True enough, but the “Literature” section is also the great unclassified of the bookstore, and I think that’s the key point behind Pete’s assertion. There are microgenres within literature, like the Bridget Jones style women-having-breakdowns-at-30 books, but since they’re next to the Kobo Abe and Alexandre Dumas, I think you get a much more mixed message.

In contrast, when you have a well-defined genre like SF, you have a fair degree of ghettoization going on, because there are authors whose entire existence is playing to the tropes of the genre, like the incessant David Drake novels. You have authors who are aware of and occasionally shred the genre’s conventions (China Mieville being a good example), but they’re still basically bounded by it. This is reinforced by audiences who will basically pick up a random novel in the category because it is is fantasy – as long as it falls within the genre boundaries, they expect reasonable satisfaction.

Taking it a step further, most of these genres are descended from a relatively small number of authors. Diana Wynn Jones wrote a really nasty piss-take on fantasy novels, “The Rough Guide To Fantasyland” which points out that there’s a prevalence of “Anglo-Saxon Cossacks” in fantasy lit. This is directly descended from Tolkien, who had a specific reason for wanting Anglo-Saxon light cavalry. Michael Moorcock occasionally gripes that he doesn’t see much point in reading fantasy because everything is a ripoff of him or Tolkien. I think if you were to break down Fantasy to descended from Tolkien, Howard, Moorcock and Gary Gygax, you’d be able to plot almost all contemporary books somewhere close.

The question in SF, then, I think, is whether or not obeying the conventions of the genre means also ignoring the finer details of plot and characterization. Banks has referred to The Culture as something of a response to the Heinleinian hyper-capitalist future, and I think we can count the origin SF authors fairly easily – Smith, Asimov, Heinlein. None of these guys are great prose stylists, their work is primarily sold on ideas for their audience – the tendency for egoboo in the SF fan community, and the intensive nitpicking that characterizes the ink spilled over the genre is a good indication that the major issue is the ideas and the manipulation of the ideas behind the story, rather than the story itself. I don’t think anyone’s ever praised I, Robot for the characterization of Susan Calvin, and rereading _Foundation_ recently, I was reminded of just how doofy Hari Seldon’s appearances are.

This touches on a subject that interests me. I am painting with a very broad brush here, but there’s an argument to be made along the lines of “Science Fiction that is well written isn’t on the Sci-Fi shelf; it’s on the Literature shelf.” This is, of course, a grossly unfair generalization. But what I’m trying to do is point out the existence of “sci fi” (or fantasy, or mystery, or what have you) as more of a “marketing genre” than as a useful designation.

Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” is as much sci-fi as anything on the sci-fi shelves. But the writing doesn’t suck, so it’s on the general fiction shelves.

Not to condemn the entire genre so flagrantly, I still hold a Canticle For Liebowitz up to anything else written this century.

Yes, there is ultimately a payoff in slogging through Dune, and many people have gotten to it. It is the payoff of realizing that there is a whole universe of fascinating technology, history, and relationships, and it makes your brain fizz with the possibilities. It doesn’t change the facts that actual story told by the book is rather mundane (managing to collapse a fantastic eight-sided conflict down to only three) and that the sentence “Immerse it!” remains one of the most gut-wrenchingly awful ever written in the English language. Never mind the usual argument of whether the movie was better than the book–in this case the book was beaten by the board game! This is not a criticism of the *concept*, it is a criticism of the *execution*, in the same way that the Star Wars Expanded Universe remains a vibrant creative ground despite the fact that George Lucas is such a shit director of movie actors. For a taste of what might have been, try The Tower of Fear by Glen Cook.

Gormenghast, contrarily, is difficult to read because it is so *good* at the level of *every* sentence, paragraph, and chapter. To use Elmore Leonard’s language, it is Ivory soap: 99.44% pure hooptedoodle. The text itself presents a very weird choice to the reader. On the one hand, each chapter is a fine little essay on a minute corner of a ritual-driven world being bumped from its habitual track. The end of each chapter invites the reader to stop and ponder, to appreciate this very precise viewpoint fully. And yet, on the other hand, the human desire to know what happens next propels the reader forward past this point of view, without giving it full value. The overall effect is that of making a conscious effort to percieve the forest despite the trees, knowing quite well that each tree deserves its own attention, and feeling a sense of loss that it cannot be given. This serves to compound the overall sense of loss that the story describes, of the decay of a monstrous seventy-six-generations-old castle and the families within it. That is the poetic effect at work, the language fully serving the emotional impact of the story.