Author David Mitchell has let loose the latest salvo in the perennial “literary vs genre” war by saying that those who dismiss fantasy and science fiction are committing a “bizarre act of self-mutilation”.



Mitchell is one of the handful of authors with a foot in both camps. He’s beloved of the literary establishment, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize twice, and longlisted on a further three occasions. On the other hand, on Sunday he lifted the best novel trophy in the World Fantasy awards for his 2014 novel Bone Clocks, and his latest book, The Slade House, is an unabashed haunted house story.

Interviewed by Wired for a podcast put online just ahead of the World Fantasy convention where the awards were announced, Mitchell spoke about his fantasy and SF reading roots.

After a list of his favourite reading in his formative years – which included Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, British SF comic 2000AD and EE “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series – Mitchell spoke about the “nonsensical viewpoint” that means some readers dismiss anything with a genre label, and the “ghettoisation” in bookshops.

“It’s convenient to have a science fiction and fantasy section, it’s convenient to have a mainstream literary fiction section, but these should only be guides, they shouldn’t be demarcated territories where one type of reader belongs and another type of reader does not,” said Mitchell. “It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.”

He said that many books beloved of the literary establishment, such as the works of Charles Dickens, are “shot through with fantasy”. He added that with works that “become sanctified in the canon of English literature, people then forget – conveniently – are what we now called genre”.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and works of HG Wells and Margaret Atwood also fell into that category, he said: “There’s no intellectual consistency in these arguments.”

The literature vs genre war is one that rumbles on. It flared up last year with Kazuo Ishiguro’s apparent distancing of his novel The Buried Giant from the fantasy label, for which he was quickly taken to task by Ursula Le Guin.

Mitchell said he admired both writers. On Ishiguro – and those readers and critics who also sought to downplay the fantasy elements in his novel – Mitchell said: “There was just this big, big, big brouhaha in the press. In the admittedly tiny corner of the press that the book world occupies, there was this, ‘How dare he? Has he lost his marbles? What does he think he’s doing?’ A lot of people just didn’t get it. But this is what the book wants to be. You’re personally entitled to not like the book because you don’t think it works, you’re allowed to not like the book because you don’t get on with his style of writing, you don’t like the book because of its absurdity or strangeness – but don’t not like it because it’s got a dragon in it!”

Le Guin remains a personal favourite: “I visit Earthsea about once a decade, and I read myself when I’m there – my earlier selves, reading them as a boy of nine, as a teenager of 15, as a young man of 26 or so, as a writer of 35, and as a person who re-read them to write an introduction to the Folio Society’s recent hardback reprint of A Wizard of Earthsea. So it’s kind of come full circle.”

Mitchell’s thoughts come a few days after Mike Carey – author of the resolutely genre Felix Castor novels, plus a body of work for comics publishers Marvel and DC, as well as the “literary zombie” novel The Girl With All the Gifts, currently in production as a movie – shared his own thoughts on the conflict.

In a piece for the online Norwich Radical, Carey wrote: “The argument about the relative merits of literary and genre fictions just keeps running and running. There’ll be periods of decorous silence, and then it will break out again, usually in the form of some egregious statement in a broadsheet or magazine, and it will be like it never left.

“One thing you tend to notice after a while, though: it’s almost never writers of genre fiction who are picking the fight. To be fair, it’s often not literary writers either – it’s academics taking up the cudgels on their behalf; considerately telling us which stories are worth serious consideration and which aren’t. And I guess we appreciate the help, right? Because it’s a bewildering fictional landscape out there and an innocent young seeker after truth could easily go astray.”

