A thing that’s always low-key irked me about a lot of science-fiction set in outer space is that all the worlds encountered overwhelmingly have a single, planet-wide government.

Which I understand! Nation-states are an arbitrary and relatively modern political invention and any wide-scale space travel is a huge endeavor that would require the cooperation if not unification of an entire planet and its resources to achieve, and in some settings its an almost utopian achievement.

But the drawback is that is that sci-fi also shrinks the worlds and homogenizes them. If you go to Blorbob V, where you land is a perfect microcosm of all of Blorbob V. The people there are dressed the same, look the same, speak the same language, have basically the same set of values, and it’s the same thing across the whole planet. Or implied to be.

I guess what I’m trying to articulate is, in science-fiction, instead of rejecting the nation-state in its entirety, most sci-fi planets are reduced into a single homogenized nation-state rather than being hugely diverse places where billions of people with thousands of distinct cultures and languages exist.