A separate SFF section in a bookstore: yes or no?

Maybe?

But now that I work in a bookstore, maybe doesn't cut it. The question is no longer academic; I need to decide.

I started with conflicting issues:

- The implication that SFF was somehow less worthy than "general" or "literary" fiction. (Thus the implication that the presence of a spaceship or dragon or the renaming of a city went hand-in-hand somehow with bad writing.)

- That plenty of novels in General are in fact SFF. How do these escape the ghetto? Sometimes by virtue of age, I suspect -- 1984, Brave New World, Day of the Triffids, War of the Worlds -- but others just because the publisher wills it -- Handmaid's Tale, The Night Circus, The Road.

So either everything that's SFF should be in SFF, or none of it should. Either eliminate the ghetto or make its boundaries clear.

Fine. But which should I do? Pick your battles, but first pick a side.

I tended, I thought, towards integration. This is literature too! Ram it down their throats! It's a position I can still support on my more militant, idealistic days.

The reality is though that SFF is the first place I head in any bookshop. I'm disappointed (and I judge the shop poorly) if it's not there. The people in that section: those are my people. The ghetto is an immigrant's small slice of home.

And the SFF that's snuck under the barricades into General? Leave it there. Let it lure in the masses. You like that bagel, yeah? Okay let me tell you about babka and bialys.

Also because this -- small -- section will have only books in it that I have read and would recommend, which means that all my non-SFF-reading colleagues can feel safe in pointing customers toward it.

Related: What would you recommend? Skip anything that's been committed to film -- I already know.