Fantasy author Stephen Hunt blasts BBC for genre bias
11 Mar 2011
Novelist says the broadcaster ignored sci-fi, fantasy and horror during its coverage of World Book Night
Author Stephen Hunt has "declared war" on the BBC over what he perceives as a literary bias against sci-fi and other genre fiction.
Hunt, whose first novel For the Crown and the Dragon won the WH Smith New Talent writing competition in 1994, claims that the broadcaster ignored science-fiction, fantasy and horror books during its coverage of World Book Night on March 5.
He says these genres were excluded from the BBC's tie-in Culture Show special, The Books We Really Read, despite accounting for "between 20/30 per cent of the fiction market".
The writer, who has released five books in his Jackelian sequence published by HarperCollins imprint Voyager, is now calling on authors, literary agents and editors to sign a petition calling for the recognition of genre writing as a legitimate form of literature.
Writing on his blog, he said: "The contemporary fiction - aka modern fiction, aka literary fiction - genre was represented by the bucket-load, as you'd expect.
"The TV producers then gently moved onto the genres that real grubby proles stubbornly insist on reading - romance, crime, thrillers, chick-lit, Jilly Cooper's sex-n-shopping novels, some of the humorous stuff.
"As the hour went by, strangely absent from this detailed parade of what people actually like to read was 'a certain' genre, you know… the unclean one, speculative fiction, as in fantasy/horror/science fiction."
Hunt believes that the BBC's "blatant bias" against genre fiction "make a mockery of any aims of supporting the printed word" and "encouraging the public to read".
To make his point, the novelist envisages a world where only 'high-brow' entertainment such as arthouse cinema and chamber music are the only available artforms.
"I am a genre author, and I live in that world. In my world there is only one genre permitted access to the oxygen of publicity in the mainstream media: contemporary fiction," he said.
"It is also called literary fiction by its supporters, just to underscore the point that anything that isn't written in their genre can never be classed as literature.
"It's a neat little semantic trick, isn't it? Reduce the denotata to its root and you end up with Fiction-Fiction. So good they named it twice.
"Before I even begin writing my tawdry fantasy novels I'm only ever half as good as them by definition."
Hunt has now put up a petition on website SF Crowsnest, which he plans to deliver to the BBC once he has collected enough signatories.
ISBN: 9780007289660
By Jason Taylors
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