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.
I find the current use of the term “space opera” exceedingly annoying and confusing.
To me “space opera” was and always will be simple adventures in space.
Other stories and novels that take place “in space” and on spaceships but are serious, multi-layered explorations of humans living and working and fighting in an other-worldly environment should be called something else.
They’re two different animals completely and should not be conflated, as they currently are.
So there IS no “new” space opera. There is space opera and there is …..but that’s the problem. I can’t think of a good term for what the rest of it is.
I don’t think I could ever agree with that. It suggests that space opera can never change, evolve or move forward. It’s true that there are stories that take place in space or or spaceships that aren’t ‘space opera’: hard SF, military SF, whatever. But I think it’s also true thatspace opera can be serious and multi-layered. I think what Alastair Reynolds does is clearly space opera, for example.
I’m not dogmatic about it, but I’ve not actually heard a better way of looking at it than ‘space opera’ and ‘lovesongs to the way the future was’.
One thing that complicates this somewhat is that often science fiction stories share elements of ‘space opera’. Military SF, obviously, sometimes is space opera and sometimes is a cousin of space opera. Some hard SF is pretty much space opera. So, to reduce space opera permanently to ‘simple adventures in space’ doesn’t really cover what space opera is, or what writers are doing with it.
I guess we have different definitions of what space opera is, Jonathan. I’ve always thought of it as the essence of lightweight adventurous fluff. That’s why “space opera” ala “soap opera.”
I guess we do. Bob Tucker coined the term in 1941, and within five or six years it was being challenged. It initially was meant to mean badly written, cliche ridden space adventure. By the end of the decade it was used to refer to good quality space adventure, and has evolved and changed since then. The key with space opera is that it is space adventure. That’s a given. There must be a spaceship and other stuff, but while there’s been a qualitative angle, I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used to simply refer to lightweight adventurous fluff. Even back in the 40s and 50s it meant more than that.
That’s interesting because I’ve been referring to it as that (lightweight adventurous fluff) for the past 25 years :-)
And that’s what I saw being published –for the most part- as “space opera” until about the past five years or so.
See, I don’t consider Greenland, Harrison, Baxter, Cherryh, McAuley, or Banks as writers of space opera but of novels about space exploration.
And yet, many of them have described their work as just that: space opera. True, I’ve not seen Harrison or Cherryh do so, but certainly Greenland, Baxter and McAuley. Cherryh’s an interesting case. Her work skirts space opera. A novel of space adventure like DOWNBELOW STATION, is borderline space opera.
Oh, and in terms of how other people see it. I had a similar conversation with John Kessel, Jim Kelly, Charles Brown, Gary Wolfe and a bunch of others. Kessel tried (and failed) to persuade me that Herbert’s DUNE was space opera. He ultimately relented on that one.
As to the last five years: I’m not sure when the term the ‘new space opera’ as first coined, but I’m pretty sure it dates back almostten years now, and the stuff they’re covering with that description goes back to the mid-70s.
Jonathan,
Space opera has gotten a bad name because of the fantastical, even nonsensical (if fun) elements that have become associated with it. Elements like fighters turning on a dime and fleets of spaceships arrayed cheek-to-jowl in dense convoys. Then there are the over-the-top villains and scoundrel-with-a-heart-of-gold good guys that run around, as Asimov once wrote about ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ firing bazookas at each other with their shirts hanging upon.
As you pointed out, military SF has made an attempt to inject come realism into the proceedings, but much of this genre lacks much appeal beyond connoisseurs of organization tables (like myself, for example).
In order for space opera to thrive outside of the world of franchise novels, writers should try to keep the science and the character development at a high level. Military science and technology should not be divorced from the “S” in SF. Also, motivations should be based on the complex interworking of societies, economics, and philosophies and not boiled down to Good vs. Evil.
I don’t want abuse your good graces, but I have just published a new SF novel that I would say falls into the space opera category. You can have a look at it here:
http://www.lulu.com/content/441712
Thanks for the forum,
–Michael