[identity profile] pnh.livejournal.com 2005-01-25 05:19 am (UTC)(link)
Of course, in a bookstore--as opposed to a library--the answer "together, because the same readers read them." Which is true; the overlap is well over 80%.

(As I remarked this past weekend, the reason bookstore categories exist is simple and fundamental: it's because customers don't want to have to dig through a giant pyramid of books in the middle of the floor.)

I imagine libraries might be more interested in purely taxonomical questions, such as whether the same authors do or don't write fantasy and SF, or whether there's some kind of fundamental narrative difference between the two genres. For bookstores, none of that matters anywhere near as much as simple customer behavior. As an emergent property of the practice of actual readers, bookstore categories amount to a serious answer to a whole lot of critical wheelspinning.