More seriously, though, I find too many ‘mainstream’ novels frustratingly slow-moving, and it sometimes seems to take half the book before anything resembling a plot emerges.

Some mainstream works by authors who also write SF have suffered badly from this; even Iain (without the M) Banks has been guilty of it. Prime example has to be ‘Song of Stone’, that reads like a short story padded out to the length of a novel.

My whole post is really a rant at the sort of rather tedious stuff that always seems to win the major literary prizes, and the sniffy distain with which the literati dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their narrow definition on what a novel should be about.

Which is exactly the same as the music critics who believe one-dimensional three-chord indie rock is the only acceptable form for contemporary music.