Ouch. I think his arguments could have been made in perhaps a quarter of the words he used, and this kind of big-dick hyperbolic ranting really turns me off. Still, there are some interesting points buried in there.
I do agree that the so-called genre ghetto is at least partly self-imposed. The same people who moan about the literary world's lack of respect for SF (never fantasy, mind; to the angry SF folks, all fantasy is crap) are the ones who excoriate a "mainstream" writer like Margaret Atwood for dipping a toe in "their" genre. Only a real science fiction writer can write science fiction, they say. So they want mainstream respect, but they don't want any nasty mainstream writers in their clubhouse. So who's propping up the ghetto walls?
I also think that the mainstream snobbery decried by those who want speculative fiction to get more respect is reproduced inside the genre ranks. The general sneer aimed at fantasy by aficionados of science fiction, for instance. Or, among "serious" fantasy readers and reviewers (most of whom currently worship at the altar of the New Weird), the sneer aimed at epic fantasy. Highly literary works of epic fantasy--such as Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series or Ricardo Pinto's The Stone Dance of the Chameleon series--can barely get the time of day from these folks, whose attitude toward this kind of fantasy is very much like the attitude of people who don't read fantasy at all. So even within the ghetto, there's ghetto-ization.
The secret of getting "mainstream" audiences to pay attention to a work of speculative fiction is pretty simple, and goes back to "genre" as a marketing category: have a non-genre imprint publish it. Would Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell have gotten such huge sales and attention if it'd been put out by, say, Del Rey? Or Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow? I think not.
The truth is that most fiction is formulaic drivel. In every category or genre, not just SF and fantasy. The Booker nominees, the Moorcocks and the Wolfes, are a tiny, tiny minority of the whole. Popular, commercial fiction is what sells. This has always been true. The only reason it seems that more good books were published in the past (something often said by people upset over how much crap is being published "these days") is that the good stuff is what's remembered.
- Victoria