“Yes, Thursday?”

“Do you think the Comedy genre might be mining the books for laughs? You know how those guys will happily steal and modify from anything and everywhere for even the most perfunctory of chuckles.”

“It’s possible, but we need hard evidence. Who wants to have a trawl around Comedy for a Thomas Hardy funnyism we can use to prove one way or the other?”

“I will,” said the Red Queen, before I could volunteer.

“Better get busy. If they are sucking the comedy out of Jude, we don’t have much time. Now that the farce, rib-cracking one-liners and whimsical asides have all been removed, a continued drain on the novel’s reserves of lightheartedness will place the book in a state of negative funniness. Insufferably gloomy—miserable, in fact.”

We thought about it for a moment. Even until as little as thirty years ago, the whole Thomas Hardy series was actually very funny—pointlessly frivolous, in fact. As things stood at the moment, if you wanted a happy ending to anything in Hardy, you’d be well advised to read it backward.

“Item Four,” continued Bradshaw, “a few genre realignments.”

There was an audible sigh in the air, and a few agents lost interest. This was one of those boring-but-important items that, while of little consequence to the book in question, subtly changed the way in which it was policed. We had to know what novel was in what genre—sometimes it wasn’t altogether obvious, and when a book stretched across two genres or more, it could open a jurisdictional can of worms that might have us tied up for years. We all reached for our note pads and pencils as Bradshaw stared at the list.

“Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? has been moved from nonfiction to fiction,” he began, leaving a pause so we could write it down, “and Orwell’s 1984 is no longer truly fiction, so has been reallocated to nonfiction. Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan is no longer Sci-fi but Philosophy.”

This was actually good news; I’d thought the same for years.

“The subgenre of Literary Smut has finally been disbanded, with Fanny Hill and Moll Flanders being transferred to Racy Novel and Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Human Drama.”

We diligently wrote it all down as Bradshaw continued:

“The History of Tom Jones is now in Romantic Comedy, and The Story of O is part of the Erotic Novel genre, as are Lolita and The Autobiography of a Flea. As part of a separate genre reappraisal, Orwell’s Animal Farm belongs not just to the Allegorical and Political genres but has expanded to be part of Animal Drama and Juvenilia as well.”

“Four genres bad, two genres good,” murmured Mr. Fainset.

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing.”