Premises:<p>1. &quot;<i>Upshot: any work of SF that takes &#x27;Lunar 3He mining&#x27; as an economic premise is about as plausible as one that assumes combustion powered by the release of phlogiston.</i>&quot;<p>2. This argument applies to essentially anything requiring space travel. It&#x27;s expensive, very delayed, unworkable based on any kind of science as we know her today, low margin, and generally silly.<p>Conclusion:<p>Charlie, as a science fiction reader, has very little reading to do.<p>* &quot;<i>Faceless 80&#x27;s style corporations ruling entire planets (hint: who handles the externalities?)</i>&quot;  I dunno, who handles the externalities for 2010s-style faceless corporations?<p>* &quot;<i>small farming planets (hint: just one ecosystem for a planet?)</i>&quot; Yeah, that one&#x27;s pretty stanky.<p>* &quot;<i>the glib dismissal of life support systems in space as trivially easy to maintain</i>&quot; If it&#x27;s not trivial, it&#x27;s not likely to work very well over any kind of long-term. Any system that requires heroic efforts from superior individuals is going to fail in short order, very likely the <i>second</i> time it is used. Of course, it may fail spectacularly, dramatically, and very entertainingly. But probably not.<p>* &quot;<i>political structures based on design patterns proven to be unworkable in the context of any society more modern than the late middle ages</i>&quot; Anyone got an example of a political structure <i>proven</i> to be <i>workable</i> in the context of, etc, etc?<p>* &quot;<i>AIs that follow the disembodied-brain-in-a-box mode of Hal 9000</i>&quot; It&#x27;s been a while, is that the Berkeley response or John Searle&#x27;s?<p>* &quot;<i>futures in which we wear mini-dresses and three-piece suits, drive gas-burning automobiles (or hovercars: it&#x27;s just a rabbit&#x2F;smeerp replacement), carry handguns (or blasters: see rabbit&#x2F;smeerp), eat the kind of food we eat today, live the kind of way we live today, and most importantly think the way we think today</i>&quot; Unfortunately, any use of the term &quot;cache-sex&quot; is verboten and should be expunged from the literature as she is known. The writer of such should be expunged from existence.<p>Conclusion:<p>&quot;<i>Edit: if there&#x27;s an entry for your pet shibboleth in the Turkey City Lexicon don&#x27;t bother repeating it here—I&#x27;m taking familiarity with the canonical list of cliches as a given.</i>&quot;<p>Given that most of this article either appears in the canonical list, or ought to if Sterling and what&#x27;s-his-name had thought of it, this ending makes the article delightfully self-negating. Très poste-moderne!<p>On the other hand, this kind of list of things-I-hate-about-all-of-the-rest-of-you has been rather done to death; examples in any decent library abound in much the same way as silverfish. See, por ejemplo, Strunk and White.<p>4&#x2F;10. A good effort, but not extraordinary.