Tools of the trade: you learn the language of analysis, all the dimensions to consider, the comparison against existing work, all of that with an in-depth experience with content of the field and a technical study of the subject. An alternative 'hack' or 'cheat' is to do a comparative analysis where you're basically stumbling through all the factors etcetera and also opening up so many avenues for analysis that a straight-edge analysis would otherwise miss.
The topic is of course sci-fi, 'western' ones more specifically, and there obsession with certain things. Aliens, as in finding them, going to their world discovering new things, or being discovered. Of empires, being ruled and ruling, the implications of that, the moralities of that and so on and so forth. Hard science. And those that consider the social aspects are super-duper modern, it's a relatively recent innovation in western sci-fi that if your societies are so vastly different across time and space, they're probably going to have different social structures from what exist right now. The author of the books I read over the weekend gave an example of sci-fi written in the 50's, where the scientist husband would go to the time-machine factory, his wife cleaning up the house and cooking, waiting for him to come back in their large suburban house with a big yard and two well-behaved kids, and a dog of course. Like the jetsons, actually. Exactly like the jetsons, except the jetsons never pretended to be sci-fi -- it was a family comedy that happened to have strange surroundings.
What confuses, shocks, saddens me is that any attempt to show an evolution of society along with the evolving technologies seem to rustle many Americans' feathers. A large number of reviews for the books complained that they tried to bring 'politics into sci-fi', which is the stupidest complaint I could imagine coming from someone who claims to like the genre. Sci-fi is never about the technology, that they seem to always forget. It's mostly about the society, politics, and their interaction with the changes in technology, but it's mostly politics and people.
In any case, it's clear the mores of our times are getting reflected in sci-fi, a genre that has been mostly male-dominated, as readers as well as authors. That's changing now, and I'm so glad for that.
I bring this up because I want to do a 'comparative study' of the 'space opera' subgenre of sci-fi with 'space opera' subgenre of puranic/vedic mythology. There aren't many similarities, and there seem to be only differences, but I'll argue those difference shed a light on societal expectations and discuss the exact mechanism. In a different post. Because I got distracted by the introduction and i need to sleep. Goodnight.
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