Lit Fic people don't often understand this.
When you find politics in Lit Fic it's usually historical and/or located in a distant country, and provides a backdrop for the personal lives and emotions of the characters.
In Science Fiction the politics is often the main point, and the characters are there to dramatise the political and social reality they live in.
The set that manages to overcome those hurdles and achieve the sublime—feelings of awe, of sudden revelation, of such beauty in the use of language that you have to stop reading and just absorb it for a minute—with fair frequency is much smaller still.
But hey, it manages to produce good (in a literary sense) stuff at a better rate than some genres (ahem, fantasy) at least. In fact I can't think of any other "genre" fic that beats it.
I don't mean, of course, that deliberately "literary" work, especially of the last few decades, doesn't have its own problems. Lit journals often read like self-parody, certainly.
It is true that if your fiction has more to do with sociology or political philosophy than individual psychology you're already fighting an uphill battle if you want recognition from academics. It's been decided, rightly or wrongly, that the proper place for those topics is in works of history—plenty of which end up as honorary entries in the canon of "literature", even! The strongest reason I can think of for this (in the whopping few minutes I've been thinking about it, just now) is that the personal perspective on which fiction thrives isn't nearly as useful for revealing insights about objects of that perspective—especially the more distant and abstract they become—as it is the subject in relation to those objects.
Huh?
The problem is anytime you pick up one of these sci-fi works that's supposed to be a deep philosophical masterpiece it is really not that and could only be thought of as that by someone who only reads genre fiction.
Don't get me wrong. I have read the entirety of (and enjoyed most of) the Sherlock Holmes books. But I'm not convincing myself that they were deep and challenging works.
It's a pity that establishment literary circles still mostly ignore it outside of a few token examples. This drives educational circles and now most literary curricula (even K-12) leave any kind of serious analysis or discussion off the list.
Science Fiction requires some very different analysis tools than many other literary genres and as a result, readers (consumers) are so ill prepared that they often can't even recognize it when they're consuming a genre piece, or consuming something with science fiction elements, if it doesn't explicitly involve Star Wars like space opera cliches. But literary criticism, by largely ignoring the genre, is failing to develop those analysis tools.
There's plenty of people who'll say "I hate sci-fi" and then go on to binge watch several seasons across several shows that are all members of some sub-genre of sci-fi.
Note: IMHO I have a very expansive view of what Science Fiction is. I consider the genre to be basically any story where some non-existent "technology" (or science, or engineering or medicine, etc.) exists, and the story is set in motion around that technology. The technology can be as inconsequential as a grain of sand in the story, or a major plot driver. It can be so important to the story that the entire setting of the story becomes incomparable to anything that we can currently experience, or so mundane that the world of the story is exactly our world, but with this one twist. And I assume technology can be anything from physical stuff to cognitive concepts.
As an example of how expansive my view on this is, I would consider a show like NCIS to be sci-fi because many of the plots can only exist or move forward based on some impossible or non-existent forensic or cyber technology.
"Walking Dead", sure I consider that sci-fi because it relies on the assumption of some nonexistent disease to drive the entire show.
The "James Bond" series (and many spy movies and series) are basically sci-fi because the stories can only function in the presence of non-existing or impossible technology.
An amazing number of Horror, Spy, Police, Thriller and Action stories all fall into the same category.
If you disagree with me on this, that's fine. But I'll put this another way, "The Man from Earth" is a movie that essentially takes place in one room of a small house. There's no technology, gizmos, spaceships, aliens, or other things that can't exist in this world. It relies on a single premise, an improbably genetic condition, that without which the entire story can't exist. Every other single thing in the story is entirely plausible as a small-set drama and if you conclude that the main character is lying or crazy, then the story is still science fiction because it still causes the viewer to consider an improbable science. In fact, I think the genetic condition is only mentioned once in the entire movie.
So if NCIS can get away with 15-20 minutes of impossible forensics and hacking per episode and not be sci-fi, then "The Man from Earth", which dwells on the genetic twist for a few moments can't be either.