A main theme of the nine-book sci-fi series The Expanse is that sometimes you may never know the consequences of a choice you made. The universe, utterly indifferent black box that it is, “never tells us if we did right or wrong,” as the character Naomi Nagata puts it in The Expanse TV show. That’s
Adams was in good company. For more than a century, many science fiction writers had used plots involving founding colonies on other planets as a way to indict imperialism on Earth. (Imperialists, for their part, liked to talk about colonizing space, too: Cecil Rhodes himself said, “I would annex the planets if I could.”) That
