And I know very little about crime writing. I’m reading a selection of Holmes stories and essays right now — I’ve read the stories innumerable times before, but the essays will be new. Apparently, according to the intro., one attempts to place Holmes in relation to the contemporary supposition that it was “realistic.”

@gwern: I haven’t read The Dispossessed yet. I will eventually, I imagine. I have read Wizard of Earthsea and Lathe of Heaven. Le Guin is good, but I’m often a little disappointed as well. She tries too hard, it seems to me; never mind that Earthsea is ragingly racist.

And a lot of the Cold War stuff falls flat now. If you want an example that still holds up, try out Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice. The book’s only partly about the Cold War, but even those parts are great.

Regarding the Wolfe quotation, that’s what I had meant to get across; thanks for providing the full quotation. It is a literary genre, as all genres really are are ways to classify things, and that’s a classification. I believe most MFA types don’t even want to believe that, though; they seem to cling onto some desire for “literary” fiction to be not a classification, but ALL. Everything there is to write is in “literary” fiction, and everything else doesn’t exist.

GW: The adventurous reader has probably already moved past realism. I
realize that sounds like a smart remark, but I mean past the kind of
fiction that is called “realism” as a literary genre, and that’s what it
is: a literary genre. It is archtypically the story about the college
professor who is married to the other college professor.

Did you read [3]Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel, [4]The Dispossessed? It was
about the college professor who’s married to a college professor, only
science fiction, and this planet is Russia and this planet is the United
States. When I read it I was so disappointed. I’d had a dozen people tell
me how wonderful it was.

It’d be interesting to compare the status of British crime fiction which has traditionally been more mundane than mundane writing. ‘The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers’, said Chandler.

I see from wikipedia that Never Let Me Go won the Arthur C. Clarke award, so the SF community accepted it as one of their own, at least. More than that, without having read it or heard MFA types talk about it, I can’t say. The bare-bones plot summary on wikipedia makes it sound very SF.

I have noticed that, outside the U.S., differences in “genre” and “not-genre” aren’t as great. J. G. Ballard and Anthony Burgess were SF writers who were well-respected in the “literary” community, though once you ask U.S. MFA types, they didn’t write SF. There was a bit of a row recently, when one of the American obituaries claimed that marking Ballard as a SF writer was insulting to his skill and work. He said it was like “calling 1984 science fiction.” Which puzzled and irritated a lot of people, obviously.

It’s still a bit marked in Britain, but once one looks at some of the great SF writers from non-English-speaking countries, such as Poland (Stanislaw Lem) or Italy (Italo Calvino), no one seems to care. Of course, that’s an outsider’s perspective, but there you go.

Do you know where people — well, MFA professors — would put something like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go? The premise, and the skeleton of the plot (which could be gripping, if the narrator didn’t think it wasn’t) could be ‘genre’ fiction (and sf), but Ishiguro is supposed to write more ‘literary’ fiction. And it has a moral, or at least this person thinks it does (that piece contains spoilers — and also claims that NLMG is science fiction, and refers to ‘genre writers’).

Yeah, “mundane fiction” is my favorite term for the stuff. “Literary fiction” is an irreconcilably stupid and personally offensive term, seemingly contrived to divide readers into upper and lower classes. It’s an issue that brings my blood to such a boil that I don’t usually bother trying to be fair and balanced about it, like I do with most things. So, clearly, my grad school professors are going to love me.