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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8245317" data-attributes="member: 18">You're kind of proving my point extremely well here. 4 and 5 for example, are clearly not really &quot;things&quot; in the way they'd be in older SF, nor is 7 (there's no &quot;louring dark&quot; of space here - the darkness is on the planet and in the mind, mate), but his definition is so malleable that you can claim it's the case even when it's a terrible fit (though I think we can both agree there's plenty of blood in palaces). I think questions can also be raised re: 1 and 2, though that's a bit more complicated.If you use it as broadly as you're suggesting, I mean, huge numbers of things can be claimed as &quot;space opera&quot; even they obviously are not.For example, it's an easy 8/10 on The Hunger Games (Peeta is 8, the man's a naughty word saint). And that's treating the definitions more narrowly than you did! All you're missing is 5 &amp; 7. But it's obviously bollocks. Yet it easily passes your 70% threshold (note the book nails it better than the films, which minimize 4, but 4 is quite a thing with the mutant wolf-monster-things in the books, I think they're in both 1 &amp; 3). I'm actually having difficulty, off-hand, thinking of much SF that wouldn't, going as broad as you're suggesting, count as space opera. naughty word you can probably get 7/10 on most of the Helliconia books, even though again, obviously it isn't space opera and is perhaps even antithetical to it.So this is why I'm saying it's not very useful.Agree that it's disappointing that there's no good modern definition, which I suspect it why Aldiss' definition got dug up in the first place and thanks for the explainer re: &quot;better writing&quot;, makes sense.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8245317, member: 18"] You're kind of proving my point extremely well here. 4 and 5 for example, are clearly not really "things" in the way they'd be in older SF, nor is 7 (there's no "louring dark" of space here - the darkness is on the planet and in the mind, mate), but his definition is so malleable that you can claim it's the case even when it's a terrible fit (though I think we can both agree there's plenty of blood in palaces). I think questions can also be raised re: 1 and 2, though that's a bit more complicated. If you use it as broadly as you're suggesting, I mean, huge numbers of things can be claimed as "space opera" even they obviously are not. For example, it's an easy 8/10 on The Hunger Games (Peeta is 8, the man's a naughty word saint). And that's treating the definitions more narrowly than you did! All you're missing is 5 & 7. But it's obviously bollocks. Yet it easily passes your 70% threshold (note the book nails it better than the films, which minimize 4, but 4 is quite a thing with the mutant wolf-monster-things in the books, I think they're in both 1 & 3). I'm actually having difficulty, off-hand, thinking of much SF that wouldn't, going as broad as you're suggesting, count as space opera. naughty word you can probably get 7/10 on most of the Helliconia books, even though again, obviously it isn't space opera and is perhaps even antithetical to it. So this is why I'm saying it's not very useful. Agree that it's disappointing that there's no good modern definition, which I suspect it why Aldiss' definition got dug up in the first place and thanks for the explainer re: "better writing", makes sense. [/QUOTE]

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