A Puzzlement

A day or so ago, I decided to reread Joan Vinge's "Snow Queen" trilogy - The Snow Queen, World's End, and The Summer Queen. That decision brought to mind something I'd read in John Clute's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - something which puzzled me when I first read it and puzzles me still.

The article on Vinge was written by Peter Nicholls; the item in question, describing the first book of the series, is as follows.

Although the title and some of the plot come from Andersen, this is an essay in anthropology, much of it founded in the pseudo-scientific anthropology of Robert GRAVES in The White Goddess (1947 US), which Brian M. STABLEFORD argued in a review "is rather like a chemistry graduate writing a story whose plot hinges on the phlogiston theory".

This charge bothers me on several levels, detailed under the cut.

( Huh? )