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The Death of the Space Opera?
Has anyone else out there noticed that one of the staples of science fiction in the serial visual entertainment medium until recently known as television and the dying form of the motion picture, the Space Opera, is — how to put this delicately — older than grandpa’s snuff? To be less delicate, if the Scripted Visual Media Space Opera were a humanoid (let’s not be speciesist), it would be looking for its second duranium hip replacement and popping kidney regeneration pills like they were candy. Bendii syndrome could not more than 20 years off, at the outside.
If we just look at the some of the genre’s best-known representatives for a minute, we find that there are at present, a “new” iteration of the Star Wars (date of birth, 1976) films and a “new” Star Trek (date of birth, 1964/66, depending on when you start counting) film in the works. The franchises are, in movie/TV terms, antiquated, and both of these original franchises are themselves derivative from even earlier models of visual-medium SF, the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials of the 1940’s.
This summer movie houses were dominated by Guardians of the Galaxy, which is a film version of a 1970’s comic book written to cash in on the success of the original Star Wars, which means that its source material is not exactly Young Republicans material, either. Battlestar Galactica? Again, its origins are in the attempts of television writers and executives to cash in the success of Star Wars and the 1970’s pop-culture obsessions with “ancient astronauts” (don’t suppose the name “von Däniken” rings a bell?). Japan’s successful 2010 revival of Space Battleship Yamato was also a revival of a property nearly 40 years old.
My wife and I were talking about this over a coffee porter and we quickly came up with a list of “newer” Space Operas that had been successful enough to have penetrated — at least a little — outside of nerd culture: Babylon Five; Stargate, which also derives its key plot conceit from the Erich von Däniken craze of the 1970’s; Farscape; and Firefly, which only got in by dint of the determination of its fans. The youngest of these, Firefly, is now over ten years old. None of them is currently in production as a regular series, either.
What about Dr. Who, you ask? It strains the definition of Space Opera, it’s central conceit being time travel, not space travel per se. And if I were to grant it for the sake of argument, it would just be one more example of a dated franchise chugging on into the present day.
What has been recently been in production in the film/tv sci-fi world? The Walking Dead; Fringe; Warehouse 13; Z Nation; handful of superhero shows on Warner Brothers’ network that act as feeders for its coming movie series. Ten years ago, the scene was entirely different, with the series named above all in production or in heavy syndication.
So what happened? Is the Space Opera dead? If so, what killed it?
Scientific Discoveries
It’s Kepler’s fault. No not the Protestant father of modern astronomy, talented layman in religious matters who occasionally dabbled in theology, defender of a heliocentric view of the solar system and discoverer of the laws of planetary motion that now bear his name. Not Hans. But the space telescope that was named after him. Since its launch in March, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has discovered 1,763 planets in orbit of stars other than our sun. In these five years and seven months, there have been repeated discoveries of so-called “Super-Earths” and “Earth Twins” that have, on further examination have proven — as far as the received data can tell — to be completely uninhabitable. Which is distressing, since the telescope’s mission statement was to:
- Determine the abundance of terrestrial and larger planets in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars;
- Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets;
The findings so far are summarized briefly in a paragraph on the mission statement, with the key sentences being:
There is now clear evidence for substantial numbers of three types of exoplanets; gas giants, hot-super-Earths in short period orbits, and ice giants.
For the Space Opera question, the important category of planets discovered is: hot super-Earths. Not habitable planets, but rocky planets 1.25 times the size of earth and larger that have orbital characteristics that exclude them as candidates for possible abodes of life. That is to say, each new Kepler discovery since 2009 has only served to strengthen the ‘Rare Earth’ Hypothesis put forth by Ward and Brownlee in the book of that title.
Now, science fiction worth the name is always downstream from science. When Gene Roddenberry conceived of Star Trek and Glen Larson first thought up Battlestar Galactica, it was still possible to imagine that there were hundreds of habitable worlds out there waiting to be discovered. It was also still possible to think that there might be ways to engineer supra-luminal travel that could credibly leave the passengers on a supra-luminal space vehicle alive (c.f. Dan Simmons’ idea of ‘raspberry jam speed’). And, no, the Alcubierra Warp Drive does not work without positing the existence of Impossibilium, by which I mean some form of exotic matter that has the ability to bend space time in such a way as to enable a vessel with human passengers and crew to traverse interstellar distances in human lifetimes.
Maybe, after a century of revolutionary technological changes in the maximum travel speeds available to humans, we have hit a limit that we can never exceed and the popular imagination is only now catching up with that fact. Larry Niven has posited that there were two basic preconditions for stories involving galactic civilizations, of which Space Operas are a sub-set: 1) economically feasible, reliable, faster-than-light travel and 2) the existence of multiple habitable planets. At the moment, it looks like science speaks against the former being possible and the latter existing. The sinking of that realization into the public imagination may be one explanation.
Cultural Pessimism
One other key element to stories involving galactic empires that Niven failed to mention is that the civilizations on other worlds and ours would have to want to build empires. Or maybe Republics; at least least Federations. A civilization must have some cultural drive to expand and plant itself on new territory in order for us to have a Space Opera, pitting the brave heroes of, say, New Texas, against the rapacious inhuman monsters from Chl’zhul’hagz’va’dozha. Or at least pitting them against the cyborg goons serving the Master Bureaucrat of The Beltway Collective.
In the U.S. and the West in general, we’ve come to denounce that drive to expand and conquer as uncouth imperialism and colonialism. We are not supposed to want to set up shop on the marsh-world inhabited by primitive spear-wielding frog people much less want to draw them into our cultural sphere. And that mentality, common to cultural studies and literary theory, has had its tentacles in lit crit dealing with science fiction for years. A case in point would be Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, by John Rieder. See also Black in Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, Science Fiction, Imperialism and The Third World, and, for a very quick read, this piece from the Atlantic.
Rather than glorify or re-imagine the 19th Century imperialist legacy, newer film sci-fi has tended toward attacks on that legacy and the body of thought that drove it, a la Avatar or District 9, or to focus inward and use expansion into space as an expression of class warfare, as in Elysium. This seems only to reflect the inculcation of a mindset skeptical of the kind of civilizational confidence that was the soul of earlier generations of science fiction. The thought that the culture who brought classical liberal democracy and capitalism to the world should continue that project beyond our planet is one that a generation raised on distillates of Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, and Said simply can’t take seriously. No, they can’t even abide it in their sci-fi, one of the most escapist of film and television genres.
One Too Many Trips to the Well
There is a much more prosaic explanation for the absence of new space operas in the last decade: fatigue. The period from the mid-1990s to 2009 saw all of the series referenced in this essay rise, reach their respective apexes, and end their production runs. That’s a total of six major space opera franchises that were competing for their slice of the target audience’s leisure time and attention for a most of two decades. Perhaps the target audience has simply grown bored with the genre or comfortable with the exponents of the genre they have grown up with and is unwilling to admit new explorations of the theme.
That said, Star Trek and Star Wars still sell tickets and so they will chug on and suck up oxygen (money, time) from any new property that might be developed. This may be the best explanation, but it’s certainly the dullest. I’d like to think that what people imagine their future could — or ought to — be provides some insight the aspirations that their culture is engendering in them. The lack of new space operas can be read as a troubling sign of cultural pessimism, while the unwillingness to part with the “legacy” Space Operas of Star Trek and Star Wars can be read a wistful desire to hold on to the fundamentally optimistic view of life that underpins them.
Now, your turn. Is the Space Opera dead in story-driven visual media or not? And, yes, I have deliberately excluded online gaming from this discussion, focusing only on scripted media with defined storylines unchangeable by the viewers. Of these three explanations, which do you find most convincing? Do you have another?
Published in Culture, General
Thanks to Misthiocracy for mentioning Riddick. It’s basically Conan in space, but that’s why it makes for such great Space Opera.
Maybe somebody already mentioned this and I just missed it, but there’s a TV-series adaptation in the works of John Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” book series. Good old-fashioned military space opera. If it’s done right (which isn’t guaranteed, as SyFy is doing it), it could be great.
I’ll be reading more of the comments later, but I will say that Guardians of the Galaxy is a perfect example of Space Opera and has very little – other than Yondu – to do with the 70s comic book of that name. The movie is based on the Space Opera “cosmic” adventure title by Abnett/Giffen/Lanning which is far more recent than the 70s book and represents a “cosmic revival” in the Marvel-verse.
Star Trek is an mash-up of Horatio Hornblower and A.E. van Vogt’s Space Beagle stories, and thus wonderful.
One should not underestimate the cache of the Space Opera on the mind of non-geeks. Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40k is Space Opera of the highest order and it is expanding its fandom.
When Gene Roddenberry pitched his idea to CBS he called it “Wagon Train in outer space.” And he meant it. He wrote a lot of horse opera in his career: 24 episodes of Have Gun, Will Travel, and individual episodes of The Virginian, Wrangler and Boots and Saddles.
Back then, entertaining movies and television were carried by good story and interesting characters and relationships. The technology didn’t carry the day. You didn’t sit around discussing what famous landmark you were going to blow up because you didn’t have the budget.
CBS wasn’t impressed. They passed because they had a SciFi show in the works, Lost in Space, and wasn’t interested in having two. Ironically, through years of corporate mergers (DesiLu to Paramount, Paramount to Viacom) CBS now owns the rights to the show and streams the original series and its offspring at CBS.com
Because…space is boring. It’s especially boring when it’s been done so many times.
I especially enjoyed Battlestar Galactica because it’s the only “space” show that has no aliens in it. Which means that it had nothing to do with “space” and could have been set in any other setting without changing a thing.
The Cape and Defying Gravity didn’t have aliens in ’em, and they took “space opera” to its logical extreme by truly being soap operas in space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dQzzBaihek
Also, I’m having trouble imagining a show about a fleet of nuclear holocaust survivors fleeing from their robotic oppressors without it being set in space … or the Matrix.
Capaldi is fan-freaking-tastic, and once they get rid of Clara this Christmas I’m confident the show will get even better.
But, I’ve been on this rant before…
Can’t wait for it to show on Netflix (cut our cable this year).
It’s available on iTunes (that’s how I get it).
It may also be on the BBC America web site, or on the BBC UK website if you go through a UK proxy server.
Yeah, can’t justify purchasing it on iTunes at the moment. Not a commentary on the show, just on finances.
Star Trek was pitched as Wagon Train in the Stars, but Kirk’s career parallel’s Horatio’s and the use of away teams is so Hornblower/Aubrey that the inspirations that non-Gene authors had is clear.
Aint Ricochet great? Thanks, Tim.
True dat. I don’t remember there being too many “fleets” or “ships” commanded by military men with naval ranks like captain, commander, and admiral on those old TV westerns.
If anything, Battlestar Galactica is a better metaphor for a western, what with it’s convoy of refugees fleeing the black hats in search of a promised land (sorta kinda like a wagon train fleeing injuns and bandits on the trail to Californee).
I always said that Star Wars was a western in space and they also took shots right out of “Twelve O’Clock High.”
Shark Opera, anyone?
The first 30 minutes or so is brilliant. I will pay top dollar to watch Vin Diesel wander the desert of an alien planet. Just take my money.
Well, since Lucas borrowed from much of the same source material as several westerns, specifically Japanese samurai movies (and more specifically, The Hidden Fortress), the similarities are understandable.
Also, the general consensus is that the main WWII airplane movie he borrowed from was 633 Squadron, though he also borrowed from other sources like The Dambusters and Twelve O’Clock High.
(I wrote a paper on this stuff for film class back in university. Got an A on it. I rule, clearly.)
As usual Misthi is right on target. “The Dambusters” is the main source of the shots that SW lovers shorthand as “Into the (Death Star) Trench”.
A curious case of life imitating art imitating life: Lucas even kept the look of WWII era turrets, with multiple facets of glass in a sort of octagonal shape with thick window frames, although there’s no reason to think that the Millennium Falcon couldn’t have had a frameless plexi dome. Now take a look at the window of the Cupola on the ISS, designed by engineers who were probably infants, or not born yet, when SW opened in 1977:
Actually, my argument is that 633 Squadron is the primary source, and The Dambusters is a secondary source. And then, there’s also The Bridges at Toko-Ri:
Specifically, the B-29 cockpit:
FYI: 2001 A Space Odyssey is being re-released in theatres:
Let’s not forget the rope swinging shot in Star Wars taken straight from the Flash Gordon serial…and the scrolling background…and the moving planet that destroys other planets…and…
The scrolling titles, it’s true, were used in some serials, but I think the origin of the SW title graphics was “Destination: Moon”.
Even back in ’77 writers said that Star Wars was “an affectionate tribute to the Saturday afternoon serials we all loved”. Lucas and Spielberg have occasionally said something like that, too. What’s odd is the timeline: Serials were essentially done in U.S. theaters by 1951 or 1952 and were mostly a rural thing by then. Lucas, born in 1944 and Spielberg, born in 1946, were unlikely to have actually seen much of them, let alone “loved” them. But it fits the myth, so….
Lucas was a child during the 1950s, at which time the old 1930s serials were being shown on television for the first time. That’s how he saw them, and how he grew up watching them. (I’m getting this from the fantastic book “The Making of Star Wars,” by J.W. Renzler.)
According to what I’ve read elswhere, during the early 1970s Lucas hit on the idea of doing a modern-day, big-budget take on an old serial. He came up with two possible premises for this movie: the first was an old-fashioned space opera, and the second featured an adventuring archaeologist.
This is why I always maintain that George Lucas only ever had one good idea, but it was a really good one. He’s been milking that idea for more than thirty years (though now, at least, he’s handed it on to someone new).
^ Given that the two franchises that grew out of those pulp serials are still recognized as some of the best things to come out of Hollywood, it suggests to me that there still a lot of entertainment to be found in the sort of storytelling that the pulps specialized in.
As I go back to read some of the old pulp adventure novels, I am surprised by just how entertaining they are. I guess I felt they would seem too dated. But it might be exactly that “datedness” that makes them work.
King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard — so freakin’ awesome. Nearly unputdownable. Far more enjoyable (and readable) than I ever expected.
Armageddon 2419 by Philip Francis Nowlan — sometimes a bit too wordy (and the sequel has some racial content that I didn’t care for), but the original “Buck Rogers” novel (he’s called “Tony” here) is an exciting story of scrappy rebels vs. tyrannical conquerors.
At the Earth’s Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs — Only just started this one, but so far so good. Burroughs does seem to rely on the Big Burly Man template for his protagonists, but given how burly men are treated today, it’s almost a breath of fresh air to feature one as an unabashed “hero.”
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs — Although screwed up by Disney marketing, the recent John Carter was quite good, and could have launched a major franchise. (Although I found the sequel novel not nearly as interesting.)
And of course, Sherlock Holmes is experiencing something of a revival lately, too.
If Hollywood is afraid of new ideas, there are always very very old stories to draw on that today’s young’uns know nothing about.
Interestingly, Disney’s rights on the John Carter of Mars series were not renewed, so there’s been a move to get those filmed again.
The Professor Challenger series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, starting with The Lost World is pretty good, too. Challenger was intended to be Doyle’s Anti-Holmes in most every way but brilliance. Doyle tired of Sherlock Holmes and even tried to kill the character off, but had to bring him up with the subsequent reader outrage. He later tried to drum up interest in this new character who was short, overweight, fully bearded, hot-tempered and impulsive. To market the first story, Doyle even donned a fake beard and posed with others for an “Expedition” Photo. Of course, Challenger never could challenge Holmes in popularity …
The Podcast is no longer recording, but if you haven’t heard any of “Protecting Project Pulp” that our own Fredosphere worked on, I recommend going back and listening. I’ve picked up several books because that show has introduced and re-introduced me to authors of old. A few of my new rediscoveries are C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, and William Hope Hodgson. After hearing some of their work, I went out and found a few books to read on my own.
I’m surprised that the Burroughs estate still has any rights to the stories. After all, the novels are available on gutenberg.org.
Yeah. They were among the first books I downloaded when I got a tablet with Kindle. Movie rights are another thing altogether, however. Apparently the estate has those rights again.
Hodgson – anyone read The Night Land? Finished it a few months ago, that would make a great movie, if done right.