‘Boldly Going’ – Episode 2: Space Opera

When you think of science fiction, what’s your starting point?

Your very foundation of what you consider to be archetypal sci-fi?

What do all these sci-fi universes have in common? They have sweeping storylines, gut-wrenching conflicts with everything on the line, centering relationships and possibly even romance. The futuristic element is the setting, but the science is not the story.

Scientific principles very well could factor into how the stories play out, but just as often as not, there is no attempt at science whatsoever (or else please explain to me how a light saber doesn’t just extend forever into space?)

But by being set in space, or on a different planet, or in a different time, they are considered science fiction.

Ladies and gentlemen:

Welcome to the Space Opera!

Wikipedia defines a space opera as, “a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, with use of melodramatic, risk-taking space adventures, relationships and chivalric romance.”

Generally speaking, a grand scope and a setting outside of planet Earth are they key factors in determining what makes a piece of work a “space opera.”

In literature, I would consider Dune series the exemplar. Dune centers on alien planets and cultures, warfare between family factions, with politics and romance in the mix between battles and betrayals.

Or, if you’re looking for a more recent reference point? Perhaps consider the Ender’s Game series by Orson Scott Card.

However, rather than dwell on these classics, I’d like to highlight a few somewhat recent book series that took space opera in new and exciting directions.

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The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks

There are nine books in the Culture series, published between 1987 and 2012.

The Culture books are related only in that they are set in the same universe: a post-scarcity society consisting of many different alien races and artificial intelligences living is some sort of harmony. Humans are a small part of the Culture, no more or less important than any other alien species or artificial intelligence. Everybody has everything they could need – food, shelter, more or less limitless entertainment, even the possibility to live indefinitely.

Still, there are enough people motivated by curiosity, desire for power or influence or just boredom to keep every job filled and the multi-cultural civilization growing and thriving. Almost no character appears in more than one book, and the very few characters that may make multiple appearances are ships.

Yes, you read that right – the ships are characters in the books – arguably more important than the human ones. They have vast intelligence, the ability to manifest in physical forms and exist on a human scale, and very specific and peculiar personalities borne from being long-lived and hyper-intelligent beings. Many ships are many miles long and wide – the size of medium to large cities, housing millions of Culture citizens. There are well over 100 named ships (they name themselves) throughout the series, and they have the best names. A few examples:

• Prosthetic Conscience
• So Much for Subtlety
• The Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival
• Grey Area (aka Meatf*cker) – one of the few that appears in multiple books
• Someone Else’s Problem
• Ravished by the Sheer Implausibility of That Last Statement
• Awkward Customer
• Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall
• Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill
• Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints
• Teething Problems
• Refreshingly Unconcerned with the Vulgar Exigencies of Veracity

The conflicts arise when the rules of Culture are interpreted differently, when another civilization or situation is encountered. For example, in Surface Detail, two stories exist side-by-side (and with different perspectives and contexts), and they eventually come together. A slave women is rescued from death by a passing Culture ship and is on a quest for vengeance against her former owner (quite in violation of the Culture’s rules). At the same time, two investigators enter an actual Hell created by their civilization – a virtual afterlife where people can be tortured in perpetuity after they die as punishment for their life choices.

A small story in a town on a faraway planet or interstellar multi-party warfare, major plot movement in virtual realities or encounters with artifacts from long gone alien civilizations.

You don’t have to worry about resources – everything you could want or need is at your fingertips – but there are still plenty of ethical dilemmas, different cultural practices and perspectives to accommodate (or not), and plenty of selfish or ill-intended people to contend with. With the Culture books, you’re going to get a good story with great characters, and in a universe that you would love to see become reality. It’s so far-futuristic that the science might as well be magic – but Iain Banks never breaks his own rules, so it’s self-contained and coherent.

The latter focuses on how the Culture addresses an “Outside Context Problem,” the type of thing that “most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.” If you’re interested in seeing if the Culture books are a good fit for you, maybe consider starting with Player of Games or Use of Weapons. Just be warned, you may feel a sense of grief when you complete them all and remember that Iain Banks is no longer with us to write more.

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The Noumenon series, by Marina J. Lostetter

Marina J. Lostetter doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.

I’d say she writes sci-fi for sci-fi fans. She’s not making any concessions to bring in a casual passerby, but she’s giving fans what we want – new ideas, a broad scope and a compelling story.

Her recent Noumenon series, consisting of Noumenon (2017), Noumenon Infinity (2018) and Noumemon Ultra (2020), is highly recommended for folks like me who devour science fiction with glee.

The Noumenon series begins much like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy – humanity is gathering a group of people to undertake a great space mission. In this case, the team is going to investigate a star exhibiting unusual anomalies, to explore the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligence may explain what we can observe here on Earth. The catch is that this mission will take many hundreds of years, and everyone on the mission will be cloned indefinitely to keep the mission alive.

Each chapter is a self-contained vignette exploring the challenges of a generation on the nine ships traveling together on the mission. As they leave Earth, lose contact with their home planet, eventually arrive at their destination, conduct the studies they need to undertake, then eventually return home, thousands of Earth years later. This structure allows each vignette to tell a very human story, while the whole carries forward the excitement of discovery and growth.

And that’s just the first novel. The latter novels follow a similar structure (intimate vignettes that contribute to the larger whole), but the story grows in scale and scope, bursting far beyond what you may think is possible. A sort of Dyson sphere figures heavily into the story, and one of the challenges in the book is to figure out what its purpose is. Civilizational achievements require generations of commitment, and that doesn’t come easily, especially when faced with frustration and dead ends. But the payoff is SOOO worth it! But when you keep thinking, Wow! I didn’t see that coming, the stakes keep getting higher. And Lostetter is able to pull it off with aplomb.

If you want to keep reading about the same characters, it can be a frustrating experience (granted they are clones, so the characters aren’t TOTALLY different.)

But if you can get past that, it can be a rewarding experience. It’s probably borderline to characterize the Noumenon series as space opera. It does have a vast scale and heroic achievements, but the conflict is largely not battle-oriented. Rather the friction is in the struggles and triumphs of discovery and science, and the efforts to keep flawed humans from pulling a great mission off the rails.

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The Final Architecture Series by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a prolific and very talented writer of (mostly) science fiction.

The Final Architecture series – Shards of Earth (2021), Eyes of the Void (2022) and Lords of Uncreation (2023) – envisions a future in which the Earth has long been destroyed and humanity has escaped to other worlds, existing in cooperation and conflict with other alien civilizations.

In the recent past, many human-populated worlds were destroyed by planet-sized entities known as Architects. Humanity put forth a civilizational war against the Architects, including creating a race of female warrior clones (the Parthenon) and developing a few modified humans known as Intermediaries who have the capacity to enter unspace and battle / connect to the Architects on a different dimensional plane.

Now, sixty years after mankind successfully drove off the Architects thanks largely to an Intermediary named Idris, trouble is brewing. The main human government / military structure (Hugh) is increasingly suspicious of the clones of the Parthenon. In the meantime, other factions of aliens and organized crime have their own plans…

In this context a ragtag group of spacers in their salvage ship the Vulture God (practically a character itself, much like Star Wars’ beloved Millennium Falcon) are sent to deep space to bring back a ship that seems to have been attacked by the Architects. The crew is frankly better fleshed out and more memorable than the Star Wars crew.

• Rollo Rostand, Captain
• Idris Telemmier, Intermediary navigator who ended the last war with the Architects
• Keristina “Kris” Almier, Lawyer and knife-fighter
• Olian “Olli” Timo, disabled badass drone specialist
• Kittering “Kit”, Hannilambra (alien species) business and trade specialist
• Medvig, Hiver (AI-based independent species) search and catalogue specialist
• Myrmidon Executor Solace – Partheni soldier

These folks can barely get along on a personal level, but they are fiercely protective of each other under the traditions of “spacers” (people who live primarily aboard spacecraft, rather than on a planet). They are at the mercy of much larger forces than them – alien crime syndicates, clone warrior princesses, Hugh bureaucrats, the Essiel (an alien species orders of magnitude more powerful than humans, which look like large mussels), and of course the return of the Architects. Many battles break out, crew are killed or taken prisoner, and the human effort to once again fight for our lives against the Architects is hampered by infighting and selfish impulses.

The crew of the Vulture God are a found family in a harsh galaxy, and they – like many others in the book – are refugees in many ways, just wanting to be able to make a living in peace and in spite of governments or criminal syndicates or alien cults. So as they move through every stage of the adventure, their love for and loyalty to each other motivates them to keep pushing on, to keep taking huge risks against much more powerful foes.

And an adventure it is. The story built across these three books has love, warfare, interdimensional exploration, intrigue, changing or divided loyalties – it’s got it all. The scientific principles are loosely based on our modern understanding of physics, enough at least to pass as science fiction and not space fantasy.

If you aren’t totally rooting for these characters by the end of the first book, I wonder what else it would take. Tchaikovsky keeps many threads of plot and history in motion, never getting convoluted or losing the story. And he does it while still building the story around believable characters. The Final Architecture trilogy has every element of good space opera, proving the subgenre is still alive and relevant in the 2020’s.

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The nice thing about space opera is that it isn’t hard to love, even if you aren’t a sci-fi fan by nature.

Plot, story and character all come first. The science / future / space element is more backdrop than foreground.

Space operas also remind us that science fiction is still just fiction. Which means it’s telling a story about what it means to be human, even if no humans appear in the story. Most sci-fi, especially in the space opera subgenre, isn’t hard to enjoy even if you don’t know a whit about the science. Space opera can be swashbuckling; it can be grand and epic; it can be romantic or dark or ambivalent.

But it’s greatest strength is in being a compelling narrative.

Have any space operas captivated you? What did you enjoy and what was the part that pulled you in most?

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