So wrote Harry Crews in 1971 in his review of Gray Matters for the New York Times Book Review. Of course, it helped that he went on to say the novel “turns out to be not SciFi, but an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science.” Still, Crews had a point to make. Writers of serious literary fiction weren’t supposed to dirty their lily-white hands with generic trash. It didn’t matter that such fine work as The Oxbow Incident and The Bronc People were westerns, that both 1984 and Brave New World should be classified as science fiction, and that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler both wrote what anyone would define as detective literature. Genre fiction remained something one despised and avoided at all costs. Even the slightest exposure might infect a writer with a bad case of brow-lowering. I just didn’t get it. Anyone who reads for enjoyment (and what other reason is there for opening a work of fiction?) knows not to risk such premature judgment. Otherwise, we all would have to give up on the manifold pleasures of Kurt Vonnegut, Graham Greene, Shirley Jackson, John le Carré and Stanislaw Lem, to mention but a few of the “serious”
