@apophis@futurebird@llewelly The difference between 20th-century American and British science fiction is that the American genre was playing on Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and the British genre was working through the decline and critique of a colonial empire.
(Americans such as Asimov and George Lucas did sometimes do Edward Gibbon with the serial numbers filed off... but Asimov's characters all assume that a Second Empire would be a fine and feasible goal to work toward, and Lucas drops us onto the Western Planet in the first act.)
shekinahcancook