but Solaris is science fiction, period. I agree with Greg's points - if you insist on stripping the best works of fantasy or science fiction of those labels, obviously before too long what remains will be of low quality. But for a book like Solaris, I can't see any valid reason to not consider it sci-fi, and same thing for Lord of the Rings as fantasy. And I also agree with Greg that all fiction books fit into a genre of some sort, with "literature" or "the literary canon" not being genres, but rather a quality label that stretches across all genres. It's true that most books of the literary canon are located at intersections of genres, or combine a number of genres, or "found" a new genre like LotR did, but I don't think that undermines the basic point. It just indicates that, obviously, originality is important if you want to produce a highly rated work of literature, and that's unlikely to work if you stick to following the fixed formulas of a genre, any genre.