Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the greatest science fiction authors writing today, has hit out at the literary establishment, accusing the Man Booker judges of "ignorance" in neglecting science fiction, which he called "the best British literature of our time".

The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and author of the bestselling Mars trilogy, Robinson attacked the Booker for rewarding "what usually turn out to be historical novels". Five are shortlisted for this year's prize, from Hilary Mantel's retelling of the life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, to AS Byatt's The Children's Book, set at the turn of the 20th century.

"[Historical novelists] tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways," Robinson said in an article for the New Scientist, published today. "A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford. More importantly, these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is."

He believes this year's prize should go to Adam Roberts's science fiction comedy, Yellow Blue Tibia, which didn't even make the longlist. In 2005, when John Banville took the Booker for The Sea, he believes that Geoff Ryman's Air should have won; in 2004 – when Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty won – it should have gone to Gwyneth Jones's Life, and in 1997, the year of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Signs of Life by M John Harrison should have triumphed.

"Speaking as an outsider from California and as a science fiction writer I see these very brilliant writers doing excellent work who are never in the running at all, for no reason except their genre and who their publishers are – the so-called club members. It just needs to be said," he said today. "The Booker prize is so big, the way it shapes public consciousness of what is going on in British literature, but the avant garde, the leading edge, is being ignored or shut out of the process entirely."

According to Robinson the ghettoisation of science fiction is a comparatively recent phenomenon. He pointed to a little known letter written by Virginia Woolf to the science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, after he had sent her a copy of his novel Star Maker. "I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction," wrote Woolf. "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 believes that Stapledon's "strange novels" made a "real impact on Woolf", changing her writing. "Her final novel, Between the Acts ... ends with Stapledonian imagery, describing our species steeped in the eons. Woolf's last pages were a kind of science fiction," he wrote in his article for the New Scientist. "When it came to literature, she had no prejudices. She read widely and her judgment was superb. And so I am confident that if she were reading today, she would be reading science fiction along with everything else. And she would still be 'greatly interested, and elated too' – because British science fiction is now in a golden age."

Authors including Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter, Ian McDonald and Justina Robson are writing "the best British literature of our time," he said, listing over 30 names. "Oh, I know there is a Booker prize, I've heard of it even in California – supposedly given to the best fiction published in the Commonwealth every year – but there are no Woolfs on those juries, and so they judge in ignorance and give their awards to what usually turn out to be historical novels."

The chair of this year's Booker judges, James Naughtie, admitted that Robinson "may well have a point", but suggested that "perhaps his arrows could be directed even more towards publishers than to judges".

"There has always been a debate about whether the prize is sufficiently sensitive to all the forms of contemporary writing. He may well have a point," he said. "We judge books that are submitted. The fact is that the science fiction component this year was very, very thin. If it is the best contemporary fiction in this country then most publishers haven't yet tumbled to the fact."

He said that judges had, collectively, been "disappointed at the way 'the new' was represented" in this year's submissions, but said that "the idea that historical fiction is fusty is absurd". "Our shortlist speaks to us about things around us, from whenever and wherever the books are set," he said.

John Mullan, Naughtie's fellow judge for this year's prize and professor of English at University College London, said that he "was not aware of science fiction," arguing that science fiction has become a "self-enclosed world".

"When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres," he said, but now "it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other."

According to Mullan there was "essentially no" science fiction submitted for this year's Booker prize, apart from Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood, set in a dystopian future, which failed to make the longlist. "We as judges depend a great deal on what publishers submit," he said. "There are certain kinds of genre fiction which get submitted – thrillers and detective books – which publishers think have literary quality, but this year I find it hard to think of any science fiction which was submitted."

Around 40 years ago, it was historical fiction which was overlooked, he said. "Thirty to 40 years ago there was Georgette Heyer and it was generally speaking a fairly derided genre, whose standing was rather lower than science fiction where you had John Wyndham. Yet historical fiction has escaped the bodice ripper, so everyone does it," he said, rejecting Robinson's claim that historical novels "tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways" and "are not about now".

"That's absolute bullshit," he said. "Of course historical novels can be like that, but really it is not to do with being a historical novel."