[whswhs]

There's a whole family of tropes of classic science fiction as it developed under John W. Campbell: interstellar travel at FTL speeds, time travel, psi powers, superhuman mutants, human-shaped robots as the only or the dominant form of AI. One of the things I like about THS is that it almost entirely avoids all those assumptions, and makes a different set of speculative assumptions that grow out of more current fantastic ideas. That's not quite a question of "optimistic" or "pessimistic"; it's more that sf with the first set of ideas seems, well, retro, in almost the same way that a steampunk campaign with an inhabited Mars and etherships feels retro.