TWELFETIDE 23:09 Space Opera

Like most things in this field, Space Opera is a fairly broad category and some of the material I have written about comes into that category. At its heart, it generally takes place at an epic scale with interstellar conflict in futuristic settings. Technology plays a significant part and there are lots of battles and individual heroes. Dune, which I talked about yesterday is sometimes considered an example and I think it is not an easy fit. The Star Wars behemoth is definitely in there front and centre as it uses every available cliché and at times takes that too far – remember Jar Jar Binks? Star Trek is less so, yes it has space opera elements but it’s much more an exploration of what sort of society we should live in. The Federation can be linked to Ian M Bank’s Culture and also to Ursula Le Guin’s Ekumen. They all share the idea of some uniting interspecies and beneficial body and remember most inherit from some of the visions around the formation of the United Nations. In a space opera, there is always something to be destroyed or conquered rather than persuaded. In that context, the idea of the Borg is one of the most interesting to come out of Star Trek as its nature is to a degree ambiguous.

The exemplar of the category for me however is E E “Doc” Smith’s Lensman Series. Every volume in this is so bad it’s addictive. I remember reading them at University and they were difficult to put down. The Eddorians, the bad guys, start an invasion of our solar system and the Arisians, the truly outstandingly good guys, set up a convert breeding programme on Earth and three other planets which produce super-beings whose ability is enhanced by The Lens which gives its possessor a range of mental capabilities who collectively form the Galactic Patrol. In the space battles that ensue entire worlds are destroyed seemingly at random and in each book, there is a leap to a new level of destructive technology. Our hero meets a “curvacious red-headed nurse” to bring together breeding lines and their children can transcend to become second-stage Lensmen with a third stage down the road which is a united mind able to destroy the bad guys once and for all. I wonder if this is where spiral dynamics got its basic idea from. There is a lot of gratuitous torture, miracle rescues and so on.

A more humorous, and to a degree direct satire is Guardians of the Galaxy best known in its film form but originally part of Marvel Comics. Indeed most of the superhero films of the modern day originate in comic books and they are all to some degree a variant of the underlying ideas of the Galactic Patrol. As it happens I’ve never really been into comics, except for Niel Gaimen, and that is by necessity. So I don’t feel able to pick up on that field in this series. I did buy one once in Cardiff and read it on the Coach with my Nan heading back up to North Wales but firstly I was pretty bored by it and secondly, I got a “Welsh Mam’ look (nonverbal, deadly) when I got home so that nascent interest went no further. It has also attracted several series of dubious merit, but like Lensman, they also carried a perverse form of fun. Remember ‘V’ in its original form with the thinly disguised carnivorous reptiles? Earth: Final Conflict was just as bad. Then there was Gerry Anderson’s UFO with its costumes designed to attract the adolescent male but with some good storylines and character development. We never did resolve what the alien’s intent was by the way and I have the full DVD set. Gerry Anderson of course also created Thunderbirds, Captain Starlet, Fireball XL5 and of course Space 1999, a title which goes up there with Orwell’s 1984.

Space Opera lends itself to satire. One of the best examples is Galaxy Quest, which also attracted some major stars. It is a parody, but it can also be seen as a homage to the optimism of the Star Trek series. It is also one of the funniest films of all time that survives repeated viewing. This is a rich field, we also have Mel Brook’s Spaceballs, not his best movie by a long way but still fun and then two long-running series Red Dwarf (which went on too long) and Futurama. Then of course there is A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which is simply in a class on its own. I would include Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan here as a satire. One of my all-time favourites, and I still reread them from time to time, is Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat with the villain we all love. If you can get a copy Bored of the Rings displays its origins in the Harvard Lampoon from the get-go and is a lot of fun.

There is some good stuff. The Foundation series is much beloved by Complexity Specialists for three components – one is psychohistory whose tendrils you can see in some aspects of Cybernetics, but also for the Mule (randomness) and the need for a Second Foundation in consequence. I Robot, also by Asimov explores a key aspect of complexity namely working through the implications of simple rules. In that respect, the science fiction writers always assumed there would be some inhibition of artificial intelligence, something that Silicon Valley seems to be ignoring. There are three things to remember about Asimov: firstly he has brilliant ideas, secondly, he doesn’t write well, and thirdly with one exception (I will come to that tomorrow when I look at the BBC’s contributions) and film adaptation is truly terrible including the current Apple TV+ abuse of Foundation.

Continuing to be positive, Alastair Reynold’s Revelation series is one I am starting to catch up on and of course, we have classics such as Dan Simmon’s Hyperion Cantos which blends time travel and fantasy. Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet Series is undemanding but interesting, a sort of Horatio Hornblower of outer space. When you get to Peter F Hamilton I am less sure as there seems to be a sadistic element in those books which is not necessary for the story itself. Stephen Donaldson’s Gap Series in contrast is never gratutious, although it is brutal at times. It is a retelling of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in outer space (so it is space opera on speed) and you need to know the Ring to understand the series and understand why some of the brutal aspects are not gratuitous. Donaldson is not only a great writer, but he also has imagination and an ability to tie together complex narrative threads over extended series: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a good example and I will return to that in the penultimate post in this series. Such writers can be read many times rather than just once.

One interesting feature of Donaldson is that his work has a moral bleakness, his father was a medical missionary and his encounter with leprosy is at the heart of Thomas Covenant, also known as the Unbeliever. The Foundation is also morally ambiguous; there is sympathy for the Mule for example. Indeed it is a characteristic of such works that they do not have simplistic light and dark dichotomies of Space Opera in general. But the idea that there are a bunch of superheroes out there who will save us from folly is a tempting one. Interestingly when we run our Future Backwards exercise on climate change the most frequent miracle is the idea that aliens may land and give us new technology. In the main Space Opera is escapist literature that plays to the simplistic over the complex. It is as a whole, a good-bad movie, no more, no less.

The opening Star Wars picture is by William Warby and the banner picture is cropped from an original by Cade Roberts both obtained from Unsplash