Kim Stanley Robinson

American sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson has slammed the judges of the well-known Man Booker Prize, saying they hand out the coveted award “in ignorance”, passing over science fiction books he considers to be “the best British literature of our time”.

The prize is awarded to the best novel each year written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth and has a 50,000 pound prize. Earlier this month, the shortlist for the prize was announced, but no science fiction books were to be found on it.

In a scathing article published by New Scientist online last week, Robinson, best-known for his terraforming Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars), said the Booker Prize tended to focus on historical novels instead of giving at least some credibility to what he considered to be the literature of here and now today: Science fiction:

“Sometimes these are fine historical novels … But working, like all of us, in the rain shadow of the great modernists, they tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways. A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford. More importantly, these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is.”

(via The Guardian, image by AllyUnion)