Good interview with Ursula K. LeGuin, and this portion is so true.

And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several of genres.

The only real difference I’ve noticed between genres is that there is a different skew of quality at different time periods in their history.

For instance from what I can tell, something like 98% of literary fiction is utter crap right now, and about 95% of science fiction is also complete garbage.

Used to be, about 90% of science fiction was gutter crud, and about 85% of litfic was. So the ratios shift over time, but never in any genre is there really that much quality work to read.