Special weird things

Kim Stanley Robinson's claim that recent British SF is 'the best British literature of our time' and that 'three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn't read' has received a received a prompt smack-down from John Mullan, Booker Prize judge and professor of English at University College London, who said that he

"was not aware of science fiction," arguing that science fiction has become a "self-enclosed world".

"When I was 18 it was a...