I just finished a ‘post apocalyptic’ book which has been sold as ‘literature’, and which I frankly find more inventive, better written and having more imagination than the lot of ‘post apocalyptic’ Mad Max rip-offs I find on the Fantasy shelf, under garish air brushed covers with badly constructed characters.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/17/featuresreviews.guardianreview19

The format of this book, ‘general fiction / literature’ allows this book to snugly fit besides Crace’s other books, such as Being Dead (thriller), Quarantine (historical, set in Judea of 2000 years ago)
Gift of Stone (historical, neolithic)

They are, as I read the synopses, all books about people and the larger questions of life & death – whether they’re thriller, scifi or historical. Going back to Atwood’s dilemma, I see the problem of a group of books on the Scifi shelf having ‘the fantastic’ as common denominator, while what she would want (and I am increasingly angling towards this myself) is to have as common denominator ‘good writing’ or ’stories about people’.
This is of course not only a matter of which label is put on the spine, and on which shelf it is to be found, but also of the general look and feel of the book, the imprint, the reputation of the publisher, etc.
Personally, the cover of the Pest House gives me more hope for a good, sophisticated, read than this: http://www.comicsreporter.com/images/uploads/fanasynovelcovers_thumb.jpg
or even this http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n62/n314454.jpg

This is the core of the problem, I think: “Fantasy”, “Science Fiction” etc as labels say very little about the quality, and the good books are tarnished by the reputation of the many infantile books in these genres. Just as, for example, I will not as a rule pick up anything sold as ‘occult thriller’ out of fear of landing myself with something akin to Dan Brown.

I’ve read some accounts of writers who find the ‘young adult’ market very liberating, and void of many limiting pre-conceptions that you seem to struggle against. I have no doubt that China won’t be dumbing down for the kiddies.

I think that, generalizing, genre-fans in Holland are no different than elsewhere in the world (except perhaps Finland, but that’s a whole different story). Whenever I read Fantasy books which touch me on an emotional level, teach me something about myself and manage to stay with me, I feel like marking it in my diary, while with young adult books this seems par of the course (even when they’ve got supernatural stuff).

Perhaps it’s because younglings still want to grow, and are expected to grow, while adults of a certain proclivity are so settled in their existence that they don’t like to be challenged?…

Whenever I see a ‘fantastic’ writer or a book jump out of the genre into the mainstream, it has more to offer than escapism alone. Random list – China M’s work does that, Neil Gaiman (with American Gods as best example, I think), Atwood did it with Handmaiden’s Tale (though, is it fantasy? Doesn’t that sort of society exist somewhere?), Let The Right One In… I feel that Stone Dance also belongs ‘out there’.