David Mitchell just won a World Fantasy Award for The Bone Clocks, and he’s one of the most exciting voices in speculative fiction right now. But he’s usually classified as a literary author—and talking to the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, he explains why that’s largely meaningless.

Says Mitchell:

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 belong. ...

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. ...

The book doesn’t care if it’s science fiction. The book doesn’t give a damn about genre, it just is what it is.