Works of fantasy or science fiction that also succeed in literary terms are hard to find, and are rightly to be treasured [...] And just as one is triumphantly sizing up this thin elite, one thinks correctively of that great fantasist Kafka, or even of Beckett, two writers who impress can be felt, perhaps surprisingly, on Kazuo Ishiugro's novel Never Let Me Go. And how about Borges, who so admired Wells? Or Gogol's 'The Nose'? Or The Double? Or Lord of the Flies? A genre that must make room for Kafka and Beckett and Dostoevsky is perhaps no longer a genre but merely a definition of writing successfully; in particular, a way of combining the fantastic and the realistic so that we can no longer separate them, and of making allegory earn its keep by becoming indistinguishable from narration itself.