Musing while packing

[tahnan]

I separate science fiction from non-sf fiction because otherwise the non-sf would be wholly overwhelmed.

But why do libraries separate out sf? To keep the David Weber from contaminating the Tom Clancy? To make it easier for browsers, so that someone looking for a Larry Niven book will have an easy time finding the Mercedes Lackey nearby, while someone looking for Danielle Steele will fortunately have the Salman Rushdie close at hand?

Comments

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much it. Most public libraries have Genre sections: mystery, sf, western, romance, I imagine some of them have a Christian fiction shelf these days, and there are a few I'm probably forgetting. This is for the purported convenience of readers with particular habits—a lot of people will confine their browsing to just their comfort zone.

What I'm not altogether clear on is why, say, Greg Bear and Robert Jordan end up in the same section. Personally, I tend to read a lot of the "harder" sf and have very little taste for the fantasy stuff.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Well, but that's my point above: Lackey and Niven are fairly unlikely to appeal to the same readership, as are Rushdie and Steele.

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

Sorry, brain slipped a cam. In that case: Yes, I agree with you. Still, it's probably easier for a genre reader to sort through 30-70% of what they call "chaff" to get to their preferred reads, than to sort through 94% chaff.

[foldedfish.livejournal.com]

I believe it was Vonnegut who said he fought to not have his books put into the drawer labeled "science fiction" because some critics confused the drawer with a urinal.

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

I think there's two reasons why SF and F get lumped together:

1. Creating the line is hard, and will just make librarians and bookstore employees make mistakes and have arguments with readers. This might fly at a specialty bookstore, where the employees have an opinion on whether Pern is Science Fiction or Fantasy once the computers and spaceships start showing up, but what a headache for little gain.

2. There's a surprising number of crossover readers. Most people I've known that read SF read at least a little fantasy and vice versa, and I'd say that the number of fans that read both genres outnumbers the one-or-the-others by 2-1 easily. (I read both happily.) And, the number of SF readers that read some fantasy dwarfs the numbers that read some mystery.

There's a little bit of chicken/egg going on, especially when we're young, we learn where our 'section' is, and move with little bias through it. There's no logical reason why Horror is generally not in the SciFi/Fantasy section - it also has some serious edge cases, particularly with urban fantasy, and hits some of the same fanbase - but SF and Fantasy got intrinsically linked a long time ago, authors have taken advantage of the blur to make it blurrier, and it's not worth the trouble of disentangling. At least with Horror, marketing has already decided which readers to try and go after.

It's kind of annoying - I'm sure I miss good books because of the segregation, and how difficult it is to follow multiple genres. Then again, a _shortage_ of things I want to read is not one of my problems.

As to why they aren't all just 'fiction', well... I think that consumers like their marketing niche more than not. I don't know nearly as well how to find a good mystery as I do a good fantasy novel, so it's not just comfort as in what I'm used to, but comfort as in my abilty to be a smart consumer, and know that I want the Bujold instead of the new Piers Anthony. I'd pick up a much higher percentage of crap, off-genre, until I knew the lay of the land and my tastes with respect to the new genre. (I know I like urban fantasy, but nothing in the Vampire genre, I like hugo nominee science fiction, could care less about most 'golden age' sci-fi, etc. I don't know anything about mystery, or romance, or westerns.)

Hmm, I'm rambling, I should get back to work. :-)

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

I'm in the habit of checking out books for pleasure from a major research library, because it happens to be convenient, and of course it uses the Library of Congress system, so fiction is sorted by nationalities, time periods, and authors, not by genres. I remember I once checked out The Hospital of the Transfiguration without knowing anything about it except that it was by Stanisław Lem; I read through it in a state of growing bafflement, convinced that any page now, the main character's father was going to build a time machine. Only when I was at least halfway through the novel did I conclude that it really wasn't going to turn out to be science fiction at all.

Whether my experience constitutes an argument for or against shelving fiction by genre is, I think, entirely a matter of taste.