Fast-food fiction

All Fiction is Genre and all Genre is Literature!

Ursula K. LeGuin, Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. LeGuin

I've written before about the late Ursula K. LeGuin's frustration with being stuck in the genre ghetto ("Committing genre," March 17, 2021). She thought she was writing literature for a broad audience, but her books were always classified by publishers, booksellers, critics and even readers as science fiction or fantasy. To most people, it seems, science fiction cannot be literature, and literature cannot be science fiction.

Sometimes the distinction seems arbitrary. Margaret Atwood's futuristic novels are regarded as literature, not science fiction. You probably won't find Matt Haig's The Humans, reviewed here a few days ago, in the sci-fi sections of most bookstores and libraries, yet it is a novel about aliens from space. The same goes for Dexter Palmer's challenging time travel novel Version Control. Many sci-fi fans might enjoy these books, yet never find them. Meanwhile many books, like those of Ursula K. LeGuin, might never be found by people who enjoy outstanding literature but never think to browse the sci-fi shelves. Nor, for that matter, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves or the western fiction shelves.

Yet LeGuin's ideal — that all fiction is genre and all genre is literature — is probably too good to be true. She well realized that genres exist for good, commercial reasons.

Publishers like genre because it helps them sell books. Booksellers like it for the same reason. "Genre addicts want books to be easy the way fast food is easy," she wrote. "They want to go to the big online commercial fiction dealer who knows what they like to read and offers cheap fixes, or go to the library shelf and stick out their hand and get a free fix."

And those who appreciate fine literature don't want to browse through all the trash, real or imagined, that genre supposedly sorts for them.

Perhaps it is the critics — those who write about books and talk about books — who have the greatest responsibility here. Their job is to separate the good books from the bad ones, even if it is only their own opinions. If critics were more open to the quality to be found in science fiction, fantasy, mysteries and other genre fiction, it might make a difference, at least among those who pay attention to critics. In this regard, LeGuin sets a good example with the essays, speeches and reviews found in the book that closed her career, Words Are My Matter.