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First published in Warp 32, January 1983.

One of the more interesting things about SF is that it doesn’t exist. Outside of the fevered imaginations of the media manipulators—the literary and filmic controllers of the game—there is no such thing.

Let me explain.

Anybody in the business of selling to the public has, the theory goes, to be able to tell that public just what it is he wants them to buy. To that end he packages his product nicely and writes all over it in big bold letters exactly what is inside. That way nobody is under any misapprehension. If you buy something with BUTTER written on it at the dairy, you won’t get CHEESE. Similarly, if a label falls off a can of corn—it doesn’t matter how long the naked can sits on the shelf—it is most unlikely that anyone will buy it.

In one sense, publishing and film making are just like selling groceries. You package your product and you label it clearly because it sells better that way. And besides, the boys in the advertising department can use the label as a launching pad for brilliantly original marketing gimmicks to make the product sell like hot SF books. (“SF? Gee, we’d better put a phallic spaceship on the cover!”)

And so we are labelled and stuck all together on a shelf so we all know just where to go to get our goods.

Or do we?

In 1959 an American newspaper published a book review which said in part:

…It will be so satisfactory to the right reader that I think a warning is in order: though the action takes place in the future and though a spaceship takes off on the final page, this should not be confused with what is usually called science fiction…What he has really written is a highly imaginative and basically joyous celebration of humankind’s instinct to keep going.

In other words, this is a good book so it can’t possibly be science fiction! The novel was A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller—perhaps one of the few unarguable literary gems to come out of SF (and I don’t care how you define SF as a concept—it still fits).

But the book as originally published did not have the convenient category “SF” stamped on it. Science Fiction was not mentioned in the blurb. So it was picked up and reviewed simply as a book in its own right. Nobody knew it was SF; they hadn’t been told. And it reached a much wider audience because of it.

To label is to ghettoize. SF has a certain image in the popular mind. So do “Western”, “Detective”, “Romance” or any other generic label you can think of. Never mind how true that image is. It is sufficient that it exists. And so the genre label will repel (or attract) depending on an individual’s image of what it really means. This is called prejudice.

But if it was just a book without a generic tag, what then? Would it be like the can of corn whose label fell off? Would no-one buy it? I think not, and I think the case of A Canticle for Leibowitz proves it. Without the label there is no prior “image-prejudice” (if I may coin a description) and you can pick the book up freely and leaf through the pages, read the blurb, see if it appeals. You can’t look inside an unlabelled can, and therein lies a world of difference.

But the publishers have always done it that way because there is a superficial logic to the whole deal. Labels and packages make a product. If it’s good enough for the groceries, it’s good enough for the media mafia. They remain blind to the wider picture. It would be a good experiment, I think, to take the categories away, take the spaceships off the cover (or the cowboys, or the corpses, or the lovers, depending on whatever genre we happen to be concerned with) and get a few more reviews like the one I quoted above. We don’t need the stigma of the SF label. It only ties us down and restricts our audience. We need to get rid of those ties.