Gotta have to push back on that. Certain genres are, but even the ones that are written nowadays and explicitely in the space opera genre tend to try to grapple with the ethics of colonialism.
Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three is set aboard a colony starship that’s revealed to be chock-full of genocidal weapons to ensure that the target planet isn’t a problem for humans to settle on. “Are we the monsters” etc.
Gotta have to push back on that. Certain genres are, but even the ones that are written nowadays and explicitely in the space opera genre tend to try to grapple with the ethics of colonialism.
Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three is set aboard a colony starship that’s revealed to be chock-full of genocidal weapons to ensure that the target planet isn’t a problem for humans to settle on. “Are we the monsters” etc.
sure, but even that’s a reaction inside the genre to the genre being steeped in it
look at The Culture, Banks was a straight up communist writing about somewhere he’d want to live but the stories are about liberal colonisation