Genre: "a flimsy irrelevence"

From: Retronaut

"This week, the chair of this year's Man Booker prize, Robert Macfarlane, published an introduction to a new edition of M John Harrison's Climbers. In it, he says 'let me try to express a little of the amazement I feel when standing in front of the work of Harrison, who is best known as one of the restless fathers of modern SF but who is to my mind among the most brilliant novelists writing today, and with regard to whom the question of genre is a flimsy irrelevance.' Are we witnessing the end of the genre wars? Macfarlane has written introductions as enthusiastically to the (genre) work of John Christopher and the (literary) work Edward Thomas and Charles Dickens. Before starting on this year's submissions for the Man Booker (I am also a judge), I was among those who selected the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, a list which featured a number of genre-inflected writers (Steven Hall, Naomi Alderman, Joanna Kavenna, Ned Beauman, Xiaolu Guo, Helen Oyeyemi, Jenni Fagan and Sarah Hall). Is genre, as Macfarlane says 'a flimsy irrelevance?'"

— The Guardian Book Blog
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Sour grapes of wrath? Or merely a difference of opinion...

"David Foster Wallace, the critically acclaimed American writer who took his own life in 2008, has been described as 'the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation' by American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis.
   According to Zadie Smith Foster Wallace 'was an actual genius.' Dave Eggers believes his writing is 'world-changing,' and the Booker-longlisted novelist Ned Beauman wrote last week that today's novelists must try 'to work out how in a million years we might ever hope to absorb the magnificent advances and expansions Wallace offered to the form.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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