I know you name a few in a comment over there, but a proper discussion including why you think they merit it would be very cool.

Dirty Baptist – You raise some good points. I’m actually less interested in genre boundaries than my passion on this subject suggests. I simply want to see the best books and writers recognised, and feel that The Booker does a very poor job in that regard. Reform it, get rid of it, replace it. Whatever. We need a better, more inclusive award.

That aside, Dirty Baptist, I completely agree. SF is like treason, it never prospers because when it does nobody calls it sf.

There’s tons of literary sf, people call it speculative fiction or magical realism (fantasy in other words) or other terms to divorce it from their flawed vision of what SF is – a vision of robots and ray guns (not that there’s anything wrong with either).

But the problem isn’t in the books, it’s in a handful of critics who’re not as widely read as they could be. SF itself is in pretty good shape.

Fantasy on the other hand…

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie picked up the award sometime in the 80s. The book is about India’s transition from British colonialism to independence or at least that’s the kind of thing that makes it onto the back cover. However, it’s a story about telepathic children. The lit crowd would not dream of accusing Rushdie of writing anything that could be considered sci-fi, instead it’s tagged as magical realism, which carries none of those ray gun and green women stigmas and so becomes perfectly acceptable.

Kazuo Ishiguro picked up the prize for The Remains of the Day but he was also shortlisted for his book Never Let Me Go, I would say to anyone grab a copy, it is fantastic. The book was not just shortlisted for the high art, literature awards but was up for the Arthur C. Clark Award back in 2006. I think Air by Geoff Ryman ended up winning, though I can’t see why. Anyway the book is about a dystopian future where organs are harvested from human clones. To me that’s pure sci-fi yet you won’t find the book in the sci-fi/fantasy section of your local book shop because it deals with literary themes, or rather themes that are synonymous with literary fiction. When the filmmaker Michael Bay released The Island, a film covering the exact same subject – human clones and organ donors – it was not picked up by the ‘arty’ crowd because at its heart it was not exploring the themes of identity and the fragility of life that Ishiguro did but instead concentrated on blowing shit up.

I think that’s how authors of speculative fiction make it onto literary award lists and also the fiction shelves, they are seen as paying closer attention to character. I’m not saying that sci-fi is about just plot and lit is only character orientated, that would be a grand over simplification and an untrue conclusion, but there certainly is an element of truth to that.

I don’t believe that sci-fi is as overlooked as many people say. When it is credited it’s simply not credited as sci-fi. If the self-confessed science fiction writer Doris Lessing, author of the Canopus in Argos series, can win the daddy of all literary awards, the Noble Prize, then sci-fi isn’t doing that bad for its self.

I’d challenge China Mieville not feeling literary, King Rat’s the only one I’ve read and it was flawed, but the prose in places was spectacular.

M John Harrison’s Viriconium stuff holds up to most literary fiction pretty well.

Iain Banks, well, I don’t think I have to try to hard to argue that he can be considered literary, so much of his output is after all literary fiction. The presence or absence of an initial doesn’t change his writing that much.

That said, the point about plot is a fair one. For me, literary fiction is first about prose style, then about issues of character (being simple here), science fiction I see more as a genre of ideas, then about plot. The concerns generally are different, just not always.

Andrew Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia was for me both good quality sf and literary fiction, it’s rare for something to be both but it’s not unknown. Often it’s just marketing, I’ve been discussing David Mitchell over at Hungry like the Woolf, a literary blog, and although he’s regarded as lit fit he’s plainly also sf. Chabon has been noted, a genre writer whose books are sometimes quite badly reviewed because they’re reviewed by lit fit reviewers unfamiliar with his sources – most reviews of Gentlemen of the Road I read didn’t even mention Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser or Elric as obvious source material.

But so what? There’s a literary prize that the papers pay attention to, and some bloggers, and few other people. It excludes some fiction that it should perhaps consider, but which may well not even be submitted for all we know (did anyone submit Mieville’s latest for consideration?).

Literary fiction gets the cultural kudos, that’s the way it is, science fiction will just have to put up then with being more popular and more relevant. It’s not the worst of fates.