Here’s a thought: there’s no such thing as the new space opera. It’s not that there haven’t been profound developments in the evolution of space opera over the past twenty five years. There have been. It’s not that those developments don’t coincide with what people (myself included) have been calling the ‘new space opera’. They have. The problem is that there’s been an error of perspective.

If you step back just a little over a hundred years Garrett P. Serviss wrote a novel, a media tie-in actually, that has some claim to being the first major pre-space opera novel. It had most of the characteristics of space opera that we recognise today. The next major work, Doc Smith’s Skylark of Space in 1928 took things a step further, ramping up the scale and drama incredibly, and Smith did it again with the Lensman novels. Campbell rang his changes on it, as did Heinlein, Asimov, Van Vogt, Kuttner, Moore and others. Blish, Vance and others improved the quality of writing, characterisation etc through the 50s, and in the 60s you began to see more experimental works, as well as work by Dickson, Anderson, and Delany. The mid-70s saw a major shift with Mike Harrison’s space opera killer The Centauri Device, and then Interzone ran it’s call to arms in the early ’80s, Iain Banks introduced the Culture, and Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley et al improved the science, the quality of writing etc that was common in space opera. Writers like C J Cherryh also made major contributions, especially in a world building sense, with detailed and intense portrayals of socio-economic forces in novels like Downbelow Station. You can then skip across Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty, Baxter’s work of the ’90s and on to writers like Alastair Reynolds, who bring a darkness and density to what they’re doing. It’s all space opera. A continuous evolution in the field.

So, what do I mean? Well, if all of that stuff is ‘space opera’ and not ‘new space opera’ or ‘old new space opera’ or ‘new old space opera’, then is there something else? Yes. Space opera has always been popular. It has always been science fiction’s dominant form, even when it wasn’t cool or whatever. And throughout space opera’s history there have been writers of ‘retro space opera’: writers who continue to create older forms of space opera for reasons of art or commerce. They effectively pastiche space opera, rather than partake of its continuing evolution. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it creates the impression that there’s space opera (that old stuff) and something new. It’s an error of perspective. There’s actually space opera and that other old stuff. I’m just saying.