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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 8245031" data-attributes="member: 75787">Here's a pretty well-known editorial comment from Locus:"Old school space opera was all about scale. Everything in it, from the lushly romantic plots and the star-spanning empires to the light-year-spurning space ships, construction of any one of which would have exhausted the metal reserves of a solar system, was big. But while it may have been stuffed full of faux-exotic colour and bursting with contrived energy, most of the old school space opera was, let's face it, as two-dimensional and about as realistic as a cartoon cel. New space opera - the good new space opera - cheerfully plunders the tropes and toys of the old school and secondary sources from Blish to Delany, refurbishes them with up-to-the-minute science, and deploys them in epic narratives where intimate, human-scale stories are at least as relevant as the widescreen baroque backgrounds on which they cast their shadows"That's a pretty fair example -- there's also a definition by Pringle that I'm failing to locate which is more explicit. This, though, is pretty clear -- it's the same as the old school, but with better characterization and modern science. I can find a number of commentators on the new school's thinking, for example:"The new space opera was a reaction against the old. New space opera proponents claim that the genre centers on character development, fine writing, high literary standards, verisimilitude, and a moral exploration of contemporary social issues"Use of Weapons satisfies 1 (several times). for 2, the book is explicitly a quest with a definitive objective at the end. There is certainly a main hero (3) who confronts, well, everything (4). Plenty of space travel (5) and ungodly amounts of blood (6), maybe even in literal palaces! (7), definitely.8, 9, and 10 are debatable -- and this is probably where the newer space opera diverges most from the old; it's much less optimistic and "good guys win" in tone. For UoW, I'd argue there is an extremely dark villain, so user Aldiss's assessment, this make sites ay 80% of a good fit? That seems pretty good to me.Yup, I can see that. For me, I haven't seen any definition more compelling, and I guess that also, for me, the Lensman series, Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy really are exemplars of what I think of as  Space Opera, and so Aldiss's definition which fits these perfectly, works well.Banks, who I absolutely adore (both his SF and non-genre work) I think deliberately created the Culture to be a rebuttal of the dystopia/Cyberpunk movement that was reaction to Space Opera and the "high optimism" of early SF. So his work ended was a reaction to a reaction to Space Opera -- and hence was very similar to the original "high optimism" view of SF, but influenced and aware of the arguments against that. I'm happy to call it Space Opera, but it's not the exemplar of Space Opera to me -- and it's better because of it!Maybe as an analogy, PULP FICTION is a gangster film. But it doesn't have all the tropes and it couldn't be viewed as an exemplar the way that GODFATHER is, for example. So, for me, a writer can be writing Space Opera even if they are not doing it 100% -- I'm OK with 70% or so.Honestly, I'd have through a succinct example of a modern definition of Space Opera would be more readily available online. Most irritating.</blockquote>

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