Jasper Fforde_Thursday Next_05 by First Among Sequels

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-fibut 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.”
    “Good,” said Bradshaw, stroking his large white mustache. “Item Five: The entire works of Jane Austen are down in the maintenance bay for a refit. We’ve diverted all the Outlander readings through a book-club boxed set, and I want someone to patrol the series until the originals are back online. Volunteers?”
    “I will,” I said.
    “You’re on cadet assessment, Thursday. Anyone else?”
    Lady Margaret Cavendish put up her hand. Unusually for a resident of fiction, she had once been real. Originally a flamboyant seventeenth-century aristocratic socialite much keen on poetry, women’s issues and self-publicity, our Lady Cavendish hailed from an unfair biography. Annoyed by the slurs committed, as so often to the defamed dead, she took flight to the bright lights of Jurisfiction, in which she seemed to excel, especially in the poetry form, which no one else much liked to handle.
    “What would you have me do?” she asked.
    “Nothing, really—just maintain a presence to make sure any mischievous character understudies think twice before they do their own dialogue or try to ‘improve’ anything.”
    Lady Cavendish shrugged and nodded her agreement.
    “Item Six,” said Bradshaw, consulting his clipboard again, “Falling Outlander ReadRates.”
    He looked at us all over his glasses. We all knew the problem but saw it more as a systemic difficulty rather than something we could deal with on a book-to-book policing basis.
    “The Outlander Reading Index has dropped once again for the