Quote:
Originally Posted by weateallthepies
It so clearly is science fiction though, even if it is many other things. Something doesn't become 'not science fiction' because it has literary merit. It's just a classification, not a restriction. Sure the publishers use genres as a way of marketing to specific audiences, and modern literary fiction is as much a genre in that sense but that doesn't mean literary fiction can't also be science fiction.
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You are bang on in many respects. 'Literary' fiction is, for all purposes, just another genre, and it fails just as hard as all the others to provide anything but similarity and sameness in an attempt to cater to a specific audience. There are identifiable patterns and repetitions in a lot of what is called 'literary' - the professor who has a mid-life crisis, the semi-autobiographical memoir, the unreliable narrator in a post-modern coming-of-age story, the list goes on and on. Orwell, and I'll say this again,
in my analysis, does not fit into these genres either. Neither does Joyce, or to take an author who many believe to be science-fiction, neither does Ray Bradbury. Once they break the expectations of genre (any genre), then genre no longer can be applied to said writer.
Bradbury's lyrical and poetic tales of Mars colonisation (The Martian Chronicles) bare little in common with science-fiction, despite the presence of space rockets and space men. Chandler did the same with his Marlowe books, where mystery and murder took a back-seat to language and the introduction of Los Angeles as a character (nobody has even come close to this since). These examples transcend genre, so that you cannot expect anything from a cold reading of either description or from the cover.
My rule of thumb is quite simple nowadays, if I don't know what to expect when I pick up the book and still don't know what to expect after a page or so, then I'll continue reading. Literary merit or otherwise, the book has to surprise me in some way, and that way is very rarely going to be with genre any more (just by dent of experience).