I think that's a very good point. I know with my own writing that I think it frequently gets stuck between the literary world and the genre world. Too much fantasy for one and too internal for the other.

Despite the blimpish movements of the current Polish government one should not be mistaken about the intellectual dispostion of SFF readers in that country. I presume that several decades of a great lack in freedom of press sharpen your senses concerning allusions. Also, chiseled in concrete as the ideological concept of those years was, you might develop a deeper interest in new ideas. If you look at the Strugatzkis, for example, you see that SFF always has a political and societal bias. Literature could (and can) apply criticism not only by its content but also by its form, structure and ideas.

Something else I think that could be pointed out is that in Europe as a whole there is not the tendency to separate into ghetto camps of SFF vs. Literary as there is here in the US. Both Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco are speculative fiction writers and they are also literary. If they had written in the US and not in Italy, they probably would fallen between the cracks.

Rachel: I'm not sure I completely agree with you, there -- Calvino is mostly a metafictionalist, and those are solidly literary both in Europe and the States (Donald Barthelme might be his equivalent over here). Eco is mostly a high-end theoretician of art; he has written a few novels (and at least one, Focault's Pendulum, has possible SFF elements), but they're clearly seen as some kind of slumming -- not unlike Graham Greene's "entertainments." So their careers have certainly been enhanced in the US by being foreign (and thus seen as smarter and more cosmopolitan), but similar writers over here are generally seen as just as solidly in the "literary" camp.