Enevhar Aldarion
Hero
Since no one else has brought it up yet, this originally came out 40 years ago:
I remember owning it and now I feel old. lol
I remember owning it and now I feel old. lol
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What is and isn't Space Opera?
- Thread starter Yora
- Start date
dragoner
KosmicRPG.com
I also owned it at the time.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
Fine.
It's still wrong.
And since you are the one making the outrageous claim, it falls to you to provide evidence that writing in the 1940s was drier than the writing of the 2020s.
As for "most of us" it strikes me that participants on this forum are mostly well read, and have read plenty of books that are more than 80 years old (R.E. Howard for example).
Paul Farquhar
Legend
No, same. And it was horribly overcomplicated, not something I could recommend. Something simpler, like Star Frontiers, seems more appropriate to the genre. "Simulationist" and "Space Opera" are strange bedfellows!
Traveller, which dates back to the same period, is debatably Space Opera, although it tends towards the more serious, Foundation end.
Mustrum_Ridcully
Hero
I think many episodes of Star Trek are indeed not space opera, but whatever specific genre that episode matches. Some sci-fi horror turning the crew into avatastic ancestors or a murder-mystery with a space ghost.
Deep Space Nine's Dominion War certainly falls in the scope of soap opera. TNG's story about how a Douwd that makes good tea in a nice house and genocides an entire race is not.
PErsonally I think one should never use genres to the point where they become too vast or too constraining. A thing can fall into multiple genres, and genres will have overlap. That's okay. It's just a tool to facilitate describing something, not an elementary particle or law of nature.
Ryujin
Legend
I still have it and have mentioned it in other threads. Didn't get all the ship books and I'm missing a couple of the star sector atlases, but have quite a bit of the original material.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
And this also applies to tabletop RPGs. You might be involved in an intergalactic war, or be hunted by monsters on an abandoned freighter, or trading cargoes between planets, or dealing with a crewmembers' personal problem. The genre might vary from session to session.
WayneLigon
Adventurer
Space Opera is Big.
There needs to be Something Big. What that Big thing is varies, but it needs to be larger than life, larger than the average largeness of fiction or even adventure fiction usually brings to the table. Then go further and faster than that, and then show people that was just the start.
The Expanse I think of as Space Opera because we have the Gates. That's certainly a Big Thing. The protovirus rebuilding parts of Venus. The vastness of the network opening up to humans basically by accident, which is the equivalent of putting a loaded revolver in the hands of a toddler.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. Humans find out one of the Big Secrets about the universe, something the elder races already knew about but knew that humans would just have to find out for themselves. Then it goes even bigger than that. Joshua Calvert Does The Even Bigger Thing Than That near the end.
Scope and stakes come into it as well. It's sometimes used as a decisive term but I totally think of Dune as space opera. Huge spans of time, huge effects on the entire galaxy as a whole, the fate of the entire race of humanity, etc etc.
There needs to be Something Big. What that Big thing is varies, but it needs to be larger than life, larger than the average largeness of fiction or even adventure fiction usually brings to the table. Then go further and faster than that, and then show people that was just the start.
The Expanse I think of as Space Opera because we have the Gates. That's certainly a Big Thing. The protovirus rebuilding parts of Venus. The vastness of the network opening up to humans basically by accident, which is the equivalent of putting a loaded revolver in the hands of a toddler.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. Humans find out one of the Big Secrets about the universe, something the elder races already knew about but knew that humans would just have to find out for themselves. Then it goes even bigger than that. Joshua Calvert Does The Even Bigger Thing Than That near the end.
Scope and stakes come into it as well. It's sometimes used as a decisive term but I totally think of Dune as space opera. Huge spans of time, huge effects on the entire galaxy as a whole, the fate of the entire race of humanity, etc etc.
Well, to compare "soap opera" and "space opera", I get:
1.It's huge, complex, detailed and obtuse. Unless you start at the beginning, it is utterly impossible to just watch an episode or two and "understand and get" what is going on in the story. Your ONLY option is to watch the whole show, and you have to accept that for some time you will be clueless and won't "get" things in the show.
2.There are lots and lots and lots and lots of characters. Characters come and go, and can be very hard to keep track of in the story.
3.No Main Characters. While a story thread my feature a character, they are by no means a "main" character. As the story moves along, old characters will fade and new ones get a spotlight. No character has plot armor and can die at any time. No character is the "special chosen one" that the whole universe revolves around.
4.Long storytelling with no short cuts. When the planet Pangus makes a space force, we get to see it slowly be built over a vast course of time. If a character falls for some addiction it's a plot point for a long, long time. There are no quick fixes or reset buttons.
5.There is no Hollywood Endings like the demi god super hero character shoots a thingy and ALL of the alien/robot/whatevers in the whole army are automatically defeated. Heroes do not disarm bombs by cutting the red wire with one second left. Things are done the hard way. The only way for a rebels to defeat the evil empire is by and endless war of attrition until the empire can't fight back.
1.It's huge, complex, detailed and obtuse. Unless you start at the beginning, it is utterly impossible to just watch an episode or two and "understand and get" what is going on in the story. Your ONLY option is to watch the whole show, and you have to accept that for some time you will be clueless and won't "get" things in the show.
2.There are lots and lots and lots and lots of characters. Characters come and go, and can be very hard to keep track of in the story.
3.No Main Characters. While a story thread my feature a character, they are by no means a "main" character. As the story moves along, old characters will fade and new ones get a spotlight. No character has plot armor and can die at any time. No character is the "special chosen one" that the whole universe revolves around.
4.Long storytelling with no short cuts. When the planet Pangus makes a space force, we get to see it slowly be built over a vast course of time. If a character falls for some addiction it's a plot point for a long, long time. There are no quick fixes or reset buttons.
5.There is no Hollywood Endings like the demi god super hero character shoots a thingy and ALL of the alien/robot/whatevers in the whole army are automatically defeated. Heroes do not disarm bombs by cutting the red wire with one second left. Things are done the hard way. The only way for a rebels to defeat the evil empire is by and endless war of attrition until the empire can't fight back.
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