Blurry photo taken of Michael Ironside in Starship Troopers shouting Come on you apes, you wanna live forever, a phrase used repeatedly in the novel Daedalus. I took this with my phone, off my TV, as you can probably tell.

Why We Want Stories Written By Humans

Hint: The postmodernists were right all along.

I was reading a wonderful blogpost by the Scottish author Charlie Stross called Rethinking Space Opera. In it he linked to an essay by Michael Moorcock called Starship Stormtroopers that he wrote in 1977. That’s an essay I first read when I was in high school and going through the first of many huge Moorcock phases. I was obsessed with The Dancers at the End of Time, and the weird and wonderful adventures of Jerry Cornelius.

I recently published a science fiction novel called Daedalus. In interviews and discussion I regularly cite The Dancers at the End of Time as a significant inspiration for the book, and it is. The image I paint of the far future is very Moorcockian. In Daedalus I also reference Starship Troopers a lot; and boy do I mean a lot. And by that I mean the film Starship Troopers, not the fascistic ImaginationLand of Heinlein’s original serial. Because at its core Daedalus is a comedy. But it’s also a space opera, by any definition of the term, and it’s also at times deeply fascistic.

In his essay, Moorcock says:

Fiction about kings and queens is not necessarily royalist fiction any more than fiction about anarchists is likely to be libertarian fiction. As a writer I have produced a good many fantastic romances in…