Skip to main content

Space Operas and Beyond

I’ve always loved the genre of science fiction, how it could be so personal and yet so distant. I especially loved the exploration aspect of it; how the audience could sit and be awed by the atmosphere every once and awhile. I’d never touched on early science-fiction and the space opera, though. Reading a few short stories by both Arthur Clarke and CL Moore was a brand new experience for me.

These futuristic settings and technologies could be the basis of real tech fascinated me as a connection to today. Satellites, touchscreens, even the modern space program wouldn’t be here if not for these fantastic first goes at what laid beyond our stratosphere.

While that influence is truly awe-inspiring, the most interesting part of this genre is the very human aspects as well. Science was only part of the show, as Hugo Gernsback's description of 75% literature and 25% science stated. The idea of a space opera is they’re horse operas set in space: more about adventure, more about action, more about romance. The setting of outer space, spaceships, and distant planets are just fun, exciting, and add to the adventure - as well as the audience’s awe factor. A perfect example of this is CL Moore’s Song In A Minor Key short story. An intergalactic outlaw returns to his home planet where he committed his first crime against the man who murdered the girl he loved. Seems super steeped in Western tradition to me.

The early authors also used this genre to speculate and cogitate on already existing wonders. Arthur Clarke’s short stories, The Nine Billion Names of God and The Star, both deal with humans and their relationship with God, as well as how technology could effectively both prove God’s existence or question if He is truly out there. These stories can be as morally complex as much as they make your brain strain. As with most early science fiction, which tended to be earthbound monster stories that could fall into the horror genre if the audience was so inclined (such as Frankenstein and the Invisible Man), these stories talked about how expanding knowledge could be extremely dangerous in the hands of mankind.

Overall, the space opera genre is made to be entertaining and cheesy, even if it makes your head hurt a bit. I’ll be honest, I’m always up for some space cowboys, ya’ll. Yeehaw.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Interview With The Vampire's Apeirophobia And Why Everyone But The Vampire Ignores It

One of the many revisited tropes in media is immortality. The idea of seeing and personally experiencing all the world’s disasters in history captivates us, I guess. Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire establishes immortality as an integral plot point (the only reason the interview can take place). The narrative, therefore, advances some heavy opinions about the topic, as well as those who seek it. Rice’s novel leaves no doubt about it: being and becoming an immortal is gross. A freak bites your neck, you drink said freak’s blood, and your body slowly shuts down. What remains is your consciousness and blood flow, which you have to supplement in order to survive (which kind of takes away the meaning of immortality). The blood-sucking itself is graphically sensual in Interview With The Vampire, revealing their killing as the last real joy that vampires have - there’s a pun on ‘flirting with death’ somewhere in there. Oh, and you can never see the sun again, so get some spray tan. The...
4 comments
Read more

Frankenstein, Literature's Worst Parent

If one needs a guide on how to be the most oblivious of deadbeat parents, they need only to look to the actions of Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . There’s nothing that says “World’s Worst Dad” like running out of the house, screaming after finding your eight-foot-something child looming over your sleeping form. Shelley’s entire novel, in essence, is about parenting and the relationships between fathers and their children - with the added element of being the first work of science fiction. Before getting into the analysis of the various facts, which point this towards being a parental “how-to”, it’s important to briefly mention Shelley’s own upbringing and how it relates to said analysis. Shelly was born to William Godwin, a philosopher, and novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a well-known English suffragette who penned “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, in 1797. Two weeks after Shelley’s birth, Wollstonecraft died due to postpartum infections. Shelley’s rigor...
2 comments
Read more

"How To Not Be a Horrible Person", AKA Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman is, overall, a novel about family. A really dysfunctional, not super healthy family, but about family nonetheless. The novel follows two brothers through their adventure of meeting each other for the first time after many, many years, and the frustration behind both their clashing personalities and the death of their father. Anansi Boys also shows the importance of family, with how Fat Charlie and Spider (the respective brothers) save each other in different ways, as well as the influence of their father, the god Anansi, on their lives. This novel also explores the unpredictability of life. The boys’ lives don’t quite work out the way both they think they should - defying both their and the audience’s expectations. Anansi dying unexpectedly, which hits both boys hard (in Charlie’s case, harder than it should) is extremely unexpected to everyone in the novel, though it’s revealed he’ll come back in a few years. Rosie, Fat Charlie’s fiancée, at the be...
1 comment
Read more