The two main spurs for my blog posts here (apart from obituaries) are podcasts I've listened to or articles I've read in the Guardian. Among the latter, my hunting ground is typically in the football section, but this time it was a piece in the culture section, musing on whether we should abolish literary genres. My first thought on reading the headline was that it would be about getting rid of genre shelves in bookstores, but it turns out rather to be a discussion of books that don't fit neatly into a single genre - or what the writer imagines those genres to be.
They don't disparage any of the commercial genres, and indeed get closer to disparaging the whole concept of "literary fiction", which I can't help but agree with. But I'm always a little uncomfortable with the idea of getting rid of different sections in bookstores, or of discounting genres, mainly because I feel that the genres I like would get strangled out.
As far as Alex Clark's argument, it boils down to the idea that books are hard to categorize when they include concepts that you'd find in thrillers or horror or speculative fiction. In Clark's defense, those elements used to appear in lots of kinds of stories which we don't consider to be "genre" - Hamlet and MacBeth and A Christmas Carol all feature ghosts, for example, and yet they don't get shelved with Stephen King or Ramsay Campbell.
There's also the Sandra Bullock film Gravity, which I've had many arguments about, concerning whether it's science fiction. Some people I've spoken to said it was, because it takes place in space; I said it wasn't, because it all involves technology that currently exists. The film's Wikipedia page calls it SF but quotes its director Alfonso Cuarón as saying that he doesn't consider it SF. The difficult thing is that it would indeed have been speculative a few decades ago.
Unspoken in Clark's article in the Guardian is the question of what line demarcates genre fiction from the stuff you'd shelve at the front of the store. Clark doesn't say it, but there's clearly an issue of quality - horror and crime and SF were traditionally dashed off quickly to be published in crappy magazines. This perception persists when someone like Margaret Atwood insists that the Handmaid's Tale can't be science fiction because science fiction consists of lasers and talking squid in space.
This leads me into my concern about collapsing the literary and genre shelves together in bookstores. No less a luminary than George RR Martin has called for this, but I don't think he's thought through the implications of it. I'm speaking from experience, because I once encountered a WH Smiths in Liverpool Street Station that lumped all its fiction together.
The upshot was that I couldn't find anything I wanted to read there, both because looking for SF books meant poring through every single shelf, and because the only genre books were the best-known ones. Realistically, if you have only one shelf for fiction, you're not going to waste space on unknown or low-selling authors of any specific genre, you're going to place people like Martin or JRR Tolkien for SFF, or Raymond Chandler and John le Carré for crime and thrillers, or Stephen King for horror.
Maybe it's just how I browse, but when I go to the SF section of a bookstore, but I like spreading out from the authors I already know to find new authors whose books promise something similar. That kind of discovery is impossible if a bookstore is only stocking the sure bets.
It's perhaps unfair to single out a crappy bookstore in a train station, where people just want something to help them while away the time they'll waste on inevitable train delays and signal failures (I still have PTSD from several brutal delays in and around London), but this example is also relevant to non-fiction books. There are two bookstores near where I live, one of which categorizes its history shelf by country and region (Ancient history, world history, Asian history, European, US, WWI, etc), while the other just lumps all its history books together, categorized alphabetically by author.
I can more reliably find something to read at Bookstore A, which separates history books out, than at Bookstore B, where I have to pore through the entire shelf to make sure I haven't missed something I'd find interesting. At Bookstore A, if I'm in the mood for a book on Ancient Rome, I just go to the section reserved for ancient history and see what they have; at Bookstore B, the process takes longer and is more annoying.
Coming back to fiction, the point where I'd agree with the Guardian article that prompted this blog is in the case of authors who write in different genres. George RR Martin himself is a good example: he's best known for A Song of Ice and Fire, which is high fantasy, but he's also written science fiction and horror, the latter of which typically gets shelved separately from his other stories. But if you're looking for more of his specific back catalog, you might never even hear of Fevre Dream if you never look at the horror section. This might be why many authors use pseudonyms when writing in a new genre.
It's an imperfect system, the one we use to categorize books, but I think it's still better than all the other possibilities. Switching from physical media to digital TV and music and movies has made it harder to find new stuff, and the same generally applies to e-books - serendipitous discoveries are still more likely in physical bookstores, and if it means ghettoizing all the science fiction in one place for me to find the best new SFF stories, I'm willing to make that sacrifice.
After all, having that smaller shelf also means it's easier to ignore the type of SFF books that I don't care about.
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