Claims such as these always make me think of the opening paragraphs of Stanislaw Lem's essay Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans[1].
No one in his right mind seeks the psychological truth about crime in detective stories. Whoever seeks such truth will turn rather to Crime and Punishment. In relation to Agatha Christie, Dostoevsky constitutes a higher court of appeal, yet no one in his right mind will condemn the English author's stories on this account. They have a right to be treated as the entertaining thrillers they are, and the tasks Dostoevsky set himself are foreign to them.
If anyone is dissatisfied with SF in its role as an examiner of the future and of civilization, there is no way to make an analogous move from literary oversimplifications to full-fledged art, because there is no court of appeal from this genre. There would be no harm in this, save that American SF, exploiting its exceptional status, lays claim to occupy the pinnacles of art and thought. One is annoyed by the pretentiousness of a genre which fends off accusations of primitivism by pleading its entertainment character and then, once such accusations have been silenced, renews its overweening claims. By being one thing and purporting to be another, SF promotes a mystification which, moreover, goes on with the tacit consent of readers and public.
Lem wrote from behind the Iron Curtain and could not escape having to demonstrate ideological correctness from time to time. Taking a few cheap shots at anything American (as in Futurological Congress or Memoirs in a Bathtub), and then getting on with the story, was the straightforward way to do this, and would be quite transparent to the Polish or Soviet reader. Here, he wants to praise an American author - but that just wouldn't be tolerated; however, if he adds some hyperbolic American-culture-so-shallow notes (and for good measure praises a then-acceptable dead Russian), he can make his pro-PKD point and still have the essay published without consequences.
I think the idea is like that: if you think that the murderer in a A. Christie's story is shown unrealistically, you can write it off as a literary device to create an entertaining puzzle, and not expect a serious treatise on the criminal's psychology, motives, etc.
If you need a deep(er) view of a murderer's soul, you open Crime and Punishment, also a literary work and not a piece of academic research, and find it there.
For SF in 1970s, there was no such higher tier; there was no literary futurology. Lem himself was one of the biggest figures in the field of literary futurology, framed as SF. "Hard SF", like the works of Peter Watts or Greg Egan, did not yet exist.
No one in his right mind seeks the psychological truth about crime in detective stories. Whoever seeks such truth will turn rather to Crime and Punishment. In relation to Agatha Christie, Dostoevsky constitutes a higher court of appeal, yet no one in his right mind will condemn the English author's stories on this account. They have a right to be treated as the entertaining thrillers they are, and the tasks Dostoevsky set himself are foreign to them.
If anyone is dissatisfied with SF in its role as an examiner of the future and of civilization, there is no way to make an analogous move from literary oversimplifications to full-fledged art, because there is no court of appeal from this genre. There would be no harm in this, save that American SF, exploiting its exceptional status, lays claim to occupy the pinnacles of art and thought. One is annoyed by the pretentiousness of a genre which fends off accusations of primitivism by pleading its entertainment character and then, once such accusations have been silenced, renews its overweening claims. By being one thing and purporting to be another, SF promotes a mystification which, moreover, goes on with the tacit consent of readers and public.
[1] https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm