A new generation of Space Opera

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, speculative sociology

Critics and others who write about Sci-fi may break up the past couple of centuries into several eras, but it seems most fondly cling to the notion of a Golden Age prior to about 1955, and everything since. Having read nearly everything older than 1970, and a pretty good amount of the stories (fewer of the novels) written since then, I think a major cognitive shift occurred in about 1960.

I recognized early on that much of the Sci-fi I enjoyed from the Jules-Verne-to-pulp period was about technology, with mostly one-dimensional human characters. However, the very best writing of the period employed the "futuristic" or "possibilistic" setting as a backdrop for more complex characters enacting very human dramas.

The cognitive shift, which took from about 1960 to 1975 to work itself out, produced much more complex personalities, and less emphasis on "explaining" how to go faster than light, travel through time, or live forever. The Space Opera was replaced by the Otherworldly Morality Play. Sci-fi writers mostly seem to be intimidated by, and thus trying to imitate, the overwhelming characterizations common in "mainstream" (that is, boring and usually pointless) fiction. Today there is very little science fiction that has its roots in genuine Space Opera, which is still my favorite sub-genre.

You have to know something about me: I am more akin to the one-dimensional characters in Doc Smith than to the overly-drawn semi-heroes of Orson Scott Card. I get along better with machines than with people. I like the Robot stories of Asimov because the people are neurotic and the robots aren't. I like the unflinchingly heroic Lensman Kimball Kinnison much better than the achingly altruistic Nafai. I need heroes who Get Things Done, because sometimes I can't and need encouragement. Blish's Mayor Amalfi may be something of a jerk, but he is an effective jerk. That I can handle. I've had bosses like that, and I like them the best.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds takes me a big half-step back to space opera. The technology is mostly unexplained, because most of it is alien in origin, and the much of the rest is the product of post-human technology. But a few things, most particularly the Frost Angel technology for preserving a dead or near-dead person for later restoration, are based on solid science.

I enjoyed the human and alien characters the most...usually. The enmity between Bella and Svetlana is overdrawn, but otherwise, the people are comfortingly complex without being overwhelming. The two alien species presented are, it turns out, pretty much what they seem: incredibly advanced, both hoping to exploit the little group on their mini-planet (of alien manufacture) that have found themselves whisked across the galaxy; both deceptive, but the firstmuch more beneficent than the other. First Contact was a lucky one...but the story'd have gone nowhere if the really malicious aliens had shown up first, anyway.

John Campbell's "first law of sci-fi writing" was, "Pose a big problem, then solve it." Author Reynolds's people face problems that, one by one, they solve or are helped to solve. To me, that's what is best about Sci-fi.