New BSC Review Column

No SF novel ever won the Booker.
Somebody, Somewhere, Somewhen

If you hang out long enough down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café, eventually you’ll hear this axiom, or an axiom like it, muttered with a certain tone of harumph, a petulance in proportion to the wounded pride. Maybe you’ll say it yourself, sullen in your sense of injustice, disregard; I know I have. And whenever it’s spoken, that truism will likely spark a little to-and-fro on the exclusion of SF from the modern canon. There is, after all, an absenting in the absence, an active excision; the ghetto of Genre is a territory of the abject, an enclosure for the refused, that paraliterary pulp exiled from Literature — despite the fact that literature means only that which has been written — delimited as Genre — despite the fact that every work of literature sits within some genre or other...

My favourite part is that after me dishing out my fairly usual level of snark about how seriously we can really expect to be taken, for fuck's sake, when we're presenting our precious stuff as paraliterary pulp, the very first comment cocks a snoot at the idea I should "care to demean" a "style of literature" like realism or naturalism "with the epithet of genre."