Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
Genre doesn't exist as pertains to reading. It's a marketing term.
When I was young bookstores had a fiction section and a non-fiction section and a science fiction section and, in most cases, that was it. Fiction was alphabetic by author and you might find a western next to a fantasy next to a mystery next to a romance. They were simply novels.
Science fiction was the only exception since it was considered disreputable
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Even in the 1990s our high school English teachers would bend themselves into knots attempting to make up reasons why
1984 and
A Brave New World aren't science fiction and
The Picture of Dorian Gray and
100 Years of Solitude (which features an actual flying carpet) aren't fantasy.
Because those are good books, and thus clearly couldn't be in those genres.