I get the impression from posts like today's that you actually read and enjoy novels a lot. So what does it mean to say that you're prejudiced against novels? You don't actually seem to be.
...........
You're right, I don't hate novels.
But as the old post Dennis Claxton kindly resurrected stated, I think they're irrelevant and useless.
Why 'irrelevant'? Why 'useless'?
The conceit of modern 'literature' is that it, unlike so-called 'genre fiction' (hierarchies everywhere mate) boldly dives into the deep end of the pool; readers are not only enjoying a good book, they're fearlessly exploring profound questions of love, loss, family, etc.
But it's rubbish, or mostly rubbish. Straight novelists are fleeing from the world's actual concerns and continuing the long Western tradition of staring lovingly in the mirror. It's all well and good to explore the inner workings of a dysfunctional suburban or struggling urban or 'lush and sensual' non-Western family (stereotypes, all). But we've been down those roads a million times or more. The topics may be eternal (or, perhaps not: things change -- even ideas of what's a family or what's love) but the medium presenting the topics is dead.
As dead as the Victrola.
Not dead because of the Internet.
Not dead because of video games.
Not dead because of any of the other things the literati routinely complain about.
Dead because there's little room in the modern, 'serious' novel for the world of transgenic goats, military invasions launched on false, easily refuted reasons (false, yet still compelling to millions for fascinating and dangerous reasons), climate change, a confused and possibly dying (but slowly...at first) US empire and all the other moving targets of contemporary life.
In other words, the serious novel ignores the real world's startling, actually existing weirdness to narrowly focus on how the character Harrison Ford will play in the movie adaption will save his troubled marriage. In this way, it serves to slow down our understanding of the mechanics of human life.
In his essay, 'A Transrealist Manifesto', Rudy Rucker wrote:
In this piece I would like to advocate a style of SF-writing that I call Transrealism. Transrealism is not so much a type of SF as it is a type of avant-garde literature. I feel that Transrealism is the only valid approach to literature at this point in history.
The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext.
[...]
<http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/transrealistmanifesto.pdf>
I agree.
Someone reading this right now is thinking: 'But hold on, is he talking about stories featuring only robots and spaceships? Is that what he means?'
No.
I'm talking about the way Ballard looked at Shepperton and instead of seeing (or only seeing) what the straight novelist sees -- the failed marriages, the sons holding grudges against absent fathers, the lonely pensioner working in his garden, the whole mishigas of small beer -- looked a little harder, a little longer and saw the structure of consumerism, of technologically mediated politics, of emerging aesthetics:
<http://www.researchpubs.com/books/ballexc1.php>
Oh, there's so much more to say but I'm pressed for time.
.d.