I'm with 'suela. I bloody well adore P K Dick and how on earth would you market him, if not as scifi? Definitely boggling.
It's as if P.D. James's books had stopped having "A Mystery" on the cover. (I just checked; The Murder Room both has a genre title and says An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery on the cover.)
Indeed it does, and it's on my TBR list because I love James and love Adam Dalgleish and have done since the late 1960s.
How do reviewers stand on Ruth rendell? Because she could rewrite the London phone directory and hook me by page five, and I expect that would be the case no matter what genre she chose. But again, not reading reviews, I don't know how she's perceived.
Name me one serious movie (as in Oscar contender) that's based on an SF novel.
Does fantasy count? because I can think of three....
By contrast, mysteries get treated seriously all the time.
Series books less so, I think, and probably for good reason. I mean, Lehane is always a great writer, but I bet a Gennaro/Kenzie book would never become an Oscar movie. Part of it has got to be the formula of it all -- the same characters, doing more or less the same thing in book after book? It's hard to make the case to someone who hasn't read them.
Huh. I always thought of mysteries and science fiction/fantasy as getting about the same level of critical respect, but that could be because I'm looking at them from the perspective of a writer with a romance manuscript to market--I mean, talk about no critical respect no matter how strong the merits of the book....
(Nodding and pointing at What Betsy Said.)
As an aside,
anything
from the SF/Fantasy genres still has a better chance of a Serious Review than a book from the horror genre, unless it's written by Clive Barker or Stephan King. Neither of whom has written in that genre for a while now.
Does fantasy count? because I can think of three....
Le oops.
t resets Wayback Machine to 2004. I hate it when I'm stuck in the past like that.
Jilli, what about Peter Straub?
The man can flat-out write.
Jilli, what about Peter Straub?
Good point. He gets Serious Reviews, too. But anyone who isn't a Big Name Author who is writing horror? Gets shunned. And frequently stuck with horrible, schlocky cover art, which doesn't help at all.
My perspective is that it's not the authors who are dismissed, but the readers. People who read mysteries are more socially acceptable than people who read SF/Fantasy. Horror's probably somewhere in the middle, thanks to King.
Why I dropped in here, tho: A friend has talked me into joining a paperback book swap, and I'm wondering if any Buffistas would be interested? You get a list, mail a book to the first person on the list, add your name to the bottom of the list, and send the newly-updated list to new people. So you only send one book, but get several. You don't get to keep trading with the same people, though.
Anyway, if you are interested, my profile addy's good.
