Reading modern space opera will, I assume, create a vision of galactic empire but it won't be the same as the one I have lurking about in the ol' lizard brain. The people writing modern space opera have grown up in a different era to those authers who began writing in the fourties and fifties, they will have different sensibilities and visions and thus produce a different future. That's what I was referring to, that my galactic empire is an old fashioned one that was only possible in the fourties and fifties. Curious that, a future superceded thousands of years before it could possibly occur.