@cstross I've bookmarked this even though my SF is more "space opera adjacent" than a proper example of the genre, mainly because mine is taking the piss out of most of the things on that list. The big one for me is that human society is always better than every possible form of alien society and human morals and ideals should be applied universally. And also people hundreds if not thousands of years in the future get everything correct about Earth history. Like we don't make mistakes today?

@cstross "Planets are small and easily explored" a planet with a surface area of a hectare could be interesting, especially if there were about a billion of them in close proximity to each other

@cstross
I barely started reading and I must say, you are way nerdier than me in that regard. Not that it's a bad thing but I feel like the list better applies to medium to hard sci-fi rather than space opera. After all, fighters in SW look that way because the designer wanted them to be associated with Wild West gunslingers. "Draw me something rugged and daring."

@cstross It wouldn't be space opera without all that stuff! You just need to recharge your belief suspension unit.

@cstross

Is it safe to assume you're a 'Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy' fan?

@cstross I think your list may be missing, “Space battles that involve so many fractional-c missiles that you need scientific notation to count them, and still somehow no planets get accidentally fragged.” David Weber, I'm looking at you…

@cstross I've read entire novels where the premise is "oooh, I broke one of the cliches on the list, aren't I cool?"

You need enough cliches for the reader to orient, but you gotta break several to be notable.

@cstross Poul Anderson was pretty good about astrogeology issues, especially given his timeframe.

Re "You can keep a starship crew healthy and sane indefinitely using a life support system running on blue-green algae, tilapia, and maybe the odd soy bean plant", I wonder if a natural limiter on fascist space programs will be the lack of Manly Beef and Coffee.

@cstross I'm pretty sure that this is the Evil Overlord List that I remember:

https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/evil.overlord