Nice to see no horrid SF listed, from August's '
Ansible' :
The Perennial Booker Whinge. Andrew Motion explains that genre-tainted pariahs were not excluded from the 13-novel Booker Prize longlist; it merely chanced that right across the board, by a multiple happy coincidence, they failed to be included. Here's the Guardian: 'There are no first novels – which have become a feature at longlist stage in the last few years, and there is no genre fiction. Motion said they had not consciously set out to exclude genre but stressed that the Man Booker prize was an award for literary fiction and there were plenty of prizes for crime and sci-fi.'