Kim Wright muses on why so many contemporary literary fiction authors are prepared to dip their toe in writing genre fiction…

“Once upon a time, genre was treated as almost a different industry from literary fiction, ignored by critics, sneered at by literary writers, relegated by publishers to imprint ghettos. But the dirty little and not-particularly-well-kept secret was that […] these genre books were the ones who kept the entire operation in business. All those snobbish literary writers had better have hoped like hell that their publishers had enough genre moneymakers in house to finance the advance for their latest beautifully rendered and experimentally structured observation of upper class angst.”

“it’s not just a matter of writers flipping back and forth, it’s a matter of genre and literary cross-pollinating to produce a new species”

The first half of the reader comments are quite interesting, too — but then the “what counts as SF” genre-police bores arrive.