What is and isn't Space Opera?

[dragoner]

I have read the origin of the term is a spin off of "Horse Opera": Horse opera - Wikipedia

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Pebble In The Sky, Asimov's first novel (set on a far future Earth that is rebelling against a Galactic Empire of human origin), was published in 1950. Poul Anderson's first Dominic Flandry story came out in 1951.

It's close, but Asimov got there first.

I haven't read that one, I wonder if it's on Kindle?

 

[Umbran]

1984, I Capture the Castle, The Naked and the Dead, The Little Sister, The Day of the Triffids, I Robot...

Sturgeon's Law applies. If you cherry pick a handful, you can have that list all be good, but then there's the other 90%.

Assuming that the names we know today are representative of the past is a failure to recognize survivor bias in action.

 

[Umbran]

It has been observed that most early Space Opera was just adapting Western plots to extraplanetary settings, so yeah Im with you that Space Western is just a type of Space Opera.

You cannot look at only the beginning of one genre, and then take it that for all time these things are basically the same. Both Westerns and Space Opera have changed and developed since then.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Sturgeon's Law applies. If you cherry pick a handful, you can have that list all be good, but then there's the other 90%.

Assuming that the names we know today are representative of the past is a failure to recognize survivor bias in action.

The quality of writing hasn't changed since Shakespeare died, and it dropped.

Survivor bias means that the bad stuff gets forgotten so the average quality of not-forgotten writing from any period is going to be higher than the average quality of new books.

E.E. Doc Smith isn't (quite) forgotten, so his stuff must be (slightly) above average. There is a lot of stuff published in 2022 that is much worse. Fortunately, it will be forgotten.

Now, if you want to call out Smith on his attitudes and values, he wasn't progressive...

 

[Umbran]

The quality of writing hasn't changed since Shakespeare died, and it dropped.

I have no freakin' idea what you're saying here.

Survivor bias means that the bad stuff gets forgotten...

No. Survivor bias means that what you have after filtering is not representative of the whole population. You can't look at Asimov, Doc Smith, and Burroughs, and understand the writing of the age, in general.

E.E. Doc Smith isn't (quite) forgotten, so his stuff must be (slightly) above average.

Careful there - there are many ways to be "above average". Being above average overall does not mean being above average in any particular aspect. If you've got a particular criticism about, say, prose quality, being remembered now doesn't indicate higher than average prose quality, specifically.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If you've got a particular criticism about, say, prose quality, being remembered now doesn't indicate higher than average prose quality, specifically.

Sure. And the particular comment was on the quality of the writing being flat. To which you seem to be saying "all writing was flat in those days".

Doc Smith's ideas where better, and more influential, than his writing, even if some of it was itself quite derivative (Skylark stole from HG Wells for example, but was itself ripped off by Lost in Space). But it was produced against a background of stuff that is largely forgotten, such as the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Dan Dare comics.

 

[Ryujin]

You cannot look at only the beginning of one genre, and then take it that for all time these things are basically the same. Both Westerns and Space Opera have changed and developed since then.

As have soap operas. The folks who wrote that description likely never saw ghosts, aliens, or demonic possession in their soap operas. (No, I don't watch them, but I hear things.)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The folks who wrote that description likely never saw ghosts, aliens, or demonic possession in their soap operas.

Those are just the writers.

 

[Ryujin]

Now, if you want to call out Smith on his attitudes and values, he wasn't progressive...

No, he was definitely "of his time", and there wasn't a female Lensman until the second to last book, for example. While I can't remember it ever being overtly stated, my impression was that the Lensmen were White. That might be on me, but it would fit with SF of the time.