If you are, please take this simple quiz to determine whether you should proceed.
- Does the society in your novel have a single polity, namely, a galactic empire?
- Does it pretty much go without saying that the occupant of the throne of that empire is always an emperor and never an empress regnant?
- Despite having trillions of subjects, does the emperor find the time to involve himself directly in the nitty-gritty of those subjects' lives?
- Even though the galactic empire is, well, galactic, are all of its subjects human?
- Do the planets not differ significantly from places that one might find on Earth in terms of climate, atmosphere, and gravity?
- As an alternative to the galactic empire, are there multiple worlds, each with a single government, language, and religion?
- Is Earth called Terra?
- Do the planets have names, while the stars that they orbit are anonymous?
- Is the whole point of your novel to express a seventies sentiment about being kind to the environment or about the evils of capitalism or of the Catholic Church?
- Do you neither know nor care about this thing called "human nature"?
- Has the society in your novel seen less social change over ten millennia than my rather provincial home town has in the past forty years?
How to score: If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, I recommend that you not write your science-fiction novel.
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