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Space Opera

Space Opera is a term borrowed by false analogy from “Soap Opera” or the now obsolete term for serialized Western: “Horse Opera.” Like Soap Opera and Horse Opera, it was originally a derisive phrase.

Critical to understanding the phrase and its history is the fact that while Space Opera originally meant “the hackneyed, formulaic, overwritten, melodramatic crap we’ve all been reading in the pulps” it eventually became a generic term for anything in Science Fiction that featured a galaxy-spanning plot, lots of aliens, huge casts of characters, threats to the galaxy or universe, that kind of thing.

If you’ve read any SF you’ve probably read what some consider to be the definitive Space Opera story, Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation.  Serialized in the 1940s, it was an homage to a genre already 10 years dead. Asimov missed the great Space Operas he read when he was a kid, and wanted to make the definitive version. Legitimize something he loved, and which everyone else had dismissed or forgotten.

There’s a direct analogy here with Arthur C. Clarke’s & Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Like Asimov, Kubrick wanted to take something, “the Science Fiction movie” in his case, “Space Opera” in Asimov’s, and do something astonishing. Make something really good out of it. Kubrick was operating in a time when “Science Fiction movie” meant “a hastily thrown together piece of crap designed to get teenagers with cars to the theater where they can make out.” If the 50′s had happened in the 70s, we’d call them Teensploitation movies. I know, that’s silly, but I love the phrase “if the 50′s happened in the 70s.”

Asimov’s Foundation takes place across an entire galaxy, many decades, and has a huge cast of characters. An entire civilization is in the balance. These are all hallmarks of the genre.

Story-wise, Star Wars bears many of the same hallmarks. Lots of aliens, check. Galaxy-spanning story, check. Huge cast of characters…well, no. It’s basically a Fantasy Ensemble and there the analogy breaks down. The easiest way to understand the manner in which Star Wars is a Space Opera is to understand Lucas’ primary source material which is not Hidden Fortress or even The Dam Busters but E.E. “Doc” Smith‘s Lensmen. Lensmen has light sabres and The Force and Jedi and Star Destroyers and Death Stars, no shit. Pretty much everything we associate with Star Wars was lifted wholesale from Smith’s stuff. The names were changed, the serial numbers filed off, but along with a melange of other stuff, including melange from Dune in the original scripts, Lensmen is predominant.  Salon has laid the issue bare.

Lensmen was exactly what Asimov was harkening back to when he wrote Foundation. But Foundation is…well, good. It’s got something most Space Opera lacks; a genuine science-fictional idea in the center of it.

Asimov invents the “science” of Psychohistory. The notion that while science cannot accurately  predict the actions of a single person, summed over millions or billions of people, behavior can accurately be predicted. Asimov doesn’t explain how this works, this is not Hard SF. But it’s an idea that means this tale could not be told in any other genre.

Foundation is missing something important to most Space Operas, and that’s aliens. Any aliens. This is because, like Dune after it, Foundation was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction later Analog under the titanic editorship of John W. Campbell.

Campbell was sick of the bullshit space opera from the 20′s and 30′s, the same stuff Asimov was writing Foundation in the 40′s as a reaction to. So he created a rule for his magazine. “No aliens.” That’s why there are no aliens in Foundation and no aliens in Dune. He thought SF stories should be about people. Humans. Men, and the problems they faced. And he thought throwing aliens in was cheap. When you look at what that philosophy produced, it’s hard to argue with him. It’s impossible to understate Campbell’s influence on SF. Too bad the dude went crazy with the Dianetics stuff.

The Known Space books by Larry Niven are another example of great Space Opera. Rollicking good adventure stories with tons of crazy aliens, with a single Science-fictional idea; The Ringworld, or the Luck Gene, thrown in to keep everything legitimate.

The genre is given new life thanks to Scottish SF author Iain M. Banks and his breathtaking Culture novels, which I think of as “neo-baroque Space Opera.”

There’s no science in the Culture novels. The Culture is a galaxy-spanning civilization full of aliens that’s genuinely post-scarcity. Meaning, an entire civilization without need or want of anything. Their technology is so formidable that no one wants for anything except, perhaps, something to do. If you want to change sex, change species, live forever, all you have to do is will it. A single Culture special agent (for there are such things in the Culture, they seem beset by enemies on all sides, including my favorite aliens, the Affront) contains glands and biomechanical add-ons that could wipe out an entire planet effortlessly.

You see why it’s Space Opera. Aliens, galaxy-spanning stories. Little or no emphasis on actual science. If anything, Banks’ Science Fictional speculations are about the ethics of the Culture. All his stories revolve around the ethics of a world where you can have or do anything you want. Often his stories are about the enemies or outcasts of the Culture, allowing him to frame the ethical issues from a sympathetic point of view. He’s put a lot of thought into it. These questions wouldn’t make sense in another genre.

That’s why you can’t reasonably call Sunshine “Space Opera.” It has…nothing we associate with the term. No aliens, no swashbuckling, no galaxy spanning, epic plot. If anything, it’s the opposite. It’s Hard SF!

Hard SF! ->

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