Life & Wisdom Quote by Tanith Lee

“Genre categories are irrelevant” lands like a provocation, but Tanith Lee delivers it with the weary poise of someone who’s fought this battle in too many editorial meetings to waste time on grandstanding. The first sentence is an aesthetic claim: genre is a filing system, not an engine of meaning. It’s also a defense of her own range. Lee moved fluidly through fantasy, horror, science fiction, gothic romance, mythic retellings; she’s arguing that the work’s charge comes from voice, desire, dread, and invention, not from whether a bookstore sticker says “SF/F.”

Then she swivels to the real point: power. “I dislike them” is personal and blunt, but “I do not have the casting vote” is the dagger of institutional realism. It’s a parliamentary phrase smuggled into literary talk to remind you that categories aren’t neutral descriptions; they’re decisions made by gatekeepers with budgets, shelving, awards rules, marketing plans, and readership assumptions. Lee is naming the quiet coercion: the label that helps a book get placed is the same label that can shrink its audience, police its seriousness, or trap a writer into repeating a marketable self.

The subtext is not “genres are fake” so much as “genres are administrative.” They’re a compromise between art’s messiness and commerce’s need for order. Lee’s mild, almost amused fatalism - irrelevant, disliked, unavoidable - captures the tension that defined much late-20th-century speculative fiction: a field bursting with cross-pollination while still governed by borders that mattered most to people who weren’t writing the sentences.