Paul Weimer recently asked:
“I saw JJ’s comment above about Space Opera and wonder just how much space is required to make a Space Opera a Space Opera, as opposed to being something more akin to Planetary Romance.”
It’s an interesting question that prompted responses on File 770, Cora Buhlert’s blog, and no doubt elsewhere. There probably is no hard line between Space Opera and Planetary Romance; that does not mean we cannot argue incessantly discuss passionately where the line should be drawn. Here’s my two cents (rounded up to a nickel because Canada phased pennies out in 2013)…
One world is not enough (probably). There are space operas that center on one world—novels such as Dune or The Snow Queen come to mind—but their plots require interactions between that planet and the rest of the narrative universe. The story may take place on one world, but this world is only one of many.
Space travel is a therefore a necessary feature of space opera. Travel can delightfully complicate the plot: trade, migration, proselytization, and the chance that the local equivalent of the Yekhe Khagan might pop by with ten thousand of his closest friends to discuss taxation and governance.
We also expect a setting that suggests great expanses of space and time. Opera, after all, often involves spectacle, and what grander scale than a million worlds? Or distances so vast that entire species have gone extinct while light was crawling across interstellar gulfs?
All of which seems to imply that space opera requires interstellar travel and a galactic setting. But…but… let us not get ahead of ourselves.
First of all, if the author limits themself to plausible or semi-plausible propulsion systems, the time required to traverse the Solar System will expand immensely. Second, the Solar System is actually quite, quite large. A combination of
- realistic delta-v (kilometers or tens of kilometers per second)
- or possibly higher delta-vs (at the cost of hilariously low accelerations)
- and great solar distances
can imbue a tale with the scale and grandeur we usually associate with galactic space operas.
The same advanced technology that can deliver a warhead full of nuclear awesomeness from a Russian missile silo to your living room in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Game of Thrones would take half a week to reach the Moon. And nine months to reach Mars. Or consider the reach of electromagnetic radiation (which includes light). The signals that can circle the Earth in a seventh of a second would take almost a second and a third to reach the Moon, more than three minutes to reach Mars, and over half an hour to reach Jupiter. The outer reaches of our solar system are even farther away. The spacecraft New Horizons is more than six hours away by photon; Voyager One is so far away that light takes seventeen hours to arrive.
Moreover, the Solar System is both very large and full of stuff. At least eight planets and five dwarf planets. Almost two hundred known moons. Maybe one hundred thousand 100 km+ Kuiper Belt Objects. Perhaps two million large asteroids. A trillion bodies in the Oort Cloud. Assuming sufficiently advanced life support1, time, and some reason to plant people on various celestial bodies, there’s certainly room for as many distinct cultures as any galactic space opera offers.
Eleanor Lutz’s Asteroid Map of the Solar system gives a nice impression of what’s out there just in the Inner System (and is available for purchase in a variety of formats.)
Even better, the distribution of matter in the Solar System lends itself to plot-enabling complications.
Contrary to the old belief that spacers would avoid large masses, it turns out that planets (Jupiter in particular) are extremely useful sources of free momentum (spacecraft can swing round those worlds for an extra boost). Well, free at the current moment. Anyone who can control access to Jupiter may be able to make a nice living off that control. How to establish control? How to maintain control? There are stories in those questions.
Then there’s the fact that the distances between objects in the Solar System are dynamic. Here, enjoy this animation of the orbits of Jupiter’s Trojans:
Human colonies may alternate between glorious isolation and easy access to other colonies2 . This would be predictable (orbital mechanics for the win), but it would still make for some interesting politics and would complicate trade in interesting ways3 . Poul Anderson wrote a story based on this observation (“The Makeshift Rocket”); I am sure that other stories are possible.
Once one is past the Belt, each planet’s satellite system presents the potential for a natural community, close to each other both in terms of time and delta-v. As pointed out decades ago in “Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships,” this means one could have a setting in which the Solar System might be divided into dozens of nations, which as we all know from current history, is a very plot-friendly arrangement.
Scale, plot-friendly orbital dynamics, plot-friendly heterogeneous matter distribution: the Solar System all by itself provides every resource a space opera author could want.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]There are at least two angles of attack here: (1) technology that facilitates creating and maintaining Earth-like conditions in very un-Earth-like places; (2) technology that enables modified humans to survive extreme conditions. A lot of our problems with space travel could be solved if only humans were as rugged and adorably cute as tardigrades. Speaking of very un-Earth-like places, it’s a fact little exploited by SF writers that a surprising number of the planets in the Solar System (Venus, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) feature roughly Earth-like gravities and temperatures…in their atmospheres. Imagine great cities suspended from balloons or hovering on anti-grav. Of course, aside from gravity and temperature, Venus, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune would be extremely challenging places to settle.
[2]Do I need to clarify the difference between proximity in terms of distance and proximity in terms of delta-v? Probably. A destination could be close in terms of the fuel it takes to send a payload there but distant in terms how long it takes to get there, OR it could be easy to reach in a comparatively short time. However, the short trip would feature prohibitive fuel costs. Example: it’s possible to send payloads from Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids to Earth via a flyby of Jupiter with a small (non-costly) impetus; however, this would add years to the trip. The payload could be sent directly, resulting in a much shorter trip, but the required change in velocity would be much higher, as would the fuel costs. Another example: a Hohmann transfer orbit from Earth to Mercury would take about three and a half months. However, because this would require a delta-v of seventeen kilometers per second, which would be challenging for chemical rockets, nobody (currently) sends payloads to Mercury via the direct route.
[3]As a general rule (which is to say, one with exceptions), the outer system is rich in light elements and comparatively poor in the heavy ones, while the inner system, having been lightly broiled by the sun, is the other way round (although in human terms “only a small fraction of the available matter” can still translate into “more than we can use in a thousand lifetimes”). As well, the inner system is rich in solar energy. Delivering this energy to the outer system seems challenging, although I will point out that I came up with a way to export solar energy that was effective beyond my wildest dreams. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll#Nicoll-Dyson_Laser) Down here in the footnotes seems like a good place to point out that many SF authors fixate on basic commodity trade, which isn’t all you need for a developed economy. You need things like information and experts and…well, other stuff that I’m sure SF authors can imagine for a Solar System space opera.
Great article with lots of food for thought James! I love the idea of floating cities on Venus, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and am surprised it is not something that’s been exhaustvely (or ever?) used. Would you consider Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline and Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers and maybe even Stephenson’s Schismatrix Plus to be examples of this kind of Solar-System Space Opera? Can you think of any others out there?
Nah, it is some form of FTL where you can visit five star systems in as many hours or bust.
I can think of a few floating cities books: Holland’s Floating Worlds (set in the gas giants), Bob Buckley’s World in the Clouds (Venus) and Michael McCollum’s The Clouds of Saturn (Saturn). Tobias Buckell had an extrasolar example in Sly Mongoose.
If not actual space opera, then close enough to see it.
I have always considered a story featuring space ships and space travel to be the defining element of a space opera, so that a story set in our soar system could easily be a space opera if it involved travel between the planets, moons, or rocks.
Interesting that most of the possible examples that come to mind jump to interstellar hijinks pretty quickly. But there are some exceptions: John C. McLoughlin‘s The Helix and the Sword is set in a Solar System that has been settled for thousands of years with no starflight and actually no use of large planets.
What is “it”?
This seems like a good place to admit I’ve only seen an episode or two of Cowboy Beebop.
John Varley’s Eight Worlds had modified humans and their chlorophyll-based sidekicks living in orbit around Saturn.
Stardance wound up with a similar solution.
Blowing my own horn, my hard-SF superhero novel Only Superhuman is set in the Main Asteroid Belt, and I resisted the tendency of a lot of SF to treat “Belters” as a cultural monolith; instead, my Striders are more like Greek city-states, unified only in relation to outsiders but otherwise being fragmented and highly diverse in culture and values. I had their cultures shaped somewhat by the environment of particular Belt regions — the Ceres habitats are the heart of the civilization, like New England and the Midwest, while drier Vesta is more like LA and Vegas, a desert made to bloom due to the lure of its mineral wealth, and the outer Belt is more rural and home to a wide range of small fringe communities, since there are more small asteroids with enough ice and organics to support an independent population. Whereas asteroids whose orbital inclinations make them harder to reach tend to be more isolated and home to more crime and corruption. And then you have the really remote asteroids like Pallas and the Trojans, which are more like pirate islands, the worst of the worst. So there’s room for a ton of cultural diversity and a whole bunch of classic space-opera stories about visits to weird societies, all within the limits of Jupiter’s orbit. (At the time I came up with the idea, I saw it as a chance to do what Gene Roddenberry called the “Thousand Worlds” concept as seen in Star Trek, but of course, Trek was just distilling pre-existing space opera conventions for a mass audience.)
After all, most space-opera universes treat entire planets as single places, with just one main city and one climate and one culture; so there isn’t really that much need for them to be whole planets. An O’Neill cylinder or Bernal sphere with a few hundred thousand or million inhabitants is more than large enough a setting.
And if you extend it to the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, there’s no need for interstellar travel at all (though that is an established thing in stories set later in the Only Superhuman universe). There’s enough raw material in those places to build habitats with, collectively, hundreds of times the surface area of Earth, so you could have a whole Federation’s worth of people within a few light-months of Sol. If I hadn’t already established FTL in my main universe, I might’ve gone that route instead. Maybe I should create a different universe that works that way.
There’s also the intriguing middle ground of Karl Schroeder’s Lockstep, where the spacefaring civilization occupies dozens of the sunless rogue planets that are now believed to exist in the interstellar void within a few light-years of Earth. So any two worlds are only a matter of light-months apart, typically, and they can be reached with no more than a couple of decades in cryosleep — and the colony worlds all go into collective hibernation for decades at a time to stay in sync with the cryoships and with each other, and to conserve resources on those small rogue planets.
The first inspired the second, I think.
Karl Hansen’s War Games combined advanced transformation technology, and the ability to make bespoke biosphere with zippy fast rockets. They could have easily gone interstellar except the Solar System was run by immortal one percent of one percent of one percenters who apparently never saw the point to such things because they were more focused on crushing peons and sadomasochistic sex.
@6 See, answer that one and you’ll have a cracking story.
@8:
Varley and Robinson are friends I think, and so there are several examples where we see a particular idea show up in works of both writers. In addition to the symbiotes in Stardance and Ophiuchi Hotline, there are time travelers with similar motives and constraints in Millennium and The Free Lunch, and an explicit reference to Varley’s Press Enter in Robinson’s The Callahan Touch.
I have played in the planetary romance sandpit myself (Saturn’s Children) and I have to say, if you want to use remotely plausible propulsion technology and go anywhere past Jupiter orbit, it really helps if you ditch the squishy meatsack bodies and go full robot … and even then it helps if they’ve got a hibernate mode. (At one point in SC our protagonist is hustled into a first class cabin aboard a high-delta-vee liner bound for a KBO … said cabin is approximately the size of a coffin and the voyage takes upwards of seven Earth years. But it’s a luxury berth, because they don’t chop her arms and legs off before departure to save weight.)
(PS: Apologies for the awful cover!)
See also “Hostile Takeover” by Susan Shwartz, a combination of space-opera and corporate-thriller set in mining operations in the Asteroid Belt.
The Expanse, anyone? It’s basically got those separate ‘nations’, and starts off within the solar system and goes on out from there. The Belters aren’t really homogeneous, although people from Earth and Mars may think so, and it’s certainly got realistic space travel in there, with several chase scene played out in 3D and based on the limits of the human body.
Does Ian M. Banks’ Against a Dark Background count? It feel pretty Space Opera-y and it absolutely keeps the action within a single stellar system.
Three floating-city novels: Sarah Zettel, The Quiet Invasion (Venus); Eric Vinicoff, Wind Rider (Earth); Michael McCollum, The Clouds of Saturn (guess).
@1: There’s also Charles Sheffield, who had several STL settings that could make the list. I remember at least two in which the oort cloud was extensively colonized, and one set in a heavily settled extrasolar system several centuries after the FTL drive that connected it to the rest of human space stopped working. His settings tend to be diverse and strange enough to evoke that space opera feeling.
And of course, there’s Firefly, if you accept that it’s set in a single star system (I know some people attempted to rationalize the setting but the show itself was very light on detail)
@18/Michael Grosberg: Firefly was initially very vague and inconsistent about its setting, but by the movie, they’d settled on it all being one big star system with multiple stars and a bunch of terraformed planets and moons.
Revenger comes to mind, as a recent example.
Several of the early Heinlein juvies (The Rolling Stones in particular; to a lesser extent Between Planets and Space Cadet) are single-system space opera. By the time you get to Time for the Stars, though …
@18/Michael Grosberg:
The Charles Sheffield story with colonization of the Oort (“Cloudlanders”) would be Proteus Unbound (serialized in Analog in 1988). His “Proteus” and “McAndrew Chronicles” stories share a milieu featuring “kernels” (naturally occurring low-mass black holes, useful for power generation and propulsion, rather like the magnetic monopoles used by other authors) and “purposive form-change”. See: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?210
IIRC, Oort bodies also feature in Jack Williamson’s Lifeburst (1984), but those residents are microgravity-adapted aliens.
On the sillier side there’s the cartoon series Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space (Hanna-Barbera, 1972), in which the titular girl-band wanders amid “planetoids” for adventures as with Lost in Space or Space: 1999. The simplest interpretation is “planetary romance in Sol System” but with sub-planetary bodies that Earth’s astronomers hadn’t noticed, what with (a) atmospheres and (b) civilizations with space travel. Um, maybe it’s a cluster out of the ecliptic?
The earlier works from Allen Steele did a pretty good job of giving us adventure and excitement all contained within our solar system. And back when there were hopes that most of the worlds in the solar system were at least marginally habitable, there were lots and lots of good stories written set all within our own solar system.
Regarding planetary romance versus space opera, I always figured if it focuses on action that takes place between planets, it is space opera, and if it pretty much ignores travel between the planets, and focuses on action that takes place on their surfaces, it is planetary romance.
@1. dulac3: Schismatrix is Bruce Sterling, not Stephenson. And it definitely features “(2) technology that enables modified humans to survive extreme conditions” from footnote 1.
Joan D Vinge, The Outcasts of Heaven Belt.
The big problem with the Solar System as a space opera setting is Earth. It’s where all the customers are, it’s very difficult to escape from, and it has all the resources we need anyway. Volatiles and lithophile and chalcophile elements are all sitting around in the crust, much cheaper to dig out than getting them from space. Even siderophile elements aren’t too bad – there’ve been some late impacts that have enriched the crust with them. A common approach is to exclude Earth somehow – occupied by aliens or eaten by nanotechnology – and make the the rest of the Solar System survive without it. It would be even easier to just design a whole new planetary system with different resources on different planets and use that as a setting, but I haven’t seen that in many stories.
@27. gareth: what about Helium 3 as used in Ian McDonald’s Luna series?
@1: Thanks for mentioning the Swanwick – I liked that one a lot when it was serialized in Asimov’s back in the day.
@27,
Quaddiespace, in Bujold’s Diplomatic Immunity, is that kind of system. Lots of asteroids, but no planets.
@28 Helium 3 is one of the very few resources that is more common in space than on Earth. Unfortunately, there’s not enough of it on the Moon to mine economically. Plenty on Jupiter, but the gravity and radiation makes that impractical. Saturn is fine, except the minimum-energy transfer orbit takes six years, one way. At that point, we’d just give up and use proton-boron fusion instead. Of course, if you make your own planetary system with an Earth-sized moon around a helium-rich gas giant it’s a completely different story.
@30 Right, they deliberately chose a system without a big convenient planet, so the two-armed people wouldn’t interested in it.
@27/Gareth Wilson: I disagree — from the perspective of a spacefaring civilization, mining asteroids is far easier than mining Earth, because the resources are much closer to the surface and much more plentiful, and you don’t have to haul them all the way out of a planetary gravity well, which is a huge amount of work. Heinlein once said that if you get to Earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere else in the system. That’s the single hardest part, so from the standpoint of people off of Earth, it would be a whole lot of trouble to drag resources up and out from Earth, and not worth the effort when there are millions of nice convenient asteroids floating around.
Earth’s gravity alone would set it apart from most of the rest of the system, both because of the difficulty of getting out of it and because humans adapted to lower-gravity environments like Mars would have trouble functioning on Earth. So you don’t need an apocalypse or a quarantine to cut Earth off socially, politically, or economically from the rest of the system.
My asteroid-dwelling Striders in Only Superhuman have little interaction with Earth, aside from reacting to all the immigrants coming out from there. They won independence decades earlier and are satisfied to go their own way. Meanwhile, the novel’s redheaded heroine prefers to avoid Earth because being that close to the Sun gives her freckles.
I love this kind of stuff![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
@33 True, but you still have to explain why there’s a spacefaring civilisation at all, if it can’t sell commodities to Earth. You could imagine some kind of religious or ideological motive for colonising the Solar System that doesn’t require making a profit, but that could get pretty tenuous as the basis of a civilisation.
@35/Gareth Wilson: It’s not so all-or-nothing. The spacefaring civilization doesn’t have to be completely cut off from Earth in order to be distinct and independent from it. There can be trade with Earth without it automatically being the center of all things. It’s just less convenient to get to and from than other places, that’s all. So that would encourage spacegoing culture to develop independence from Earth even while still being able to trade and interact with it.
Plus, of course, the reason colonists leave the homeland is generally because they want to be independent from it. So it makes no sense to assume the only possible reason for them to develop an independent culture is because Earth is somehow completely removed from the picture. Unless you’re taking it for granted that Earth would be an authoritarian state, which is only one possibility, not an automatic certainty (especially since we’ve seen a hundred stories about space colonists revolting against Earth oppression, in many cases taking advantage of the high ground to drop asteroids on Earth or the like).
I feel now’s an appropriate time to plug Atomic Rockets. It’s a collection of real-world space travel, the fictional stuff, and various calculators.
37: Um.
@@@@@ 0, James Davis Nicoll
Human colonies may alternate between glorious isolation and easy access to other colonies . This would be predictable (orbital mechanics for the win), but it would still make for some interesting politics and would complicate trade in interesting ways . Poul Anderson wrote a story based on this observation (“The Makeshift Rocket”);
I prefer the alternate title, A Bicycle Built for Brew. It’s more of a farce than a serious exploration of belter politics. With dialogue like:
“Do you speak Attic Greek?
“I don’t even speak basement Greek.”
But Poul was a physicist. He knew whereof he wrote. From his Industrial Revolution:
“Yes, we are pretty isolated,” he said. “The Jupiter ships just unload their balloons, pick up the empties, and head right back for another cargo.”
“I don’t understand how you can found an industry here, when your raw materials only arrive at conjunction,” Ellen said.
“Things will be different once we’re in full operation,” Blades assured her. “Then we’ll be doing enough business to pay for a steady input, transshipped from whatever depot is nearest Jupiter at any given time.”
“You’ve actually built this simply to process … gas?” Gilbertson interposed. Blades didn’t know whether he was being sarcastic or asking a genuine question. It was astonishing how ignorant Earthsiders, even space-traveling Earthsiders, often were about such matters.
“Jovian gas is rich stuff,” he explained. “Chiefly hydrogen and helium, of course; but the scoopships separate out most of that during a pickup. The rest is ammonia, water, methane, a dozen important organics, including some of the damn … doggonedest metallic complexes you ever heard of. We need them as the basis of a chemosynthetic industry, which we need for survival, which we need if we’re to get the minerals that were the reason for colonizing the Belt in the first place.” He waved his hand at the sky. “When we really get going, we’ll attract settlement. This asteroid has companions, waiting for people to come and mine them. Homeships and orbital stations will be built. In ten years there’ll be quite a little city clustered around the Sword.”
“It’s happened before,” nodded tight-faced Commander Warburton of Gunnery Control.
“It’s going to happen a lot oftener,” Blades said enthusiastically. “The Belt’s going to grow!” He aimed his words at Ellen. “This is the real frontier. The planets will never amount to much. It’s actually harder to maintain human-type conditions on so big a mass, with a useless atmosphere around you, than on a lump in space like this. And the gravity wells are so deep. Even given nuclear power, the energy cost of really exploiting a planet is prohibitive. Besides which, the choice minerals are buried under kilometers of rock. On a metallic asteroid, you can find almost everything you want directly under your feet. No limit to what you can do.”
“But your own energy expenditure—” Gilbertson objected.
“That’s no problem.” As if on cue, the worldlet’s spin brought the sun into sight. Tiny but intolerably brilliant, it flooded the dome with harsh radiance. Blades lowered the blinds on that side. He pointed in the opposite direction, toward several sparks of equal brightness that had manifested themselves.
“Hundred-meter parabolic mirrors,” he said. “Easy to make; you spray a thin metallic coat on a plastic backing. They’re in orbit around us, each with a small geegee unit to control drift and keep it aimed directly at the sun. The focused radiation charges heavy-duty accumulators, which we then collect and use for our power source in all our mobile work.”
@39. Fernhunter: “Do you speak Attic Greek?” “I don’t even speak basement Greek.”
That could’ve come from a Marx Brothers movie. It’s almost as good as “There ain’t no Sanity Clause!”
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky is set in a single solar system (although I won’t say any more as it’s only just come out, but it is really, really good).
Niven’s Belters and the stories about them in the pre-FTL Known Space era would fit. They don’t avoid planets, they use them to get the “free” speed boost. And occasionally miscalculate, because all Belters fly by the seat of their pants doing multi-variate calculus in their heads in real time because they don’t have computers to do that for them. The Motie Asteroid civilization in “The Gripping Hand” is fairly well done.
As for floating cities, Bespin, anyone?
I tend to think the idea that the “best and brightest” would be the ones to emigrate to the latest new frontier is the least supportable meme in sf; historically, it’s tended to be people who were marginalized in some way, e.g., Norwegians in the 19th Century, were poor, uneducated, and in societies with virtually no opportunity for upward mobility and autocratic or oligarchic governments.
I think the second least supportable is a free-wheeling, libertarian polity. A complex, artificial ecosystem won’t tolerate the sort of abuses that many libertarians seem to endorse for natural ones
@26,
although, if memory serves, that wasn’t in this solar system
@28,
Helium-3 has very little current value outside of cryogenic research; He3 based fusion is even farther than deuterium fusion, and may never be practical.
I love taxonomy! My own understanding of planetary romance is that it is more fantasy than hard SF, although it has to have SF trappings rather than a fantasy setting. That doesn’t mean that I don’t love great examples of the form, but that I’m less likely to be a pedant regarding their plausibility. In addition to the protagonist having to buckle some swashes, the characteristics of the planet(s), although it’s usually set on one, are contrary to what we now know about them or about likely planetary environments in general. I.e. not only Barsoom and ERB’s Venus, but also Leigh Brackett’s Mars & Venus. Also her entirely imaginary Skaith qualifies, so action in another solar system doesn’t magically turn it into space opera. It’s more about feel than locale. C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories blend planetary romance with horror. Romance = “marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized” (Merriam-Webster). Space opera to me also depends on feel, but I think the setting has to be interstellar if only because you need multiple civilizations each with a deep history and a unique culture. Unless you posit an ancient civilization also arising on one of the planets or moons of the Solar System, a work limited to the Solar System consequently can’t be space opera. The Expanse isn’t. It’s (mostly) hard SF, except for the protomolecule’s more magical abilities. The plot also needs to be driven by adventure and a sense of grandeur, rather than by ideas or speculation. Alastair (no relation) Reynolds and Iain M. Banks were both called New Space Opera when that term was still used, but Reynolds’ Revelation Space series is less space opera-y than the Culture because the former takes special relativity into account while the Culture series blithely ignores it (which is not a criticism, since I love the Culture books). As @13 explains in Singularity Sky, ignoring special relativity leads to time travel. On a Venn diagram, planetary romance doesn’t overlap hard SF at all, and space opera overlaps hard SF only a bit. Planetary romance can overlap space opera, but also only a little, when you have some space travel but also idealized planetary settings. Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure series spans planetary romance and space opera, although it’s more of the former.
@43/swampyankee: “I think the second least supportable is a free-wheeling, libertarian polity. A complex, artificial ecosystem won’t tolerate the sort of abuses that many libertarians seem to endorse for natural ones”
Yeah, I was originally assuming my Only Superhuman Striders would tend to be libertarian and mistrustful of authority as per the usual cliche (hence the emergence of superhero-styled peacekeepers as a way to earn their trust), until I read essays pointing this out and realized that habitat communities would tend to be very strict and authoritarian, at least until they could be built large and stable enough to withstand some fluctuations in their environments. So I rewrote it to replace libertarianism with nationalism — they’re very obedient and loyal to their home communities, but mistrustful of outside authority as a result.
As for your “best and brightest” point, a lot of the communities in the Belt are extremist fringe groups that were exiled from Earth, kinda like the British inmates shipped to Australia. That way, my spacegoing superheroes have lots of potential villains to face.
@44/BillReynolds: I think it’s unwise to define genre labels too rigidly or to use them in an exclusionistic way. They’re just convenient shorthands and approximations, not excuses to build impassable walls. Genres overlap and blur into each other all the time, and labels are inadequate to capture that full diversity, so they should not be taken too seriously or proscriptively.
Niven’s Belter’s are the ur-counter-example, in that their use of hilariously overpowered fusion drives inspired the original Pesky Belters essay I am riffing on.
@@@@@ 42, wiredog
Niven’s Belters and the stories about them in the pre-FTL Known Space era would fit. They don’t avoid planets, they use them to get the “free” speed boost. And occasionally miscalculate, because all Belters fly by the seat of their pants doing multi-variate calculus in their heads in real time because they don’t have computers to do that for them. The Motie Asteroid civilization in “The Gripping Hand” is fairly well done.
Niven wrote an essay called How I Stole the Belt Civilization. Here’s the meat of it; ellipses in the original.
Randall Garrett’s view of a developing asteroid civilization made so much sense to me, I just swallowed it whole…the Belter’s self-reliance, the anarchism, the intolerance of fools, the wary respect for an unforgiving environment, the one-man ships, the political friction with earth.
I met him at Poul and Karen Anderson’s, the day after a Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula Awards banquet. He was witty, charming, energetic, bubbling with puns and stories. He’d read all my stories, and he raised the subject of the Belters…diffidently, but with some amusement. He knew that the sincerest form of flattery is copyright violation.
Believe it or not, it had not occurred to me that the Belter civilization was Randall’s. I didn’t remember author’s names, then, remember? On reflection it was perfectly obvious, and I admitted it all.
But this is the first time I’ve put it in print.
Ironically, the reason I called my asteroid dwellers Striders was because I figured Niven had already used “Belters” so I shouldn’t copy his terminology. But now it looks like I’m the only one who doesn’t call them “Belters.” Never mind; I still like mine better.
Somewhere I have notes for a setting where it’s a couple of centuries on and commercial D-T fusion is still twenty years away. There are respectable thrust, decent delta vee “beam riders” but military vessels don’t want to be tied to fixed beam sources, thus various flavours of nuclear (fission) thermal. Interestingly, Earth seems to have a real advantage when it comes to decent sources of fissionables, thanks to the role of hydrothermal processes in forming ores. It seemed to me at least possible enough for an SF setting that Mars and maybe Ceres would have decent ores (Venus might have but have fun mining Venus.). So if you’re a military power, securing Ceres might look useful.
@@@@@ 48, ChristopherLBennett:
Ironically, the reason I called my asteroid dwellers Striders was because I figured Niven had already used “Belters” so I shouldn’t copy his terminology. But now it looks like I’m the only one who doesn’t call them “Belters.” Never mind; I still like mine better.
Here’s an example.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23561/23561-h/23561-h.htm
Don’t let the author-name fool you. Randall had multiple noms de plume in stock. For when he had more than one story in one issue of one magazine.
This is probably a good place to mention that many of Garrett’s stories aged badly. Although sometimes such authors’ works are excellent fodder for rework by better authors.
@49 It seems to me there might be an analogy to be drawn between the rail network and a beam rider network. And therefore between military beam riders, and armoured trains. Which were quite common for several decades.
An alternative analogy might be river steamboats and river gunboats.
Sounds rather like the Wild West.
Arguably, even if the Expanse had the sort of scale I wanted, it was never an example of a single system space opera because the mcguffin that sets everything in motion is first contact with an extra solar intelligence. There’s a huge pressure on authors to go interstellar for some reason.
@53/James: My universe was always going to be interstellar, since it kind of evolved from my early Star Trek-inspired daydreams and was also heavily influenced by Asimov and Niven. But when I came up with the earliest seed of my idea for what became Only Superhuman, I looked around my future history for a period I hadn’t covered yet in my plans, and the era of the colonization of the Solar System stood out as a gap that needed filling. So I kind of went at it backwards.
The first two books of Wil McCarthy’s “Queendom of Sol” series (The Collapsium and The Wellstone) are set in a Sol System with widespread colonization, but because two of the milieu-toys are artificial worldlets with neutronium gravity (“planettes”) and teleportation (“faxgates”) (take that, Puppeteer stepping discs!), the stories don’t have quite the dynamics of Mr. Nicoll’s thesis: orbits are immaterial, and transit time is imperceptible.
The third book (Lost in Transmission) describes the colonization of the Barnard’s Star system and asteroid mining is important, but again, the nature of the narrative (“now that we’re immorbid, what novel societal mistakes can we make?”) puts them in the background.
The queendom books have a weird mix of immortality and first world planning time scales. They could plan in terms of millennia but they don’t. Thus the immortal monarchs with a designated heir. Thus a phone system whose failure mode is apocalyptic.
@44. Bill: ” a work limited to the Solar System consequently can’t be space opera. The Expanse isn’t.”
Isn’t space opera or isn’t limited to the solar system?
The series gives humans access to 1300 alien systems as of book 3 and book 4 is set on an alien planet. The last couple books have the Sol system under control of an Empire based on one of the alien planets.
Then again, once they use the stargate hub to transition to another system, Newtonian flight still applies.
The Ryk Spoor trilogy Grand Central Arena, Spheres of Influence and Challenges of the Deeps is set in a milieu designed to support “planetoid romance” and “sky pirate” tropes, but also “interstellar war.”
The titular Arena is a pocket universe the size of a star system, populated with planet-sized hollow spheres at asteroidal distances, each mapped to an system (many inhabited) in the real universe — and anybody who invents FTL travel winds up inside their home sphere. Outside, the spheres are surrounded by air and ecosystem (shades of Niven’s The Integral Trees and Schroeder’s “Virga” series) — yes, the human explorers quickly realize that its persistence requires something beyond blind natural law. The creators provided teleport gateways between the spheres, but pedestrian-sized, so hazardous inter-sphere travel by airship is unavoidable.
In Wikipedia “Hartwell and Cramer define space opera as: ‘colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set in the relatively distant future, and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone. It often deals with war, piracy, military virtues, and very large-scale action, large stakes.‘”
But I’ll nominate Joe Haldeman’s “The Long Habit of Living”, which features a generation ship with a difference; they intend to crew it for the stars with regularly repaired immortal people using the book’s main subject, the Stileman Process. Also it isn’t finished, so the adventure only visits it briefly and doesn’t leave the Solar System. But does involve off-Earth action… including sex on the generation ship AFAICR but that’s not what I meant. And that’s not what it’s called, it’s “adastra”. The future has capital letters but doesn’t waste them.
For better or for worse, what came to mind immediately for me when talking about life in an asteroid belt was Joan Vinge’s rather grim Heaven Chronicles: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/600425.Heaven_Chronicles
I always understood space opera to be limited to a single solar system. I don’t know where I got the definition. But most of my early SF reading was written before we knew what Venus and Mars were really like. Venus was full of swamp-monsters. Martians traveled in canals. In some early SF they called solar systems other than our own, other universes. Why not? A century ago we lived in a much smaller cosmos.
The Boundary trilogy by Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor is space opera. Thrilling adventures, plausible technobabble, interplanetary travel, all within our solar system. The extinct aliens arrived by generation ships. FTL travel doesn’t show up until the Castaway series, in the same universe.
@61/Fernhunter: I think what you’re talking about falls more into the planetary romance genre, as discussed above. “Space opera” has traditionally carried the connotation of grand, sweeping narratives on a vast scale with cosmic stakes — the “opera” part meant to convey how grand, melodramatic, and epic it all was. So it’s archetypally on a galactic scale.
But the meaning of the term has evolved and broadened over the decades. Initially it was used just for that particular type of larger-than-life epic, which was usually fairly lowbrow and fanciful with simplistic characters, so it wasn’t a very respectable genre. Then, in the ’80s and ’90s when cyberpunk and near-future Earth-based dystopias were seen as the future of SF, there were critics and fans who dismissed all space-based SF as outmoded and silly and therefore labeled all of it as “space opera” indiscriminately. So that when the counter-reaction came and we got a new wave of authors doing smart, well-received space-based SF again, they embraced the term “space opera” with pride and reclaimed it as a positive. Thus, the term is now used a lot more broadly and less negatively than it used to be.
My own first encounters with asteroid mining (in addition to The Rolling Stones as noted above) were probably Assignment in Space with Rip Foster, and Alan E. Nourse’s Scavengers in Space. The latter was also where I first encountered the (since disproven) idea that the asteroid belt was actually chunks of a previously-existing planet that had blown itself to bits.
@62 CLB
Having grown up on a diet of Skylarks and Lenses, I mostly agree with you, but how do you classify single-system space stories that are exciting but have smaller stakes? I am thinking mostly of something like Hamilton’s Captain Future. If we scale it down even more, how about Tom Corbett and most of the Heinlein space-faring juveniles? My gut says Captain Future is space opera, but not of the others, but I can’t see a huge difference in the stories told.
Incidentally, I want to give a shout out to Sheffield’s McAndrew stories mentioned above which I adore.
@64/vinsentient: I’m not talking about I classify things, but how the usage has changed over time. My point was that these days, people have come to use “space opera” to mean pretty much any fiction set in space, without making the distinctions that used to exist.
I do think, though, that the stakes of a story are more a matter of narrative than geography. I’ve talked about how my Only Superhuman and other such single-system tales have worked narratively in much the same way as your classic thousand-worlds interstellar space opera. In place of alien planets, you can have space habitats or terraformed Solar planets and moons, and in place of aliens, you can have transhumans or AIs or uplifted animals if you want. So the storytelling can be essentially the same in terms of the number and diversity of the worlds and cultures the story encompasses; the only difference is whether it’s sticking to relativity and realistic travel times or using FTL or cryosleep to compress interstellar travel times to a narratively useful degree.
Heck, you can compress the physical volume even further. In my Star Trek novel The Face of the Unknown, I fit a whole multispecies, multiworld federation inside the atmosphere of a single Jovian planet, in a network of giant artificial habitats suspended in its upper atmosphere. There’s room in there for hundreds of Earths’ worth of habitable surface area.
@63,
Yay, Rip Foster !
Given that cover, there was no way it could not be for me.
(I reread it a few years back on Kindle and was amused/dismayed that the chief’s name had been autocorrected at some point from “O’Brian” to “O’Brain”. Other than that, it held up surprisingly well.)
In terms of nomenclature, I tend to look at the distinction more on the basis of characters and their motivations/natures rather than setting.
Planetary Romance: focuses on a lead character who is “special” –touched by destiny, or the only one of their kind, or descended from an important bloodline, or in possession of a one-of-a-kind magic sword. Whether the story spans a single region of a planet or an entire galaxy is just set-dressing, compared to the fact that the Hero(ine) is doing things that normal people (in the setting) would not be able to.
Space Opera: characters tend to wear uniforms, have ranks/titles, and belong to a large administrative body (either a military fleet, a government, an organized religion, or a large corporation). Other than by rank/experience, no one is inherently “special” (in fact, progressing through the ranks may be part of the narrative). Their day-to-day needs are all taken care of, and their main dramatic concerns are weighty, “important” issues such as the rise and fall of civilizations, the difference between Law and Justice, or the defeat of a great universe-threatening Evil.
And, as a counterpart/deconstruction of space opera that deserves to become its own subgenre:
Space Western: characters’ day-to-day needs are not taken care of, and so they don’t have the luxury of caring about “the Big Issues” –they’re just trying to keep food on the table, and are probably willing to bend or break a few laws in order to do so (and then must deal with the consequences). These characters are smugglers, bounty hunters, pirates, and mercenaries, more inclined to use their names even when they do have ranks.
There are, of course, overlaps. The original Star Wars trilogy was basically about three unrelated conflicts (space opera via the Rebellion/Empire, space western via Han/Jabba, and planetary romance via Luke/Vader) all getting tangled up in each other. Christopher’s Only Superhuman does the same; the Troubleshooters are part of a space-operatic organization (giving them missions), but operate mainly independently (like space western bounty hunters), and, of course, superheroes are basically “romance” figures by design (each being fundamentally exceptional in some way). Part of what makes Holden such a troublemaker in The Expanse is that he insists on thinking like a morally-driven space opera character when everyone else is in a pragmatic space western (and everyone is left picking up the pieces of Julie Mao’s tragically-failed planetary romance).
@68/Cybersnark: Yes, well-said. The problem with treating genre labels as separate countries with impassable walls between them is that they’re really more like ingredients, or like the pure flavors that combine in a dish to give it its own unique character. They’re descriptions for attributes of a work, not proscriptions for what it’s allowed to be.
Part of what I wanted to do in Only Superhuman was to approach superheroes in a different way than I’ve seen before, as hard SF rather than fantasy or supernatural fiction. I also combined it with a “Thousand Worlds” space-opera setting, the sensibilities of transhumanist SF, liberal doses of comedy and eroticism, etc. Really, the eclectic mix and clash of diverse cultural influences is an integral part of the worldbuilding. And it’s part of a larger universe that includes stories in a mix of other genres.
“‘Space opera” has traditionally carried the connotation of grand, sweeping narratives on a vast scale with cosmic stakes — the “opera” part meant to convey how grand, melodramatic, and epic it all was. “
I am really not sure that’s where it comes from. I suspect it’s more likely to be “horse opera” or “soap opera” in space. The use of “opera” in those phrases was not supposed to imply grandeur and epic scale, but unrealism and melodrama.
@70/ajay: You may be right, but I think those both fall into the broader category of “larger than life.”
@68. Cybersnark: The main feature of planetery romance is, well… a planet. The setting is paramount. John Carter is important and in the foreground, but Barsoom is the main ingredient. Don’t see Julie Mao plugging into that at all.
Holden is simply naive and unsophisticated in his worldview. Avasarala refers to him as a child at one point. His reaction to finding out a secret is to TELL EVERYBODY, literally bradcasting to the entire solar system. He’s a space Don Quixote with no moral grays; a white knight tilting at the dragons. So there’s a moral component, but it’s not part of any systematic framework. He’s a freelancer.
In other words, these are characters first and foremost. The sub-genre labels are irrelevant. Though, of course, it’s OK to organize the books that way for yourself.
The classic example, of course, is the original Buck Rogers, which spends almost all of its time on Earth and near planets. Buck’s racism, sexism, and probably every other kind of bigotry aside, it’s the archetype for later space opera.
John Barnes’ Duke of Uranium, Princess of the Aerie, In the Hall of the Martian King are space opera in the Solar System only; there is an alien species, who tried to exterminate Humans and failed, but the ones in the story are descendants of POWs.
Walter Jon Williams’ Implied Spaces starts out as medieval fantasy, then space opera in the Solar System, then multi-dimensional adventures.
Pohl & Williamson’s Starchild Trilogy are space opera-ish set in just the Solar System and far out, with a unique solution to people living in deep space.
Carve the Sky, by Alexander Jablokov certainly counts as space opera in a single solar system.
It’s also a great caper tale.
I think Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 qualifies as space opera in a single solar system. I never attempted to confirm that he did the orbital mechanics correctly, but I always suspected that some of the habitats were too small for some of the ecosystems they built.
@75. bgalbrecht: Like the one that was built as a sex-liner? Basically, you traveled on it to join an orgy. KSR had some weird stuff going on in that novel. The sexual mechanics of the two main characters don’t seem possible, unless you visualize altered-human anatomy. Both are somewhere on the hermaphrodite/trans scale (one a womb-man).
I couldn’t agree more, I crave Science Fiction books confined to the solar-system and set in the medium term. It took a while but I found a list of such novels in the link below. It would be great if more were added to the list.
ttps://www.goodreads.com/list/show/15763.Solar_System_Opera?tab=Add_Books_To_This_List
@@@@@ 62, ChristopherLBennett:
@@@@@61/Fernhunter: I think what you’re talking about falls more into the planetary romance genre, as discussed above. “Space opera” has traditionally carried the connotation of grand, sweeping narratives on a vast scale with cosmic stakes — the “opera” part meant to convey how grand, melodramatic, and epic it all was. So it’s archetypally on a galactic scale.
But the meaning of the term has evolved and broadened over the decades. Initially it was used just for that particular type of larger-than-life epic, which was usually fairly lowbrow and fanciful with simplistic characters, so it wasn’t a very respectable genre. Then, in the ’80s and ’90s when cyberpunk and near-future Earth-based dystopias were seen as the future of SF, there were critics and fans who dismissed all space-based SF as outmoded and silly and therefore labeled all of it as “space opera” indiscriminately. So that when the counter-reaction came and we got a new wave of authors doing smart, well-received space-based SF again, they embraced the term “space opera” with pride and reclaimed it as a positive. Thus, the term is now used a lot more broadly and less negatively than it used to be.
On the subject of the evolution of the phrases soap opera and horse opera:
I reread Rex Stout’s Too Many Women, published in 1947. I found Arche saying: “I decided to take in a flat-face opera…Ordinarily I let the movies wait when we’re busy on a case…”
I’m pretty sure flat-face opera was a linguistic venture that failed to prosper.