The much-garlanded science fiction writer Christopher Priest has launched an extraordinary broadside against the authors nominated for this year's Arthur C Clarke award, describing the shortlist as "dreadful" and calling for the resignation of an "incompetent" panel of judges in a post on his website.

The six titles chosen for the shortlist were announced earlier this week, ranging from China Miéville's deep-space exploration of the fall myth, Embassytown, to Jane Rogers's Booker-longlisted dystopian novel The Testament of Jessie Lamb. According to Priest, author of The Prestige, only Rogers' novel deserves to be on the shortlist, with the remaining titles all unworthy and four novels "outstandingly ignored" by judges: Ian R MacLeod's Wake Up and Dream, Simon Ings's Dead Water, Adam Roberts's By Light Alone and Lavie Tidhar's Osama.

"It is indefensible that a novel like Charles Stross's Rule 34 should be given apparent credibility by an appearance in the Clarke shortlist," writes Priest, who has won both genre and literary prizes for his novels but whose latest outing, The Islanders, failed to make the Arthur C Clarke shortlist. "Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long," he continued. "You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet."

Greg Bear's Hull Zero Three? "The paragraphs are short, to suit the expected attention-span of the reader. The important words are in italics. Have we lived and fought in vain?" Sheri S Tepper's The Waters Rising? "For fuck's sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word 'neigh'." Drew Magary's The End Specialist? "Speculative fiction is for the present, on the cutting edge, looking forward, not back."

And as for Miéville, according to Priest "Embassytown contains many careless solecisms", as well as "lazy writing" and a "lack of characterisation". Unless, says Priest, the three-time winner of the Arthur C Clarke "is told in clear terms that he is underachieving, that he is restricting his art by depending too heavily on genre commonplaces, he will never write the great novels that many people say he is capable of".

Having read almost all of the books tipped for the prize, Priest concludes that 2011 was "a poor year" for science fiction, and that judges decided to play it safe. "We have a dreadful shortlist put together by a set of judges who were not fit for purpose. They were incompetent. Their incompetence was made more problematical because the overall quality of the fiction in the year in question was poor. They did not know how to resolve this. They played what they saw as safe," he wrote. "They failed themselves, they failed the Clarke award, and they failed anyone who takes a serious interest in speculative fiction."

The judges – Juliet E McKenna, Martin Lewis, Phil Nanson, Nickianne Moody, Rob Grant and chair Andrew M Butler – should be fired or forced to resign, says Priest, and the 2012 award suspended. If his "modest suggestion" is taken up, the author says, and enough people believe the proposal was made in his own interests, he would withdraw his own novel The Islanders from the running.

But Tom Hunter, director of the prize, brushed aside Priest's calls. "Nobody is going to be resigning," he said. "We've put forward our shortlist. It's the award judges' list of the best six science fiction novels of the year. They've done their job entirely well, and produced a fascinating shortlist, which we stand by. Please feel free to discuss it, but we would never retract it."

Jon Courtenay Grimwood, an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author who has judged the Arthur C Clarke in the past, said that "the beauty of the Clarke shortlist is that it's always going to offend someone". Although he felt there were some "obvious omissions" from this year's shortlist – Priest's own novel The Islanders, Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, and, like Priest, the Tidhar and the Roberts – Grimwood nonetheless thought Priest had been too hasty in his rebuttal of the shortlist.

"If you're going to make Leavisian statements from Olympian heights, you need to bring Leavisian levels of intelligence to the table, and Chris Priest's piece strikes me as too hastily written, and just plain wrong in places (in particular the references to Miéville and vocabulary)," he said. "Should the judges resign? Of course not. Their job is to judge what they consider to be the best books and that's what they've done. Do I agree those are the best six books? No. But that is the point of the Clarkes. It's a snapshot that makes readers go, 'Yeah, but what about …'"

Stross, meanwhile, has taken the remarks in good spirit. "I want 'Stross writes like an internet puppy – Christopher Priest' on my next book cover," he tweeted. He has now changed his Twitter picture to a grinning puppy.