the range, depth, intensity, wit and beauty of the science fiction being published in the UK these days is simply amazing.
And quotes Virginia Woolf's letter to Olaf Stapledon, praising his awesome novel Starmaker.
it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.
Robinson concludes by saying that British Sf does not only compare highly with SF in general, but with British literature of any kind. I do not know why the literature of the past is respectable, and the literature of the future is not. Something to do with the idea that education is knowledge and knowledge is factual. Thus the past is the realm of the educated and respectable, the future the realm of the autodidact who may be useful, but is never invited to dinner.