When looking through the Booker Prize shortlist in any recent year, there’s a moment when something seems a bit strange, but in a good way. ghosts recounting their own killings. Capsaicin is illegal in dystopian worlds. Even though they shouldn’t be considered serious fiction, these bizarre labyrinths manage to make you consider your identity for weeks. You can’t help but wonder, “When did this happen?” in the back of your mind. When did the prize shelves and the genre shelves start to resemble one another?
It turns out that gradually and then all at once is the solution. Science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and horror are all included in speculative fiction, which has been encroaching on literary fiction’s domain for decades. However, that creep has only lately evolved into something more akin to a self-assured walk through the front door. The 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction went to Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, a book that revolves around a lone man living in a home with endless hallways and tidal statues. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a murder mystery narrated by a ghost navigating the afterlife during Sri Lanka’s civil war, was awarded the 2022 Booker Prize by Shehan Karunatilaka. They’re not flukes.
The way the literary establishment has reacted is intriguing. Not exactly with resistance, but rather with a slow, hesitant recognition. Every year, critics and prize committees seem to be pushed to recognize what readers already understood: that a book can have real moral and philosophical significance without compromising the enjoyment of a compelling story. The long-standing claim that “serious” fiction entails slow, challenging, introspective prose about peaceful suburban lives has begun to sound less like a critical stance and more like a preference disguised as a principle.
This blurring has its own term in the publishing industry. Agents and editors now refer to novels that combine literary-caliber prose with the kind of forward momentum typically associated with commercial genre writing as “umparket fiction.” Few publishing labels are flawless, so it’s not perfect, but it suggests something genuine. These are books that are assigned in university courses, sometimes within the same semester, after being recommended by book clubs. Upmarket fiction, according to Mary Kole, a former literary agent with more than ten years of experience in the field, occupies the space between two audiences that were never as distinct as publishing once claimed.
Writers like Juliet McKenna, who has argued that speculative fiction uses its “magic mirror” to reflect on the world in ways that purely realistic fiction sometimes cannot, have articulated the theoretical case for why speculative fiction belongs in serious literary discourse. It’s a point worth considering. Margaret Atwood was not creating a way out of reality when she created Gilead. She was constructing a lens. The same is true of Jonathan Lethem in The Fortress of Solitude, where magical realism and comic book clichés carry the narrative rather than adorn it, bringing to light issues of race, identity, and Brooklyn boyhood that might have gone unnoticed in a more traditionally realist book.
The old literary gatekeeping that once kept genre fiction at a distance is also worth discussing. Will Self’s 2014 essay in The Guardian, which proclaimed the demise of the serious literary novel, now reads differently than it did at the time. Although he was genuinely frustrated, the idea that popular appeal and literary seriousness are inherently incompatible has not held up well. Graham Greene tackled God, politics, and human failure in the same paragraph while writing incredibly readable novels. He never quite reached the pinnacle of the critical canon, and it’s difficult to avoid wondering if his readability worked against him in settings where depth was mistaken for difficulty.
The most peculiar aspect of this continuous change is how literary fiction itself has been subtly humiliated by it. As noted by G.M. Baker, literary fiction is now arguably its own genre, with its own secondary ingredient that can become as formulaic as any thriller or romance: a preference for MFA-polished prose and psychological interiority. At times, the prestige has been based on style rather than narrative, on the appearance of depth rather than the real thing. In contrast, a book about a man imprisoned in a labyrinth or a ghost that wanders through post-war Colombo manages to pose more difficult questions about memory, consciousness, and history than many books that are praised for their seriousness.
All of this does not imply that every literary novel is worthless or that every genre novel is worthy of a prize. The more truthful observation is that readers discovered the old map’s slight errors before the institutions did. It wasn’t through a back door that the fiction genre was subtly taking over serious literature. It kept knocking on the front door until someone finally had the common sense to answer it.
