The concept of science fiction, as we think of it now, came out of marketing and editorial priorities of magazines that published alot of space opera. And “space opera,” as a category, is a concept created to describe trends, and not a deliberate movement conceived as its own thing the way new wave and cyberpunk were.

I’ve never read Margaret Atwood, but she says that she doesn’t write science fiction because science fiction is “”escapist fantasies about talking squids in outer space.”