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Space Opera

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Le Wrath di Khan

"It'll be fabulous, believe me, Jerry. It's Grapes of Wrath in outer space! Oh, it's got heart, it's got laser battles, it's got a timely message of interstellar poverty—!"
— Lorne, Angel ("Life of the Party")
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Space Opera refers to works set in a spacefaring civilization, usually, though not always, set in the future, specifically the far future. Technology is ubiquitous and secondary to the story. Space opera has an epic character to it: the universe is big, there are usually many sprawling civilizations and empires, there are political conflicts and intrigue. The action will range part of a solar system, at least, and possibly a whole galaxy or more than one. It frequently takes place in a Standard Sci Fi Setting. It has a romantic element which distinguishes it from most Hard Science Fiction: big love stories, epic space battles, oversized heroes and villains, awe-inspiring scenery, and insanely gorgeous men and women.

Historically, it is a development of the Planetary Romance that looks beyond the exotic locations that were imagined for the local solar system in early science fiction (which the hard light of science revealed to be barren and lifeless) out into an infinite universe of imagined exotic locations. Planetary Romance was more or less Heroic Fantasy In Space. While works such as John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs were pure Planetary Romance, Buck Rogers and its imitators had essentially codified the Space Opera concept in the popular imagination by the late 1930s, though the earliest strips took place on an After the End future Earth. (Flash Gordon, at least in the classic Alex Raymond era remained resolutely Planetary Romance, tied to the planet Mongo.)

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Expect to see a dashing hero cavorting around in a Cool Starship, Green Skinned Space Babes, Crystal Spires and Togas civilizations full of Space Elves, Wave Motion Guns capable of dealing an Earth-Shattering Kaboom on a daily basis, and an evil Galactic Empire with a Standard Sci-Fi Fleet, including an entire universe full of beat-up mechanical objects capable of being resurrected with Percussive Maintenance.

Note that this is quite different from the original definition of space opera, which was originally a derogatory term, following "horse opera" (cheap westerns) and "Soap Opera" (so named because soap operas began as hour-long ads for soap), which requires no explanation. The phrase was coined in 1941 by Wilson Tucker to describe what he called "the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn". (It's said that before 1975 or so, the only author who ever intentionally set out to write a space opera was Jack Vance, who wrote a novel, Space Opera, literally about an opera company in space.)

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Via semantic drift, well-regarded works such as the Lensman series are today held up as prime examples of Space Opera. As more authors and writers came to embrace the style, the term came to lose many of its negative connotations. Assisting that process were writers who regarded all tales of action and adventure in space as bad, and so tried to pejoratively label it all "space opera"; they succeeded with the label, but not with keeping it pejorative.

The ideal space opera, as described by Brian Aldiss, contains most if not all of the following criteria:

  1. The world must be in peril.
  2. There must be a quest,
  3. And a man or woman to meet the mighty hour.
  4. That man or woman must confront aliens and exotic creatures.
  5. Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher.
  6. Blood must rain down the palace steps,
  7. And ships launch out into the louring dark.
  8. There must be a woman or man fairer than the skies,
  9. And a villain darker than a Black Hole.
  10. And all must come right in the end.

Star Wars is inarguably the most famous modern example of space opera. (Indeed, The Empire Strikes Back may have shifted "space opera" from insult to a more neutral genre descriptor, due to the involvement of veteran sf writer Leigh Brackett.) In Star Wars, technology is either magic (the Force) or jazzier versions of today's gadgets (blaster rifles, hovercars, space ships). Any Star Wars character (evil emperor, farmboy, princess) would feel at home in a thick fantasy novel, in part because editor-publisher Lester del Rey derived the "epic fantasy" template partly from Star Wars and partly from The Lord of the Rings, though also because these works borrow from the same source of Jungian imagery.

The genre is useful for long story and character arcs but also expensive to film, unless rendered in animated form, like countless anime series.

While Hard Science Fiction defines itself in part in opposition to space opera (and vice versa), in recent years, however, there has been a trend towards incorporating hard science fiction elements into space opera, as in Starship Operators, the 2000s Battlestar Galactica, Firefly and especially Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space. In fact, "New Space Opera" has gained some currency as a term referring to works that combine fast-paced adventure plots with some degree of hard SF rigor.

See also Space Western, Two-Fisted Tales, Pulp Magazine, and Wagon Train to the Stars. In many ways, this is the science fiction equivalent of High Fantasy.

Note that while many more famous space operas go to the "ideal" side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism, more recent ones are harder and more cynical: Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica and Firefly being most prominent in Live-Action TV.

Sadly, there aren't too many actual Operas set IN SPACE!.

Examples

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  • Andromeda: Originally created by Gene Roddenberry, pitched by Majel Roddenberry, and steered by Robert Hewitt Wolfe (of Deep Space Nine). It was a Vancouver production and it shows. You'll see the ensemble recycled in other Canadian productions from that era: SG-1, Lexx, etc. These days, it is best remembered for Lexa Doig in tight outfits. Can't blame Michael Shanks for knocking her up, though it did remove her from the show for a while.
    • In Season Three the network pushed for a more episodic show with more focus on Kevin Sorbo's character. The last year (Hercules: The Legendary Space Journeys) was panned by fans.
  • Babylon 5: A sort of "five-year miniseries" which rewards multiple viewings. If their direct competitor borrowed from old westerns and war movies, B5 was a space-based Middle Earth, but with enough verisimilitude to take those tropes and make it into something you can believe in. (The "techno-mages", a monk-like order of reclusive scientists, are one such example of this dual nature.) It helps that Andreas Katulas (G'Kar) has such a commanding air that pretty much everybody raises their game in his presence.
    • The aftershow, Crusade, suffered from network meddling and budget restrictions, among other things. The second spinoff, Legend of the Rangers (LOTR, get it?) probably isn't worth your time unless you're a fan: 15 minutes of G'kar (one of Andreas Katulas' final performances before he died!) and 1 hour and 45 minutes of not much happening.
  • Battlestar Galactica (1978) and Battlestar Galactica (2003) are at opposite ends of the Idealist-Cynic scale. Both had their share of movies and spin-offs.
    • Galactica 1980 was more Family Friendly.
    • Ron D. Moore's ambitious spin-off series, Caprica, had positive critical reviews. During the first season, Moore stuck to his guns about keeping it a family drama, but the last few episodes were so packed with story because the showrunners knew they weren't going to get a second season, and didn't want to leave their open storylines dangling in the wind. Caprica and Blood and Chrome (set during the First Cylon War) never really clicked, because it seemed like they were going down the road of "You served with my father in the Clone Wars?" Caprica simply raised more questions than it answered and complicated the overall story. Still, it's a shame that the lesson they took away from Caprica was that space battles and military bravado was what made BSG popular and gave us Blood and Chrome, which no one liked.
  • Although Doctor Who is not Space Opera in itself, some individual stories make use of the subgenere.
  • Earth: Final Conflict: Another posthumous series from Gene Roddenberry. The pilot takes place only 3 years after First Contact. What the series captured perfectly, but ignored in later seasons, was that humans had only recently come to terms with an alien race as part of their world.
    • The lead actor was run off the show because the studio felt that it needed to be more episodic. And then they did it again in season five; not a good sign when you have to continually cycle cast members to save money. The tone of the show changed from a sci-fi detective story ("Who are the Taelons and what do they want in exchange for improving Earth") to a Monster of the Week show with very few sci-fi concepts beyond those already established. Sandoval, played by the capable Von Flores, turned out to be the saving grace of the series at that moment, something even the execs could not topple.
  • Farscape: What's most interesting is that the Aussie TV market was not a market where science fiction had been successful. Like Lexx, you had a large pool of talent wanting to show the world what they could do. They used animatronics because the Jim Henson company wanted to prove they could do film-quality puppets and makeup on a TV schedule. As for the show, it starts off relatively tame, but then it stops pulling punches and shows how savage the universe can be. The aliens are mostly well-done, and the show has a very grim atmosphere to it. (And where else are you going to see a naked blue anthropomorphic plant?)
  • Firefly, which has the unusual distinction of being both a Space Opera and a Horse Opera. However, Firefly is only a borderline Space Opera, as it has no aliens and according to Word of God is set in a universe with no faster-than-light travel (although this is difficult to reconcile with some of the on-screen events).
  • Power Rangers
    • Power Rangers in Space had begun to to drift this way before the season ended. The Rangers spent more and more time in space fighting evil or trying to rescue Zordon, and the villains were slightly more fleshed out than usual, with the apparent main villain being the franchise's first case of Luke, I Am Your Father.
    • Power Rangers Lost Galaxy followed suit, depicting a human colony ship's season-long journey to a new world. Along the way the Rangers deal with Space Pirates, a ruthless Anti-Hero with a tragic past who ends up sacrificing himself, and the (temporary) death of one of their own.
  • Lexx: One of the crewmembers is an escaped sex slave. The ship is a literal dildo. Don't say we didn't warn you.
  • Space Cases
  • The Stargate-verse is a borderline example. Technically the center-of-operations is on a single planet (Earth in Stargate SG-1, the Atlantis base in Stargate Atlantis), but with the instant wormholes provided by the Stargate, the bases function like a spaceship or space station in a standard Space Opera, as far as most story purposes go. Both series also have the Big Universe, Big Empires, Big Heroes, and Big Villains elements in spades, and it gets bigger yet once Earth has a space fleet. However, many individual episodes, especially in early seasons, feel more like Planetary Romance. Stargate Universe, the second spin-off, is probably closer to a traditional Space Opera.
  • Star Trek, perhaps the most famous example in television, with its grand tales of interstellar exploration, romance, intrigue, and war. Though there is (some) serious consideration of how technology and science would change society (not surprising, given that creator Gene Roddenberry originally envisioned using the setting to address social issues that could not have been dealt with in a normal drama back in the 60s). Coincidentally, there was in fact a Star Trek Opera performed on stage in New York.
  • Uchu Sentai Kyuranger. Super Sentai often has heroes or villains from outer space but in general, it doesn't fit this trope thanks to being set mostly on Earth. Kyuranger, however, fits neatly into Space Opera. It's set in a future where the villain pretty much rules the entire galaxy. The heroes and heroines comprised of Human Aliens, a wolf-man alien, and robots. It's actually set in space as the protagonists travels the galaxy using their Cool Starship, which also functions as their headquarters, to defeat their enemies.

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  • The long-running The Stars My Degradation, (a parody of the Alfred Bester classic SF novel The Stars My Destination), a cartoon strip that ran in the Sounds music paper in the 1970's-80's:
    Dempster Dingbuster is my name, Sputwang is my nation;
    The depths of space gob in my face,
    The stars, my degradation.
    • It was drawn and written by a then-nearly-unknown Alan Moore. Examples may be seen here

    Tabletop Games 
  • BattleTech: the backstory and novels put the Soap back in Space Opera.
  • The Cathedral setting in Big Eyes, Small Mouth is intended for this kind of adventure.
  • Fading Suns
  • The forgotten board game Imperium was used as a source for some of the Traveller universe. In it, a young and expansionist republic on earth, conquers a Vestigial Empire in space. There are a number of other Space Opera board wargames, but this one is notable for historical reasons.
  • Rifts has the Three Galaxies setting, a Space Opera with the same blend of magic, technology, and plain weirdness as the main setting. As may be expected, it's way way down on the hardness scale, but it has pretty much all the elements of the Standard Sci Fi Setting.
  • Rocket Age only covers our solar system but the epic themes and intrigues of space opera are definitely there. Just replace The Empire with actual Nazis.
  • There was a RPG named Space Opera.
  • Pacesetter's 1980s Star Ace RPG, in the spirit of ''Star Wars', but set in an original universe with fewer mystical undertones.
  • The Star Drive setting originally made for the Alternity system and later reused for d20 Modern.
  • Paizo's second game, Starfinder is set in the same universe as Pathfinder but advanced thousands of years into the future, with technology and magic being equally ubiquitous among the solar system.
  • Star Frontiers was TSR's attempt to do D&D in a space opera setting.
  • Traveller was the first RPG set in the Space Opera genre, and set the standard for those that followed. It's in the harder end of Space Opera and a lot of work went into the Backstory including fairly realistic science and social science. Traveller is flexible enough that a wide variety of flavors of Space Opera can be played, since the setting is one designed for the telling of stories.
  • Twilight Imperium may as well be the Trope Codifier for space opera board-games. Spice-dealing, trader lions, peaceful turtle-people who smoke weed, living flames put into mechanical bodies, snake-women who have psychic powers; the Twilight Imperium's got it all.
  • Warhammer 40,000 is overloaded Up to Eleven with adventure, battles, intrigue, and fantasy (including Space Elves, Orks, and even Gods), all in a setting where mankind possesses a galaxy-spanning empire with planet-spanning cities and a population in the trillions. However it's also overloaded with about as much cynicism, grimness, and darkness as you can get (hence the common description "grimdark", for which its tagline is the Trope Namer).

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