O genre, you contentious and poorly understood topic!

From the silly notion that “literary” fiction can’t have sex in it to the facepalm-worthy idea that novels written on cellphones constitute a new genre, we suffer a lot of bizarre delusions when it comes to the distinction between genre and quality.

Some privileged smugsters would like us to believe that literary-quality writing must have a realistic—preferably modern—setting, convey some sort of political message, and rely on the Gadsby-esque stunt of obsessively avoiding common phrases. In other words, the sort of thing that people might write who have (a) relatively little creativity, (b) lots of free time due to not needing a day job, and (c) a desire to smuggle their activist propaganda into your brain under the guise of storytelling.

Even the Hugo Awards—which one might assume would be free of this dust-up since they’re granted for science fiction—fell prey to the conflict, with the Establishment pushing a message fic propaganda paradigm and the Puppy outsiders claiming that the only thing that matters is a popular, rip-roaring story. This Puppy-like standard of quality is also quite common in the rising tsunami of self-publishing authors, for whom sales are the ultimate measure of worth.

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