I loved Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (try the audiobook if you want something immersive and long) and am looking forward to his Book of Strange New Things. But there was a passage in Marcel Theroux’s extremely laudatory NYT review last week  that’s driving me crazy: “Since the critical and commercial triumph of Hilary Mantel, the historical novel is newly respectable. One hopes that Michel Faber can do something similar for speculative writing.”

One hopes, does One? But does One read? I, who in private life pretty much run away from anything labelled speculative fiction, can easily reel off the names William Gibson, Octavia Butler, Kazuo Ishiguro, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. LeGuin, Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami as examples of writers who have made the genre respectable to non-specialists. To evince hope that Michel Faber might finally get speculative fiction some respect is like saying it’s about damn time that people started enjoying chocolate.

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