I’ve got a new post up at Black Gate, looking at Salman Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus. I note at the start that the book was in the running for a sf prize before the publishers pulled it, wanting to avoid Rushdie being branded (in both sense of the word) as a science fiction writer. Brian Aldiss, one of the judges, points out how differently Rushdie’s career could have gone. I wonder, though, how different science fiction itself would have been. Would Midnight’s Children have won awards in the genre field as it did in the wider world? What sort of conversations would be going on in the field now? Would Rushdie be widely recognised, or a critical darling? Or is his approach to storytelling too inherently subversive of the very concept of ‘genre’ to fit comfortably in sf?