“Thinking about the maneuvers performed by self-defined“literary” novelists to preserve their purity from genre pollution, I realized that I am in the unusual position of being able to perform the same poses and contortions, only backwards. How am I to protect my unspotted name as a science fiction writer from the scorn of those who might think I have been shamelessly performing acts of realism in public? Thus: How dare you call me a realist? My book “Searoad” has nothing to do with the commercial realism found in all the chain bookstores. I call the book “Social Reality Enhancement.” Realistic novels are for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and conventional subject-matter. Realistic fiction, or re-fi as its fans call it, is an outworn genre, written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they’d be writing memoir, but they’re too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read re-fi, but my children keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it’s an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, incredibly culture-bound, full of wornout clichés and predictable situations: the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive lust, suburban guilt, and so forth. All it’s good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject-matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the com-plexity of contemporary experience. Now, would you believe that tripe? There’s some truth in it. But it’s tripe. All judgment of literature by genre is tripe. All judgment of a category of literature as inherently superior or inferior is tripe.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Genre: A Word only a Frenchman Could Love
