What is Space Opera?
A. In short, Space Opera is Action/High Adventure story telling amid the grand and colorful backdrop of future fantasy spanning the stars. After all, was it not the creator of James Bond – Agent 007, the author Ian Fleming himself, who maintained that there was never a good yarn that couldn’t be improved by an exotic locale or setting? And what could be more vividly exotic than fantastic far away planets in the world of the distant future? The challenge beyond the superficiality to which world-building is often reduced in typical Space Opera, is for Science Fiction to offer anything more than just colorful variety in setting or background, as basic and crucial as all that may be to any ripping yarn, although setting is often an important plot point, variously also establishing the tone or even making metaphor, allegory and imagery extending beyond the setting alone, the Mise en Scne, visually conveying subtext, theme, essential understanding or recurring concept, as often conveyed via
Here’s a thought: there’s no such thing as the new space opera. — Jonathan Strahan Of all sf’s subgenres, “space opera” seems to attract the most definitional fervour. Everyone seems to have an intuitive sense of what the term means, and no two people seem to have the same intuitive sense — as demonstrated in the comment thread on Jonathan’s post, where Ellen Datlow says I find the current use of the term “space opera” exceedingly annoying and confusing. To me “space opera” was and always will be simple adventures in space. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, of course, have argued, in an essay and in their recent mammoth anthology, that most of the confusion comes from the fact that the meaning of the term has shifted. Space opera used to be a pejorative locution designating not a subgenre or mode at all, but the worst form of formulaic hackwork: really bad SF. […] Many readers and writers and nearly all media fans who entered sf after 1975 have never understood the origin of space o
