[Prestidigitweeze]

Perhaps fiction in which the character defines the genre leads to empathy more often than fiction in which genre defines character.

Perhaps the reason literary fiction has been singled out as beneficial is because of the implied hierarchy of elements that define the form. Flaubert, Proust and Joyce were important not because they wrote litfic but because they observed characters so minutely that they were forced to develop entirely new forms of syntax, style and structure to show how the characters thought and behaved.

In their work, character defined everything, including the genre (though you could also argue, in the case of writers like Joyce, that the allusive external structure verges on mnemonic and in that sense is arbitrary, i.e., not character-defined).

I've seen rich levels of formal invention in genre fiction as well, though the emphasis is often different: The experimental aspect comes into play when showing unusual forms of thought, vocabulary and perception that might occur in a culture/race that doesn't actually exist; it's cultural/anthropological/historical/linguistic in origin. You can see that in Neal Stephenson, but you can also see it in Tolkien.

The level of richness and detail in someone like Stephenson is comparable to that of literary fiction. My question is whether you can say the same about the characterization.

The structure of Thom Disch's science fiction novel 334 seems defined by the chamber-music interplay of its characters and in that one sense resembles The Idiot. So perhaps the empathy distinction tracked by the article is often true but not exclusively so.