Putting my socialist SF novel here in case anyone wants to check it out. I wrote it specifically because SF is such an annoyingly reactionary genre. The first book in the series is a dollar right now and will be free in about ten days, but you can read about fifty pages of it for free right now if you want. Mods remove this if it's inappropriate.

For me, an annoying SF trope is the way other civilizations are so often just, like, space feudalism (Klingons) or even regular feudalism, because the libs writing these books have a hard time making themselves look good without comparing themselves to something so incredibly awful. I tried reading A Fire In The Deep, which is supposed to be this amazing SF novel, and it does have some cool ideas (collective entities made of dogs), but then I got to this scene where this space capitalist was deciding where to invest in the galaxy, and I was like, fuck this. A notable exception is a writer like Arthur C. Clarke, who usually depicts socialist civilizations without naming them as such or really getting into the gritty details.

I'm working on a fantasy series right now which is supposed to upend the most annoying fantasy trope: eugenics. "We are the special powerful people because we are born that way, everyone else is a poo person." I have magic in this series, but it only works if you use it collectively to liberate the exploited, and anyone can use it. It also takes place in Byzantium, since fantasy writers seem to have absolutely no interest at all in that civilization (because it's extremely complex, politically risky, and not well known even though a lot of people who don't write fantasy seem to kind of like it or be interested in it). It's meant as a specific attack on GRRM's idea that feudalism/capitalism is more or less inescapable so you just have to make the best of it, as well as JRR Tolkien's many stunningly orientalist takes in LOTR.