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Back in the day much of what you might be able to 'find out' about a book might be its title, author, and genre. At best a one or two sentence synopsis.

Today, so much more can be found and digested. From enhanced library guides to better educated staff and teachers to the vast Internet world of publisher, reader, and review sites that offer much more about a story, the author, and the value of the story.


While the serendipitous act of finding a book of a particular 'genre' on a library shelf might be hindered by 'mashing everything together', I doubt little else would be. Good (or bad) books will still be 'found out' and the word spread more easily by fans and critics alike.



...tom...

P.S. Perhaps libraries and 'fiction book sorting' would work equally well by 'tagging' them as photo (and other) sites do now. That would really scramble the idea of genre.
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Tagging, folksonomies, social cataloging, it's all a very hot topic for libraries today, with champions and detractors.

Those against it argue for continued adherence to controlled vocabularies, and that the breakdown of these reduces seach effectiveness and clarity of classification.

Those for cite its flexibility, user-involvement, and most of all, it's low expense.

Personally, I don't think traditional methods are anything holy, but at the same time I'm not yet sold on the worth of tagging, at least not as a replacement for authority control.

-Andy

Perhaps sci-fi and fantasy should be side-by-side, with the over-arching megagenre of speculative fiction, and the fuzzy books lodged smack between undeniable sci-fi and undeniable fantasy.

I'd like to see books put into as many categories as they fit, rather than shelved (figuratively or literally) in only one place.

So, you have Asimov's Caves of Steel (I think that's the right book) and it's both sf and a mystery. So you put it both places (or at least put notice of it both places saying where to look).

I was shopping for shoes online a couple of days ago, and I was frustrated by one site that was making me choose the shoe type by a very narrow set of criteria. I had to choose between "casual" shoes and "slip ons" and the twain didn't meet.

That level of granularity might make sense for the people at the selling end, but not for those of us who are looking for shoes. Or books!

Awww, what the heck. To get more on topic...:)

My library actually also (in addition to not filing books of stories correctly;) ) files all fiction writing in the same group. Personally I don't like it. I find it a pain in the butt to find books I want to read and generally just look for specific authors rather than branching out. I don't think I've read a single fiction book that isn't in SF/Fantasy since I moved here though. :) Maybe I'm overstating things a bit there but...

Do I think that the "science fiction" or "fantasy" categories ghettoize (spelling doesn't look right) books? To some degree I think that it does. I think that the term "genre" does also though given that neither classification really works as a genre except in a fairly narrow set of books (and even there science fiction is seperated into subsets rather than a straight genre).

Personally though, I also think that the term "speculative fiction" is rather banal and is a way to essentially cause both science fiction and fantasy to lose meaning and make them each rather generic. It does not deghettoize them though but rather lumps them into an all purpose ghetto that really doesn't do anything for them at all.

I find Literary fiction to be as similar to itself as anything that acedemia terms "genre" fiction though which is a big thing that frustrates me about literary snobs.

Hmmm. I could go on a bit on the topic but not right now.

Ander

This whole discussion is making me think of the more incendiary issue of race.

There's no doubt that race, cultural heritage and physical traits are one way of classifying people. And at times those descriptions can be very useful. But that's also a very superficial and potentially degrading type of categorization - especially if it's the only trait that's taken into account.

Far more important in knowing what a person is "like", but harder to define, are issues of personality, interests, social values, morals, ethics, beliefs, etc.

The problem comes in finding people that you like & mesh with, but that you wouldn't naturally cross paths with.