell, and that means books that don’t require too much explaining. Thus books that fit into pre-existing categories, author, genre etc. Hightoned literary novels obviously fit that description in the requisite superficial way. I don’t agree there is any real & consequential snobbery involved.

I would also have to argue that genre is not necessarily the same thing as subject matter. I think it fundamentally has more to do with the technical features of the writing - extending from the big categories of novel, play, poem etc, down to things like whether the language of narration is heavily metaphorised (eg, Ray Bradbury) or straightforwardly transparent and functional (Dick). Form follows function, of course, and certain kinds of form become very closely associated with certain kinds of subject matter. But they’re not indivisible, and lots of the most successful writers do great things by making surprising recombinations. Innovation only makes sense when seen against a background of tradition, so writing that breaks moulds and crosses boundaries is heavily dependent on stuff that it seems to be rejecting.

Looked at in this way, you can make a case that the types of book which are typically nominated for big-deal literary prizes do constitute an internally coherent genre (as coherent as any other genre) because they tend to borrow from each other technically and to work with similar assumptions about the reading experiences shared by their audiences.

I’m sorry this is such a long comment - there are interesting things to ponder about why Atwood is invariably cited as an example of genre boundary policing at its evillest, and also that anecdote of Stephenson’s is pretty fascinating: I seriously can’t imagine a real practicing novelist & writing teacher of any stripe who hadn’t heard of Neal Stephenson…. that’s like the Premier of Tasmania not knowing who Kofi Annan was…

I wouldn’t call myself a SF person although I do enjoy it on occassion, so I certainly don’t feel insecure about it. Neither do I have problems with seperation into genre. However, I am puzzled about separation into genre by author, rather than by book. Its not done in non-fiction, where seperation is by subject matter, rather than by typcasting the author as a particular type of writer. Its the fact that we do that, seperate into genre by author in fiction that makes it smell snobbish.

Speaking of ideas vs. prose, what do people here make of Samuel Delany and Kim Stanley Robinson? Any fans of Lord Dunsany, Tanith Lee, or HP Lovecraft out there?

wbb — yeah, good point. Good shop design is just good shop design. If anything, the quarrel should be with tastemakers and compilers of syllabi, but that sort of fight runs its own course. Cream rises to the top, and ‘breeding will out,’ and so on. Time to just order another round of Bushmills for the house, and relax for the day.