Then again, it may not, given that it is a distinction I’ve seen commonly made - it is you who are attempting to discredit it, not with argument, but with aspersions on the motives of those who make the distinction.
Since it’s been mentioned the Hugos are for fantasy along with SF I just want to add that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the only book in that series to win a Hugo award.
Fantasy has been a popular choice in the novel category in the past decade with Paladin of Souls, American Gods, and Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell winning. Before Harry Potter opened the floodgates the only “fantasy” winners wrapped that fantasy up in a neat bundle with science fiction. Lord of Light is a good example where all of its tropes are fantasy but gives a science fictiony explanation for them. The short fiction categories have been much kinder to fantasy with Bloch’s “The Hell Bound Train” being the first clearly fantasy winner in 1959, though I’d argue that the beings in “Or All the Seas with Oysters” which won in the previous year are fantasy style goblins.
Odd – that’s not what you’re suggesting above:
I’m not discrediting it – just noting that this seems to be your definition.
I’m protesting that:
sounds uncomfortably like “Asidev from these few works that transcend the genre, all the others are mired in cliches.”
It’s a distinction that comes uncomfortably close to ‘literary SF’–meaning that ‘mere’ SF can’t be as good. You’re saying that it’s better than the genre it belongs to, in a way. An SF book is an SF book–good or bad, it is no more and no less than that. It cannot reach beyond the borders of the genre, just explore what they are. There is no ‘transcending’ to be done, because there are no limits beyond the imagination of the author.
That is simply a value judgment in a particular case, which could well be wrong (someone else may well state that on the contrary, X author’s work is full of cliches).
That however does not invalidate the very notion that some works are full of cliches, and some are not.
And that, I think, is the point of the argument: what makes up a “genre”? What typlifies a “genre”? The very reason that “genre” fiction is held in lesser esteem is that, to be easily identified as “genre”, it must inevitably stick close to those elements (cliches if you will) which are easily identifiable; and the closer a work adheres to those elements, in general, the more impoverished the imagination of the work.
There will certainly be exceptions, but the general rule, more than any otherwise unfair and inexplicable hatred, explains why genre fiction is held in lower esteem.