Rethinking space opera antipope.org

Thoughts on space opera from Charlie Stross, touching on work from Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ursula le Guin and Lois McMaster Bujold.

The romantic impulse renders space opera antithetical to solarpunk. A fictional setting composed entirely of wild individualists isn't going to end up as some sort of libertarian utopia, it's going to be a cat ranch: meanwhile someone needs to stay behind and tend the home fires, someone has to mind the grain silos on that "small farming planet", someone else needs to manage the shipyard that repairs the interstellar freighter.