I read books, plenty of them – fiction, biography, autobiography, poetry, the whole thing. I tend not to think in terms of genre but what I am looking for is something which appeals to me. What appeals to me is, of course, variable: some days I want to be challenged, some days informed and other days I’m happy with brain-candy which doesn’t tax me too much when I get home from work.

The fantasy/SF thing is a marketing distinction which has evolved in my lifetime. When I started picking up “science fiction” novels in the early nineteen seventies the staples were, for example, Asimov and EE “Doc” Smith, James Blish, Fritz Leiber, et al and to some extent John Wyndham and others whom we could all name. I read Tolkein too of course – what 14 year old in the early seventies didn’t? but I can’t say that I thought of it as being in some kind of cognate genre to EE Smith, and nor for that matter with Kafka’s Metamorphosis or even Orwell’s 1984 (which was still a good decade into the future).

In those days if you wanted to progress deeper into sci-fi and your local library didn’t have a decent stock then you had to hope that there was a science-fiction book shop or similar in a nearby city.

Times change of course and my problem now is that with the explosion of genre publishing it is harder to find material which is worthwhile because of the signal:noise ratio. That and the fact that the old science fiction bookshops have increasingly stocked up on Buffy action figres and manga rather than books (I live in Edinburgh and am lucky to have Transreal Ficition) and hence an increasing use of the net to find what I want. I have a core of authors whom I stick with because I trust them to be interesting most or all of the time – Iain R MacLeod, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, Richard Morgan, Ian M Banks for example. But for the most part I’m in a word of mouth or blind chance situation (never Amazon reviews I’m afraid).

But my yardstick isn’t “interesting within the genre” – my points of reference are much more general: is this book as interesting as, for example Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game? Or how does this match up to Richard Cowper (remember him)?

In terms of the way this debate has gone I tend to stick with SF rather than Fantasy, to the extent that they are definable categories, because, personally, I find decent SF to be more interesting and engaging than Fantasy. That’s not a normative statement, just my personal preference. In any event I find Haruki Murakami at least as interesting a writer and he would normally be regarded as mainstream rather than genre.

Anyway, just my tuppence – I have Morgan’s The Steel Remains to finish and then Honeyboy Edwards’ autobiography and then Malcolm Pryce’s From Aberystwyth With Love….