Last night I came across this article which had me intrigued. It talks about writing professors being partial to literature and against science fiction. The comments are even more interesting as some of them show not all professors are against science fiction. And this morning I was directed to this letter from Daniel Abraham, a genre writer.

It’s very interesting how so many literature writers, readers and reviewers still look down on genre books, books written in a particular genre such as science fiction or fantasy and it doesn’t really make much sense as some of these genre books are much better than some literature books. They make a lot more sense, are easier to read and have messages inside them which are the equal of literature.

Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series have distinct messages about women and their strength and show women to be extremely capable of thought and action. Many of the women in Pern are capable and run things quite nicely while in literature such as Bleak House the women are depicted as being rather silly and pandering to the men. I know Bleak House is based on people Dickens knew but surely he knew more capable women than that, there’s only a couple of decent women in it, most of them are silly and fluffy and only do what they’re told.

There are many examples of messages about society within the pages of genre books. Take Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell. Both of these genre books take society into the future and show us what it could be like. Literature readers will often read these books and tell us they transcend genre, they mean this in a derogatory fashion but it’s not really because they’re using the wrong words, they mean they cross the borders between genres. These books are science fiction and literature together, what I’m really saying is that literature is a genre so the idea of calling a book a ‘genre’ book is actually really silly.

When deciding which category to put books into on this website I often just take the most well known category, so Anne McCaffrey’s books could go into science fiction or fantasy. I tend to think her Pern novels are more fantasy but as there is a lot of genetic engineering in some of them and that then filters through to all of them they could easily go in science fiction. If I had a category for women’s fiction I’d put them there as well, but that assumes I’m classing strong women as women’s fiction. Women’s fiction could be chick lit or romance but that’s just silly as I know men who happily read both chick lit or romance and I don’t read either if I can help it. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire could be classed as horror or fantasy due to the vampires but there’s also a deep love element in there so could be slotted into romance, it also has a fair amount of philosophy so maybe I could stretch a point and file it under philosophy.

Anyway, I think I’m confused. I’m just going to finish by mentioning my English Literature teacher from last year who is partial to vampire fiction and even likes Twilight – I do hope no-one tries to categorise that as literature, maybe we could start a new category called Sparkly!