re: #1 Shiplord Kirel

Sorry, I stopped reading right there. This is an uninformed and wildly inaccurate stereotype used by people who want to disparage the entire genre but who cannot be bothered to actually learn anything about it. It hasn’t been even close to the truth since perhaps 1950.
Samuel “Chip” Delaney, who is black and very publicly gay, won a Hugo almost 50 years ago for Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones The New York fan club and writer’s circle known as the Futurians had a decidedly leftist bent and defined SF from the 30s until quite recently. The membership list is a Who’s Who of SF from the 30s onward and included such iconic figures as Isaac Asimov, James Blish, and Fred Pohl.
In the 50s, Ursula K. LeGuin and many others published works that were decades ahead of their time in terms of cultural and environmental sensitivity. I could go on and on.
These puppy people in fact claim to be a subversive group within a largely left leaning genre . Since there has long been a large sub-genre of libertarian and right-wing science fiction, this is not quite accurate, but they are certainly not defenders of some imaginary and cartoonish status quo.

Cordwainer Smith’s The Lady Who Sailed the Soul was written in the late 50s. The heroine, Helen America, is a legendary pilot who endured hideous self-sacrifice to found a new world. She is a self-directed feminist who had an unashamed affair and an abortion of choice.

Smith was perhaps the most ‘political’ SF writer of all, in his real life.
en.wikipedia.org