I think one of the components of “space opera” is that the technology is in the background and not necessarily plausible. Need a spaceship that can fly between star systems? It’s yours. Need a space station the size of a moon? Here you go. None of that messy “But, but, how do you even build something that big?” which is the staple of “hard” science fiction.
I’d disagree with that explanation.
Lucas is using the principle of beginning his epic “in media res” (“in the middle of things”), a dramatic device that dates back to the Oddessey and which was first mentioned as a dramatic technique by Horace.
Doesn’t mean that it can’t be both. Lucas did deliberately borrow from past movie tropes. Some of those may be older than movies. This particular reference is pretty clearly to movie serials, even though serialized stories in general are far older.
Not really. There’s plenty of hard science space opera. Stephen Baxter and Jack McDevitt are doing some good work in it these days.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
No you don’t. Your eyes aren’t multi-faceted at all.
The less said about the xmex snout, however, the better.
Oh come on now. How could it not be called a Space Opera when it is filled with such massive operatic song and dance numbers?
Or did I just dream those?
You seemed to like my xmex snout just fine, that night in Palm Springs . . .
The music John Williams wrote for the movies was operatic in every sense but the lyrics.
Could you specify a story, and what is “hard,” and what is operatic about it? For clarity on terms.
Jack McDevitt’s “Academy Series.” Hard science – based upon scientific speculation and alien civilizations, and deals very much with the physics of space.
The Engines of God
Deepsix
Chindi
Omega
Odyssey
Cauldron
StarHawk
I’d also argue that Mission of Gravity – the seed of all modern hard SF – is space opera.
More from Holst than from opera, actually.
Not a bad definition. Space opera almost always has at least one space battle in it. I agree with them about Skylark of Space being the first.
Brian Aldiss’ anthology, which is quoted in the article, predates Star Wars which proves space opera is not tied to movies at all.
BTW I just watched the MST3K version of 12 to the Moon. The extra on the DVD had someone describing it as space opera - which it isn’t. Not everything set in space is space opera - for instance Marooned sure isn’t. But Star Wars is almost pure space opera.
And what is the operatic part? Is it romantic, melodramatic?
To me, it seems that if the story relies on the science–my standard for “hardness”–then it can’t be transposed into other settings, the way Star Wars easily could.
There were lyrics? Oh wait, of course there were. This one’s for you and the Cubs, Bill.
Well, take Outpost Mars, a 1951 novel by “Cyril Judd,” a collaboration between Cyril M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril. It ran in Galaxy Science Fiction, the same magazine that ran the “you’ll never see in Galaxy” house ad I linked to earlier claiming that you’d never see a lazily transmogrified western in Galaxy.
Outpost Mars is hard science fiction. It preceded Clarke’s Sands of Mars as the first novel to present a plausible Martian colony according to the science of its day. (Heinlein’s *Red Planet *was earlier and has some colony-building, but it mostly dodges the subject.) All three books present a Mars with generally similar breathable atmospheres and survivable temperatures, though otherwise are wildly different.
Outpost Mars lives up to its title. Its Mars is essentially a mining colony with a small number of settlers trying to make a go of an independent colony. There is one glaring oddity to modern eyes. Even though virtually all of its supplies come from Earth, there is no communication with the planet and even the spaceships land almost without warning until they hit the atmosphere. In short, the outpost’s social environment is built entirely on an an analogy with an American 19th century mining town with only the weekly stagecoach bringing news and supplies from the civilized world. It is a western with the hardest of hard 1951 science.
Of course, nobody at the time saw it that way. They assumed that space would be like early frontier settlements; isolated, dangerous, full of hardship and deprivation, but eventually full of riches and rewards on a par with earthly experiences. This was the norm for classic sf. Star Trek is an update on that basic premise, pre-moon landing. Star Wars, probably inadvertently, reduced it to camp only a decade later. If you were brought up in the modern world I don’t think you can appreciate how seriously the “space as America” vision was taken. Those people believed to their very core. Lucas’ tie fighters in a WWII dogfight eventually dropping a bomb on an aircraft carrier is exactly their sensibility, even if Clarke would have known better. 1977 audiences loved it. But they never for a second thought it resembled the universe they lived in. That Future has vanished.
Actually, more Wagner than Holst. Indeed, leitmotiefs abound in the Star Wars music.
At this point leitmotiefs are so commonly used that I’d hardly call them Wagnerian. I think Williams has acknowledged his debt to Holst.
You Tube comparison of them.
Here is an article with others. Not Holst here, but not Wagner either.
And here is one which does mention Wagner. But Korngold seems to have had even more of an influence.
Tried to tie it all into SF, but they are too obvious. For decades SF hasn’t been about the potential, but about what an intelligent person sees before herself. OTOH, Star Wars is about the 1940s and '50s, as seen by a kid who dropped 15cents at the flicks. Kids, as anyone who has raised one, are into spectacle. Star Wars is all about spectacle, despite what Joseph Campbell thought. SF has, for decades, been a different market.
While one obviously would want to follow up the quote that follows with some legwork, here is the paragraph in Wikipedia on the score that discusses leitmotif use and Wagner (as well as Stein):
Leitmotif use these days is common; at the time, not very common at all. Star Wars was so obvious in its use of the technique that anyone who knew Wagner’s work immediately recognized what was going on. AND, apropos of the thread, it was the use of the OPERATIC technique of leitmotif that helped give the movie an “opera” feeling. 