Of New Space Opera and Old

While I had long been familiar with the term "space opera" I'm not sure that I concerned myself with its definition until reviewing the Gardner R. Dozois and Jonathan Strahan-edited anthology The New Space Opera, in the introduction to which Dozois and Strahan offered their own definition, distinguishing the space opera from other kinds of science fiction "space story" by its romanticism and its grand scale. I did have more specific associations in mind when I read that, referencing the space-based feudalism and blade-and-blaster adventures of "galactic empire" tales, for example, which was distinctly lacking from the fiction gathered in their anthology, but I accepted Dozois and Strahan's claim--as well as their argument for the "New" space opera representing a continuation of the "Old."

In the years since I have had occasion to rethink that acceptance. Some years ago considering the matter again--after having read a lot more of the old stuff--it seemed to me that the old space opera, especially insofar as we identify it with writers like E.E. Smith can be distinguished from other kinds of space fiction a bit more concretely. Rather than speaking vaguely of romanticism and scale it seems that one can speak more specifically of pulp adventure, and of an interstellar scale to the adventure, with interstellar distances covered the way we humans of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries cover today's merely international distances, with what we call "super-science" the means, and this apt to supply a good deal else of the adventure's elements (like those starship-flying heroes fighting those blade-and-blaster battles). Thus are Smith's Skylark and Lensman tales readily distinguished from, for example, the planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs (like his John Carter tales), or such later space-set tales as Arthur C. Clarke's 2001--for romantic and grand-scale Clarke's novel may be, but pulpy adventure it isn't, while its interstellar and super-science element is, from the standpoint of the main narrative, a final twist presented with arthouse obliquity far, far removed from Richard Seaton zipping about the galaxy.

Indeed, that stress on pulpy adventure has come to seem to me problematic from the standpoint of claims for what is presented to us as "New" space opera, not least as represented by that anthology, precisely because what is usually presented to us as New space opera just doesn't offer that--as anyone who has really read much of the old space opera, or for that matter pulp adventure of any kind (Robert Howard-style sword-and-sorcery, Lester Dent's Doc Savage tales, etc.) should be able to see almost at once. The rough-and-ready prose, the rollicking pace, the narrative zip of pulp at its best . . . it just isn't there, or even a real attempt at it. Instead it inclines toward literary science fiction--to making Literature, as defined in mainstream discussion, out of the tropes that were used in those old space operas--with, indeed, Dozois and Strahan avowing in that introduction the superiority of their fiction in those areas of literary accomplishment of which the proponents of science fiction's "literary turn" have made so much. (Just look at our prose! Look at how we drew our Characters!)

In saying all that I should acknowledge that I have often enjoyed the results of the attempt--as my favorable review of the anthology shows. Yet the claim for continuity between the Old space opera and the New has held up less and less in my estimation, with Dozois and Strahan's definition itself betraying the difficulty--explaining Space Opera not as super-science interstellar pulp space adventure but merely romantic, grand-scale space adventure watering down the old definition to enable them to put two unlike things under the same heading. The science fiction genre was in just too different a place, publishing generally in too different a place. Pulp adventure? The sorts of writer to which a Dozois attended in this anthology did not make their careers out of such, and indeed felt themselves far superior to it ("Oh, we're so much better today! Look at our prose! Look at how we drew our Characters!")--and to the writers of old, of whom it is fashionable for them to speak with a sneer. At any rate, I suspect they couldn't do the job if they tried, though not because of any lack of talent. Rather they never had occasion to cultivate the particular skills that go with the writing of rough-and-ready, rollicking, zippy adventure because the market that existed for that work vanished before many of them were even born, and these instead trained to write quasi-literary short stories for what little was left in the way of a magazine market, and ponderous doorstops for publishers insistent that they will have big books or none, such that especially in the latter case they cultivated the ability to stretch out the 60,000 word or less narratives to which commercial genre fiction tended in its heyday into 150,000 word+ doorstops in a training for exactly the opposite. (Indeed, I can't help but think of Ang Lee's comments about setting out to make a kung fu movie, and ending up with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--and I might add, David Walsh's less than flattering comment on the results of the attempt.)

Why claim otherwise then? Why try and link the new space stories with the old tradition of the space opera? The answer would seem to me to be that in that period when people began speaking of "New" space opera--the 1980s--science fiction was an aging genre, and as the aging so often are, prone to cast a glance back at its earlier days, all as the ultra-commercialization of the genre (as has so often been the case with the corporatized entertainment media since) rested heavily on trafficking in old names, old works, old franchises, old entertainments, the more in as that key element of a living, breathing, genre, a sense of tradition, remained strong among its fans. Thus was Isaac Asimov, for example, induced to return to the field and give the public more Foundation novels, while as George R.R. Martin remarked in an introduction to a collection of Howard Waldrop's short stories, even the promotion of new authors no longer promised anything new, just more of the old, with "hot young talents in SF . . . routinely proclaimed . . . the next Robert A. Heinlein, the next Isaac Asimov, the angriest young man since Harlan Ellison," and so forth, such that "the blurb-writers" make it sound as if "everybody writes like somebody else"--preferably a somebody else who had made their name twenty or more years earlier. Amid all that, what can be more natural than to claim a familiar old label and the ancient lineage that goes with it? Likewise, what less natural in a period in which science fiction's thought-leaders are ever more prone to attack tradition--such that I expect that what we have called New Space Opera will increasingly be called something else by those few who still bother to discuss the matter at all.