The gods are not known by their external qualities, but their internal ones. But Sleeper Service's greatness lies in something murky, possibly the only thing that's really murky. Displacement has a scientific explanation, we just aren't going into the details. And the hero must be great because of some unexamined characteristics. You can't just save the orphanage, you have to save the universe. For the largest possible hero, the stakes must be as large as possible. For maximum emotional engagement in individual efforts, the story is about the largest possible hero that can be wedged into the setting. Emotional situations are exaggerated, and individual efforts are the focus. Saying that space opera is tinged with romanticism (enhanced by gothicism) is just a way of characterizing it's melodramatic roots. Does it have to be interstellar? No, but being interstellar helps with making things larger. A story about a character using a pre-owned spaceship for smuggling can. A story about the first spaceship cannot be space opera. No, set in space means that space travel is involved, and like ray guns and psionics it is an ordinary part of the setting and perfectly scientifically plausible there, yet easily grasped by the reader without lots of explanation. Does "space" mean everywhere beyond Earth? If so a family drama set entirely in a dome home on Mars could be said to be set in space. Ideally, the entire setting is totally whitewashed so that nothing is not transformed into magical bur ordinary versions. But when we say ray gun and spaceship you already know what it is, and in the setting ray guns and spaceships are ordinary to everyone there. Ray guns can do things regular guns can't, just like spaceships can do things regular ships can't. Ideally the setting is jam packed with tropes so you can have all kinds of technologies that are both wondrous and ordinary. They channel energy from an alternate dimension, someone understands it somewhere so it's not at all mystical, now back to our story. For each magical element here must be some kind of wave in the direction of how there's some scientific explanation, but little more than that. For example if you need people with superpowers you can't have magic, it has to be called psionics. Space opera is fiction that pretends to be "science ficion" in that it uses a patina of unexamined science-like justifications for the setting. Signy Mallory of the Norway is just too, um, too real? Too gritty, maybe.Īs for Downbelow Station: Space Opera is about epic adventures. But the psychodrama of Cordelia Naismith's relationship with Sgt Bothari, and her rescue mission that decapitates the pretender Vordarian: they just don't feel like Space Opera. Which still doesn't explain why "Barrayar" and "The Vor Game" don't feel like Space Opera to me. I think it was Stirling who gave the contact lens as the sort of new technology that inspired cyberpunk, in contrast to rocket ships. I see it in some ways as requiring the opposite of the sort of grimy, personal, intimate technology that CyberPunk was about. But the technology must be in the background. I think space opera relies on a background of epic, grand technology. I don't think "Downbelow Station" is space opera, nor "Barrayar" and "The Vor Game". I find myself in disagreement with Langford and Stableford. (Jean le Flambeur is a classic space operatic anti-hero in the mold of Gully Foyle.) I wouldn't call "Ringworld" a space opera, even though it hits the high notes on scale/sense of wonder/adventure-Niven's tone is all wrong-but on the other hand, "The Quantum Thief" trilogy nails the target even though it's not strictly speaking interstellar and a metric shitload of it happens in upload/computing environments. The key factor is that it's almost invariably romanticist in sensibility, often overlapping with the gothic: if it lacks a romantic/gothic tone then it's probably not space opera. Breadth of scope is one of them: Interstellar scale is almost mandatory (although I think there are exceptions: "Tiger Tiger"/"The Stars my Destination", perhaps). I think that for a work of SF to qualify as space opera it requires certain features to be present. And so they should be it's not exactly a well-defined concept.ĭave Langford and Brian Stableford took a stab at describing it in the gigantic monograph on space opera in the Encyclopedia of SF, but they (wisely, in my opinion) didn't try to give it a coherent definition, because it's a diagnosis, not a prescription. What is space opera, anyway? Going by the discussion on the preceding blog essay, lots of folks are a bit confused.
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