Doris Lessing tells it like it is

This is from the remarks at the beginning of Doris Lessing's collected Canopus in Argos: Archives:

"I was in the States, giving a talk, and the professor who was acting as chairwoman, and whose only fault was that perhaps she had fed too long on the pieties of academia, interrupted me with: 'If I had you in my class you'd never get away with that!' (Of course it is not everyone who finds this funny.) I had been saying that space fiction, with science fiction, makes up the most original branch of literature now; it is inventive and witty; it has already enlivened all kinds of writing; and that literary academics and pundits are much to blame for patronizing or ignoring it—while of course by their nature they can be expected to do no other. This view shows signs of becoming the stuff of orthodoxy."

In my life, space fiction equals popular music. Discuss.