I Don't Intend To Pick On io9 All The Time

Because, sometimes, io9 is quite thoughtful and intelligent (which here means "agrees with me").

There was a post yesterday about "literature" and SF, which made some very smart points.

I'd have been even more nuanced, myself -- because I'm all about the picky little distinctions -- for example, by pointing out that the "literary establishment" is, more often than not, embroiled in nasty fights among themselves (just like any other genre community) and so talking about them as a monolith can be misleading.

I also think there are a lot of literary SF novels, though not in the high-New Yorker post-Raymond Carver style that io9 is calling all of literary fiction.

And they could have usefully brought up Delany's theory of figurative language and concretized metaphor in SF -- compare and contrast "her world exploded" in a literary novel and a SF novel -- to explain why figurative language must be handled very carefully in SF, to keep it from being taken literally or from confusing everyone.

But, in general, it's a good post that points out some of the important boundary-markers for a certain type of critically popular mainstream fiction, and asks if we'd really want more of that in our ghetto. Possibly not, possibly not -- but the mainstream does still have things to teach us. (And, of course, vice versa.)