Would this would be the same Brian Aldiss who was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded an OBE for services to literature? The one who as well as being an accomplished poet was an artist with international reputation?
The guy who won a Hugo award for his history of science fiction? Let me repeat that -- he won a major award for a book specifically that discusses what space opera is.
I mean, it's up to you, but I think his credentials are pretty damn good in this area.
Yes, absolutely
that Brian Aldiss.
I mean, the fact that you think an OBE means anything, or that being a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature is a
positive thing in this context really shows the extreme problem with your thinking. You think prestige in the non-genre, even anti-genre society means he must be right for the rest of time? That's beyond ludicrous. This is the classic appeal to authority, but of an unfortunately ludicrous kind. He has many other, more relevant qualifications! So why go with those? The least relevant, and even somewhat harmful ones (esp. the OBE good god, they don't consistently mean anything at all beyond a willingness to be a member of the Establishment or at least associated with them). And why would him being a poet qualify him to define space opera? Bizarre!
Presumably you're referring to his 1987 book, The Trillion-Year Spree? I'm sure in 1987, it was relevant, and still is valuable as a history of SF up to that point, but things move on, and his definition of space opera was
never great, not even for 1987, being overwrought and excessive one, because he was writing in an era where space opera had very, very recently been a pejorative and sneering term, and indeed many of his contemporaries still used it that way (or had it turned against them). I have no doubt his fellows at the Royal Society used it pejoratively. His definition seeks to
narrow what can be considered space opera, because to him, it seems like it's still pejorative term or at least represents a low-brow sort of thing - he was very careful to construct it so any of his contemporaries could decide their work was not space opera - even when it clearly was by a more reasonable definition. His own work also would certainly and consistently escape being termed space opera, despite frequently being as lurid, glamorous, and over-the-top as any space opera, and if one is going to sneer at most space opera, one should certainly be sneering at Helleconia. Yet literary people didn't - as we see from his literature-world credentials, which you stressed the importance of (probably on the basis that it's all kind of miserable).
I should point out, I'm hardly ignorant of his work. I've read quite a lot of it. There are a lot of fantastic ideas, though also a lot of stuff that was looked dated-as-hell even when it was being written. He was incredibly talented and prolific, no-one can take that from him, and I'm sure his histories were good - it's very helpful to have histories like that showing how people regarded things at the time - but yeah I am going to go ahead and say he was not the right man to define space opera, and 1987 wasn't the right time to define it.
I should note as mean as I am to Helleconia, I love it really - Aldiss is really bad at certain kinds of writing but those ideas, and the sweep and the scope and let's just not think about the beaming love-rays business which... just no. But still, you don't get enough SF writers now who are willing to write about epic periods of time or humans-like beings in distant futures - or when they do, it can get a bit trite - yeah I'm looking you Noumenon.
