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niggle · 07-30-2012, 10:37 PM

Back in 1968, one rainy lunchtime in highschool I went to the school library looking for more books to satisfy my craving for science fiction. There was a set of three books on the shelves which I had been distantly aware of for some time. On the flyleaf inside Volume one was a quote (forget from whom) which said: "This is really super science fiction"... so I took the first two volumes out. That started my adolescent obsession with Lord of the Rings. I hadn't read the Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings craze (already by that time well-established in the US) had not really made much impact yet in the UK.

I think it would be rash to say that there is a blanket disregard of "genre" fiction in literary circles...after all what about the great dystopias of the twenties, thirties and forties? Orwell's "1984", Huxley's "Brave New World" and Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" are all science fiction. I'm pretty sure Orwell called "Animal Farm" a "fairy story". Mervyn Peake's "Titus" series is fantasy/dystopia. And what about HG Wells? He considered himself a journalist more than a literary writer, but Henry James (then the "doyen" of literary London), thought him a gifted writer, and had a long correspondence with him.

I don't know whether this is any more than an unqualified personal observation (because I certainly haven't done any research) but there seems to have been in the last 30 years a huge expansion in the number of books published in the broad "fantasy" genre. When I was a kid back in the sixties the published output in "fantasy" seemed fairly small compared with science fiction. Now it seems to me there is a lot more fantasy (including all the sub-genres) than science-fiction. Does anyone else share that perception?

07-30-2012, 10:37 PM	#103
niggle Member Posts: 18 Karma: 10 Join Date: May 2010 Device: Hanlin v3	Fortunate (?) misallocation of genres Back in 1968, one rainy lunchtime in highschool I went to the school library looking for more books to satisfy my craving for science fiction. There was a set of three books on the shelves which I had been distantly aware of for some time. On the flyleaf inside Volume one was a quote (forget from whom) which said: "This is really super science fiction"... so I took the first two volumes out. That started my adolescent obsession with Lord of the Rings. I hadn't read the Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings craze (already by that time well-established in the US) had not really made much impact yet in the UK. I think it would be rash to say that there is a blanket disregard of "genre" fiction in literary circles...after all what about the great dystopias of the twenties, thirties and forties? Orwell's "1984", Huxley's "Brave New World" and Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" are all science fiction. I'm pretty sure Orwell called "Animal Farm" a "fairy story". Mervyn Peake's "Titus" series is fantasy/dystopia. And what about HG Wells? He considered himself a journalist more than a literary writer, but Henry James (then the "doyen" of literary London), thought him a gifted writer, and had a long correspondence with him. I don't know whether this is any more than an unqualified personal observation (because I certainly haven't done any research) but there seems to have been in the last 30 years a huge expansion in the number of books published in the broad "fantasy" genre. When I was a kid back in the sixties the published output in "fantasy" seemed fairly small compared with science fiction. Now it seems to me there is a lot more fantasy (including all the sub-genres) than science-fiction. Does anyone else share that perception?