[Ransom]

I made no such claim.

Very well, but you did say that LF "may discard" all those things while saying just before it that LF was "idiosyncratic." If it's not the discarding of those traits that sets LF apart, then just what exactly is so individualistic about this so-called genre?

Your examples were irrelevant to the respective traits I did describe.

Oh come now.

If American Gods is your idea of a work of contemporary literary fiction, I rest my case.

Why not tell the truth about this? I said: "...garbage like Gaiman's American Gods is the norm among the LF crowd...." This is true. It's part of your crowd's mindset—not mine. You'll seldom see a conversation about this trite work that doesn't include the term LF even though it certainly is entirely fantasy, and if you'll search reviews for the book, you'll find it listed as LF time after time.

"...wonderful authors who are not dead white men."

I can't think of many since 1960. Arthur C. Clarke has written some fine things, especially 2001 which was indeed wonderful and much better than the movie, but his finest work was a couple of decades earlier. Susanna Clarke has written the only other piece of fiction I've read since 1960 that I would refer to as wonderful although the first 200-pages of her 800-page masterpiece were very slow, and her fictitious footnotes got to be very draining. Some of Orson Scott Card's books have been quite good even though he's the best example I could give if I wanted to exhibit the inherent problems within stream of consciousness writing. His stories are good—his writing is not. However, good is not wonderful. Patrick O'Brian has some fine stories, but he's not wonderful.

And you might enjoy Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, Narcissus and Goldmund and/or Steppenwolf.

I gave up on Hesse after he butchered both Hinduism and Buddhism in Siddhartha. He now joins my list of 20th century lightweights alongside of Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, M. R. James, and Norman Mailer. Not that they all didn't have their moments (except Mailer), but their overall output is quite overrated.

The great misfortune of our generation is that there are few, if any, writers who know how to write for men anymore. This is where Twain and Chesterton ruled the literary world. No one could write for men like they could. Again, Patrick O'Brian is not bad in this regard though.

And you might enjoy this article in the (gulp) Guardian titled "Is speculative fiction poised to break into the literary canon?" They make such enlightened statements as: "Over the same period, the fashion of literary fiction writers borrowing ideas from SF has continued." And of course, American Gods is mentioned once again.