Very cool, if true

I think that's true, and I should have qualified that in my answer. I don't think that was the right way to describe the effect (although if they've read some of the thinkpieces about how scifi is shit because it's not litfic, I understand why they were primed to be unfair).

But it's not necessarily the case that a book is less valuable if it's harder; only if the extras are not valuable. I'm not sure how much someone who's never been exposed to scifi would benefit from being exposed to those concepts: I guess being exposed to the concept of a space station or an android is really good in its own right, but absorbing the genre conventions that don't necessarily have anything in common with what's possible, but just happen to be what anglophone scifi has somewhat converged on, isn't.