When Leigh Brackett returned to science fiction in the mid-1970s her final works were space operas starring her archetypal hero Eric John Stark, an avatar of Tarzan raised by beasts but operating as an interplanetary special agent. The style of her Skaith narratives is often polished, involving and efficient even as it marshals many of the genre clichés. It is significant that Brackett’s last work, the draft of a screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, completed just months before Brackett’s death, links her to the most significant work of space opera in the history of science fiction, the Star Wars epic.
Lucas and Spielberg, and the group of San Francisco-based filmmakers who were then invading Hollywood, were nostalgic for “the good old stuff” which had delighted them as boys. They were to express this appreciation, not in cynical parodies, but in updated tributes to the genres of pulp fiction and pulp fiction movies. Instead of running away from obvious genre markers, they ran towards them.
George Lucas was able to take the iconic qualities of genre and put them against photorealistic special effects of space travel, aliens, and distant planets, allowing the audience to navigate unexpected territories of new worlds through the familiar map of the expectations associated with space opera. The audience could become readily present in the story by wrapping around the familiar framework of genre and the points of view of stereotypical characters and, while inhabiting those characters, look out within the frame of the movie onto the exotic landscape of space and other planets which was photo-realistically presented. The cinematic effect was pretty much the same strategy as the wide-screen western.
A similar effect is on display in the planetary romance, Avatar, in which the immersion into the rich and deep 3D landscape is made navigable by the familiar way the story is shaped around stereotypical characters and the foreseeable events of its western-derived high concept (Dances with Wolves in outer space).
Star Wars completed the translation of space opera from opprobrium to accolade. It could be argued that space opera never stopped being the popular idea of what constituted science fiction, despite the efforts of those who wanted the genre to be associated with a better class of literary legacies. Star Wars cemented the conventions of space opera as the most recognizable form of science fiction storytelling. More than that, in part through its self-conscious effort to embody the elements of mythic narrative, Star Wars became the central epic in the popular culture of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Other epics were to follow—The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter—multi-parted, re-imagining the structures of mythology and concerned with the broad promotion and dissemination of positive values, especially to young people. In these stories good is distinguished from evil and it is amply demonstrated why you should prefer one over the other. It is the sort of well-defined, if simplistic distinction that has always been a part of space opera.
After Star Wars and through the 1980s and the 1990s there were any number of multi-volume trans-galactic and trans-dimensional space stories. Many of them are parts of world-building universes, authorial or even corporate projects that transcend epic and enter the realm of creation myth as writers focus on the development and extrapolation of alternate worlds. Projects like the extensive and ongoing articulation of the Star Wars universe are examples of this. Using a development strategy pioneered by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the various articulations of the story from X-Wings to Ewoks are spread across and through media, working through professional fiction, comics, films, animation, fan fiction, electronic games, 3D and eventually, perhaps, into MyMax and other virtual reality technologies. Eventually some of these worlds become so vast it is impossible for any single individual to experience every aspect of the world, much less to completely comprehend it.
Some of the authorial projects, such as the Miles Vorkosigan universe of Lois McMaster Bujold, have been occasions to reconnect with the tradition of the romance. Her work brings to fruition the promise of large scale storytelling that emphasizes action and characters larger than life. These are the hallmarks of the romance and central constituents of classic space opera. In volume after volume, Bujold weaves her tales of a family, constructed across cultures but united by shared values and attitudes. She focuses on the formation of the hero and his education, emphasizing the importance of remaining flexible and nimble in response to change and the rapid flow of events. In works like Falling Free, a prequel to the Vorkosigan Saga, we can see at the base of her universe the same scientific/engineering “can do” approach to problems that is on display in The Skylark of Space. In the stories surrounding the Vorkosigan family we are submerged in the high stakes gamesmanship and complex negotiations that comprise a life near the center of power. Miles, a future Theseus, must learn how to emerge through the labyrinth of imperial politics.
What changed in the formation of new space opera from classic space opera is the prose style and the assumptions. Bujold replaces archness and overstatement with control and understatement. She and other writers creating space opera since the 1980s have learned from the leaner and more efficient styles of realistic literary fiction. At the same time, what has been removed from the more literary style is the self-consciousness of modernism. The prose is not about itself becoming prose; it is about delivering the story and creating an atmosphere of high adventure without a tone that calls attention to itself.
The colonialist, sexist, and racist assumptions that underlay much of classic space opera are not as much subverted or attacked as simply missing. The dynamic struggle around values is not such a battle between good and evil as a struggle between those who try to use power responsibly and with sensitivity and those who use it narcissistically, sadistically, or bureaucratically, without respect for ecology and the value of life.
There are still spaceships.
In the big picture of science fiction, space opera and realistic modernism have been posted at opposite poles. Since the mid-1990s there has been a concerted effort to organize a tradition of “new space opera” as a sort of counter modernism that would redirect the energy of science fiction writers away from experiment and the seeking after literary legitimacy, toward a purity of genre storytelling. Anthologies have been made and an extensive effort put forward to show a long lineage for new space opera. But many of the same writers are listed in the family trees of both modes, space opera and literary science fiction.
Writers whose voices emerged in the 90s and more recently seem to thrive at being in both places at once. They proceed from an assumption of literary legitimacy for space opera itself. Some writers of high adventure science fiction like Alastair Reynolds or Catherine Asaro who are scientists, like to interpenetrate genre codes with literary technique and hard science. Asaro likes to merge the scientific romance with the conventions of romance novels generally. Reynolds blends the nineteenth-century sea story with literary devices in the way that Joseph Conrad does, texturing tales of psychological depth and realized adventure. A writer like Iain Banks plays on both sides of the street, writing both genre-driven science fiction and mainstream literary novels. It is hard to determine if the effort to define a “New Space Opera” is just an attempt at creating viable market segmentation or a reorganization of science fiction in a way that would re-privilege genre, or both.
The history of space opera as a term demonstrates the mutability of genre definitions. They are imprecise, overlay one another, and sometimes completely reverse in value and meaning. They can be amorphous and ambiguous like the genres they try to contain. As we sub-divide science fiction in reasonable ways so that, as Neil Gaiman says, we can better know what not to read, we are creating the system through which we will represent, understand, and track its various traditions. Terms like “space opera” are no longer territories but are being embedded in the large online libraries and bookstores in the form of searchable categories and metatags, a system that allows us to enumerate all the aspects of a group and, through the optics of discourse, assemble a simultaneous composite and discomposite view of a specific genre.
To make use of this system we need to abandon binary habits of reference, in which an object is either here or there, now or never, and talk more in the mode of quantum computing, in which we can locate a specific event in a specific place, in many places at once, and, equally and fantastically, not anywhere at all.
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Works Cited
Gaiman, Neil. The Julius Swartz Lecture. M.I.T. May, 23, 2008. DVD. MIT Comparative Media Studies.
Hartwell, David G. and Kathryn Cramer. The Space Opera Renaissance. A Tom Doherty Associates Book. New York: Orb, 2006.
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David Steiling is Coordinator of the Literature Program at the Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida. He teaches speculative fiction, the literature of comics, and media studies. He received his B.A. from Carleton College, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University and a Ph.D. from the University of South Florida. Before entering academic life he was a poet and a new vaudevillian. Recently he has been instrumental in Cosmix, an ongoing initiative investigating and experimenting with art and design for immersive media. Currently he makes work for full-dome (planetarium) projection and plays space music.
DONALD A. WANDREI
(1908–1957)
Although his brooding, poetic style was a perfect fit for the pulp magazines and his stories were popular, Donald Wandrei considered himself primarily a literary novelist, poet, and playwright. Eventually he stopped writing short fiction entirely to focus on his more highbrow literary output, little of which was ever published. Despite his discomfort with writing for the pulps, he was a huge admirer of Lovecraft and member of the Lovecraft circle: As a teenager he hitchhiked from Minnesota to Rhode Island to meet with Lovecraft, and Wandrei was instrumental in founding Arkham House, the publisher devoted to preserving Lovecraft’s works.
Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota to the children of early Minnesota settlers, Wandrei was an avid reader who took library jobs to gain access to more books. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1928, Wandrei moved to New York (although he still spent much of his time in Minnesota) and worked as an advertising assistant at publisher E.P. Dutton and Co. while writing in his free time. He sold many stories to magazines (especially F. Orlin Tremaine’s Astounding, which was within walking distance of where he worked in the early 1930s), but never any of the novels or plays that were his real passion. He did publish two volumes of poetry, Ecstasy and Other Poems (1928) and Dark Odyssey (1931), while concocting a scheme to buy up and destroy unsold copies so the remaining copies would become valuable rarities; not surprisingly, nothing came of it.
In 1939, Wandrei co-founded Arkham House with August Derleth, and went to work editing a collection of Lovecraft’s letters. Arkham House did eventually publish one of Wandrei’s novels. He quit writing for the pulps entirely after returning from his military service in World War II, focusing on his never-published novels and plays. He didn’t abandon the popular market entirely, though, writing story plots for the Gangbusters crime comic.
A move to Hollywood to write screenplays and song lyrics seemed to change Wandrei’s life for the better, but illnesses in his family drew him back to Minnesota in 1952; he spent much of the next twenty years focused on caring for his ill mother and siblings. After their deaths, he was consumed by a lawsuit against the new owners of Arkham House, which began in 1971 and lasted until Wandrei’s death in 1987.
“The Red Brain,” the story which originally established Wandrei’s reputation as a poetic pulp writer, was written when he was only sixteen. Although not as well-known as “Colossus” (1933), it remains one of his most readable stories.
THE RED BRAIN, by Donald A. Wandrei
First published in Weird Tales, October 1927
One by one the pale stars in the sky overhead had twinkled fainter and gone out. One by one those lights flaming whitely with their clear, cold flame had dimmed and darkened. One by one they had vanished forever, and in their places had come patches of ink that blotted out immense areas of a sky once luminous with hordes of brightly shining stars
Years had passed; centuries had fled backward; the accumulating thousands had turned into millions, and they, too, had faded into the oblivion of eternity. The Earth had disappeared. The sun had cooled and hardened, and had dissolved into the dust of its grave. The solar system and innumerable other systems had broken up and vanished, and their fragments had swelled the clouds of dust which were engulfing the entire universe. In the billions of years which had passed, sweeping everything on toward the gathering doom, the huge bodies, once countless, that had dotted the sky and hurtled through unmeasurable immensities of space had lessened in number and disintegrated until the black pall of the sky was broken only at rare intervals by dim spots of light—light ever growing paler and darker.
No one knew when the dust had begun to gather, but far back in the forgotten dawn of time the dead worlds, in their ceaseless wanderings, had become smaller and had slowly broken up. What happened to them, no one knew or cared, for there was then none to know or care. The worlds had vanished, unremembered and unmourned.
Those were the nuclei of the dust Those were the progenitors of the universal dissolution which now approached its completion Those were the stars which had first burned out, died, and wasted away in myriads of atoms. Those were the mushroom growths which had first passed into nothingness in a puff of dust.
Slowly the faint wisps had gathered into clouds, the clouds into seas, and the seas into monstrous oceans of gently heaving dust, dust that drifted from dead and dying worlds, from interstellar collisions of plunging stars, from rushing meteors and streaming comets which madly flamed from the void and hurtled into the abyss.
The dust had spread and spread. The dim luminosity of the heavens had become fainter as great blots of black appeared far in the outer depths of space. In all the millions and billions and trillions of years that had fled into the past, the cosmic dust had been gathering, and the starry horde had been dwindling. There was a time when the universe consisted of hundreds of millions of stars, planets, and suns; but they were ephemeral as life or dreams, and like life or dreams they faded and vanished, one by one.
The smaller worlds were obliterated first, then the larger, and so in ever-ascending steps to the unchecked giants which roared their fury and blazed their whiteness through the conquering dust and the realms of night. Never did the Cosmic Dust cease its hellish and relentless war on the universe; it choked the little aerolites; it swallowed the helpless satellites; it swirled around the leaping comets that rocketed from one black end of the universe to the other, flaming their trailing splendor, tearing paths of wild adventure through horizonless infinitudes the dust already ruled; it clawed at the planets and sucked their very being; it washed, hateful and brooding, about the monarchs and plucked at their lands and deserts.
Thicker, thicker, always thicker grew the Cosmic Dust, until the giants no longer could watch each other’s gyres far across the void. Instead, they thundered through the waste, lonely, despairing, and lost. In solitary grandeur they burned their brilliant beauty. In solitary majesty they waited for their doom. In solitary defeat, kings to the last, they succumbed to the dust. And in solitary death they disappeared.
Of all the stars in all the countless host that once had spotted the heavens, there remained only Antares. Antares, immensest of the stars, alone was left, the last body in the universe, inhabited by the last race ever to have consciousness, ever to live. That race, in hopeless compassion, had watched the darkening skies and had counted with miserly care the stars which resisted. Every one that twinkled out wrenched their hearts; every one that ceased to struggle and was swallowed by the tides of dust added a new strain to the national anthem, that indescribable melody, that infinitely somber paean of doom which tolled a solemn harmony in every heart of the dying race. The dwellers had built a great crystal dome around their world in order to keep out the dust and to keep in the atmosphere, and under this dome the watc
hers kept their silent sentinel. The shadows had swept in faster and faster from the farther realms of darkness, engulfing more rapidly the last of the stars. The astronomers’ task had become easier, but the saddest on Antares: that of watching the universe die, of watching Death and Oblivion spread a pall of blackness over all that was, all that would be.
The last star, Mira, second only to Antares, had shone frostily pale, twinkled more darkly—and vanished. There was nothing in all Space except an illimitable expanse of dust that stretched on and on in every direction; only this, and Antares. No longer did the astronomers watch the heavens to glimpse again that dying star before it succumbed. No longer did they scan the upper reaches—everywhere swirled the dust, enshrouding Space with a choking blackness. Once there had been sown through the abyss a multitude of morbidly beautiful stars, whitely shining, wan— now there was none. Once there had been light in the sky—now there was none. Once there had been a dim phosphorescence in the vault—now it was a heavy-hanging pall of ebony, a rayless realm of gloom, a smothering thing of blackness eternal and infinite.
“We meet again in this Hall of the Mist, not in the hope that a remedy has been found, but that we find how best it is fitting that we die. We meet, not in the vain hope that we may control the dust, but in the hope that we may triumph even as we are obliterated. We can not win the struggle, save in meeting our death heroically.”
The speaker paused. All around him towered a hall of Space rampant. Far above spread a vague roof whose flowing sides melted into the lost and dreamy distances, a roof supported by unseen walls and by the mighty pillars which rolled upward at long intervals from the smoothly marbled floor. A faint haze seemed always to be hanging in the air because of the measureless lengths of that architectural colossus. Like a boundless plain, the expanse of the floor swept forever onward with a dull-gleaming whiteness. Dim in the distance, the speaker reclined on a metal dais raised above the sea of beings in front of him. But he was not, in reality, a speaker, nor was he a being such as those which had inhabited the world called Earth.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 114