Read on Twitter
"Literary" vs SFF beef is fugazi and intentional market segregation that readers/writers got tricked into taking personally. If more SFF presses subbed books for the Booker and more "realist" imprints campaigned for the Hugos, you'd just be catching up to readers. https://twitter.com/miayalynn/status/1326390976592613376
"Literary" is in quotes because, imho, it's a style and not a genre. Gene Wolfe is "literary" (and is 95% your favorite writer's favorite writer), and The Road is SFF. Most readers i know grok this, despite marketing efforts that try to tell us otherwise.
Like, maybe Finnegans Wake is a portal fantasy. And maybe John Crowley has long deserved every accolade on both sides of the "genre" divide. And maybe Severance is a book just as much at home at Picador as it might've been at Tordotcom.
The reason I brought up awards so early on is because it's one of the simplest ways to break through the seeming intractability of the marketing/writing Moebius Strip. Waterstones may not overnight completely reconfigure their shelves but BLRW hits the NBA shortlist and boom.
We can't obliterate the comps system by EOD tomorrow but we can talk (and many people DO talk) for instance about postcolonial considerations that animate Arundhati Roy's work as well as Arkady Martine's.
That's why it's been so heartening to hear folks position Riot Baby not just in convo with The Fifth Season but in convo with Richard Wright as well. Readers know that all these books and so many more are talking to each other. And the convo is so. Fucking. Rich.
