Jo Brand vs. SF

[coalescent]

This is by now well-known:

Radio Times invited various alleged celebrities to comment on the BBC 'Big Read' list of the public's favourite books. Which clunkers should have been excluded? 'All Terry Pratchett's novels,' according to Jo Brand: 'It's a bit unfair of me because I've probably only read the first page of one of his books, but sci-fi is a genre that really makes me want to bang my head against a wall.' Her personal favourite novel on the list: Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Noted without comment on the letters page of the 1-7 November Radio Times:

When Jo Brand named her favourite and least favourite books (RT, 18 October), she seemed to be contradicting herself. On the one hand, her chosen book is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. On the other hand, she says that science fiction is a genre that exasperates her. So, Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel about an imagined future where a higher level of technology is used to suppress the population, is her favourite book? Yes, it is a political novel, but it also fits pretty comfortably within most definitions of science fiction - a lot of people regard it as one of the seminal works in the genre.

[Name and address]

To be fair to Jo, RT did speak to three large bookstore chains, and they all shelve Nineteen Eighty-Four under fiction, not science fiction.

Hmm. >:-)