The Space Opera as Literature?

Books, comics, TV, music
1

Ok, now that I’ve got your attention with a suitably monocle-wearing thread title, lemme give you a setup and then beg you all for suggestions.

When I was a kid, I loved Star Wars, and loved it a lot. I think I dug sci-fi stuff during my high school days too–I sure don’t remember hating it, and the SSI game “Freedom In The Galaxy” (memo to Mr. Tom Chick–that’s the game you couldn’t recall the title to in the 3 Moves Ahead podcast last week!) was a favorite of mine. I read Battlefield Earth in high school, and–blissfully ignorant of the Hubbard trappings behind the novel–I loved it. Then college arrived, and I took Astronomy 80 for my science with lab credit…and discovered much to my dismay that college-level Astronomy courses have this nasty, nasty pestilence intertwined with almost every aspect of the coursework: they have math. Who knew? I didn’t, and I suck at non-accounting style math.

I think that was the point where I decided I loathed sci-fi and especially all things “space”. I’ve crossed my arms in front of me and turned up my nose at every flavor of Star Trek or Babylon 5 on television for years. Games set in futuristic space-ish settings did nothing for me. Sci Fi and the Space Opera genre were cold porridge to me, and I wanted none.

Funny thing happened to me this month. Looking for an rpg to play, I grabbed Mass Effect off D2D for twenty bucks. And…I don’t hate it. I actually am having a very good time, even if I’m utterly lost in some of the trappings of the game that I suspect people with deeper backgrounds in familiar milieus navigate easily. I started watching BSG (7 episodes into the first season, thanks) and I’m really enjoying that, and quite a bit.

So now here’s the thing. This is a whole new genre to me. I have a hankering to read some good stuff in the genre but I haven’t the foggiest idea where to start. I’ve always figured that if someone expressed interest in typical fantasy genre tropes, you could easily say “Check out Tolkein, check out the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, and look at GRRM and SOIAF” and get someone off to a very nice, huge backlog of essential reading in those genres. Well here I am looking for the space opera equivalent. I’m not looking for plausible science; my problem with a lot of classic sci-fi authors is that once they start throwing out terms and usages from high school physics class, I can actually feel my own eyes rolling into the back of my head.

So…any help out there? What should a newb like me be looking to read? I’m pretty much allergic to Star Trek, and am looking for something that manages to be well-written enough to perhaps rise above some of the genre fiction trappings.

2

So… you haven’t read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Robot series? That’s where you start. Start from the beginning, and for now avoid books he wrote after 1960 or so. Asimov was considered “hard” sci-fi for his time but there’s nothing like the endless strings of scientific and technical terms that some modern writers employ, and the focus of his stories is on political, social and philosophical issues.

3

Dune also sounds like a likely candidate. Also, and especially if you never got around to watch the show, the Robotech novels might be a somewhat guilty pleasure.

4

No. No Dune. I was tricked into that series once.

5

As always, I highly recommend the Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It is a mostly hard sci-fi look at a future colonization of Mars, and touches upon a lot of subjects relevant to our society today, like terrorism, environmentalism, economy, etc. Awesome awesome series. In fact, now I might have to go read them again. It also has a sweeping, almost space operatic storyline that follows the original settlers through the years as the terraforming happens.

Another place to look, if you are interested in hard sci-fi, is the list of Hugo Award Winning novels, most of which I can recommend (although there are fantasy ones on there also… not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

7

If you’re after Space Opera then you won’t go wrong with Peter F. Hamilton. His Night’s Dawn Trilogy (beginning with The Reality Dysfunction) is great fun. The Commonwealth Saga (begins with Pandora’s Star) is a great read as well. My biggest criticism is that there’s a streak of misogyny running through some of his books, particularly the Commonwealth Saga, that I found a little off-putting. Still worth a read though.

8

Ursula Le Guin’s sci-fi stuff is really good. I especially recommend The Lathe of Heaven and The Dispossessed.

Otherwise, Asimov is fantastic, especially his short stories and the Foundation books, Arthur C. Clarke is really interesting and quite “different”, and once you’ve worked your way through a few of those, you’ll have a pretty good idea whether or not you want to keep exploring. ;)

9

Hmm. Night’s Dawn trilogy is available for the Kindle for 8 bucks.

I like the idea of Asimov, but all too frequently he just loses me and I never catch up; I will happily admit to not being smart enough (or at least not smart enough in the right areas) to appreciate his obvious, empirical genius.

10

PF Hamilton’s characters are also extremely dull. This contributes to the feeling sometimes that reading his work is like reading the history of a place as it would be written up in The Economist.

I highly recommend anything by Neal Stephenson, which isn’t really Space Opera, but is extremely good sci-fi / cyberpunk. Even his baroque cycle, which is historic fiction, takes his love of ‘networks’ to an older period. Works well.

11

I suspect the first Space Opera I loved was Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, which I read as the early ones were coming out as a teenager. PLAYER OF GAMES should work for almost anyone on this forum for obvious reasons. USE OF WEAPONS was the best of the early ones. Fans of Halo should read CONSIDER PHLEBAS.

KG

12

I second the recommendation for Ursula Le Guin stuff.

For sci-fi recommendations as wanky as the thread title deserves, I recommend Nova by Samuel Delaney and Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. Two of my favourite books. They both have interesting, energetic premises, don’t overstay their welcome, and are liberally sprinkled with stuff to get all poncey and literary over. Nova established a lot of Space Opera tropes we take for granted now, whilst also explicitly tying it in to the ancient quest narrative and providing some seriously interesting insight on colonialism and race. Stars My Destination is The Count of Monte Cristo reimagined via 50s-proto-cyberpunk. The synesthesia section is one of my favourite uses of form in any novel.

Lords of Light by Roger Zelazny is another favourite of mine. Imagine a book based on the science/magic quote by Arthur C. Clarke that everyone trots out, liberally mixed with Hindu spiritualism. Again, pacey, pointed, contains laserbeams in abundance, but enough there for the literary side of the brain to chew on.

A lot of sci-fi tends to devolve all too quickly in too quasi-scientific airport potboilers that go on for a million pages solely to appease 'spergin fans. Not a fan of that sort of thing, myself, so I tend to avoid anything multi-volume. YMMV.

13

Pretend there is no Dune series. Just Dune all by itself is plenty.

People seem to love the Honor Harrington books but I’ve never given them a fair chance.

Ringworld by Larry Niven is fun.

I never get tired of Steel Beach by John Varley.

14

Alfred Bester’s “The Stars My Destination”. Loooooooooove this book. Wild and rollicking space adventure written by a guy who was clearly in love with language. You’ll dig it.

15

They put that up right after I got my kindle, which is coincidently after I dropped probably 5 times that on the paper reprints. I enjoy his novels, but it’s not at the top of my list of recomendations.

Also, you seriously didn’t like the first Dune novel? I can understand the subsequent books, but the first?

My favorite SciFi series would be The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict by Stephen R. Donaldson. It’s pretty dark and twisted with a bit too much sex for my tastes, but the introduced alien race truly made my skin crawl.

16

I third, fourth and fifth The Stars My Destination. Also Le Guin, especially Left Hand of Darkness.

17

My advice with the Donaldson would be to just endure through the first short novella. It’s really sleight and doesn’t give an impression of what the rest of the books do. Linking to the thread about sexual hang-ups, there’s a mass of dodgy stuff going on herein, but there’s also the sense that Donaldson is both aware of it and not trying to normalise it.

Or I could be wrong. It’s been a while, and I always like monsters.

Most impressive feat is just how the fucking thing motors. After the first volume, it doesn’t slow down until the last 50 pages. For over a thousand pages, that impressed the hell out of me.

KG

19

Second Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn and Donaldson’s the Gap series.

Night’s Dawn was my intro to SF books and hooked me hard. It’s an “everything and the kitchen sink and then some” kind of series encompassing all genres. Takes a little while to get going though. It can be technical at times, but Hamilton has a very accessible style.

I’ve seen people refer to The Gap as ASoIaF in space and that’s a pretty apt comparison. It’s probably perfect for you in the sense that Donaldson isn’t much on the science stuff either. The big caveat is the one mentioned above- read “The Real Story” but understand that it’s really nothing like the following four books.

20

Trig, I was in your boat - with the exception that all the details outside of not being into Sci Fi in my highschool/college years are different - and now I’m not. I got some excellent suggestions from Chris Gwinn to help me along. I’ll pass my thoughts you:

  1. I’m a big John Scalzi fan. I really liked Old Man’s War (first book in the series) Ditto the second book, The Ghost Brigades is not a true sequel (same universe, and is set chronologically after book 1, fwiw) so you don’t need to read them in a particular order. Books 3 and 4 are sequels to the combined events of War and Brigades.

It’s got minimal trappings of hard science mixed with what I like to think of as magic science. Faster than light travel, e.g. The books are not particularly long and quick reads.

  1. The Foundation - Isaac Asimov. I’ve read something like 3-4 of the foundation novels. I like the series less as it goes on, but I think the first few are really good. It’s space opera-ish. I’ve never read any of the robot stuff, FWIW.

  2. Snow Crash - people told me I would love this book but I didn’t love it. I did like it, though. It’s got fun/magic technology, a sense of humor, and a pretty cool internet of the future.

  3. Ender’s Game - I really liked it but I haven’t continued with the series. Card seems kind of flakey, so I probably won’t change that any time soon.

  4. The Miles Vorkosigan books - very space-operaish. Take Tyrion Lannister, remove the obvious facial deformaties, and put him in a universe that is ultimately much brighter than Martin’s and won’t turn the central character’s bitterness into the white-hot-hatred-fueled kind. And that’s the Miles Vorkosigan books. Fun action/adventure stories, it follows our hero through a variety of adventures starting with his enterance rejection to a famed military academy. I’ve read the first 3 books and really enjoyed them.

21

To lighten things up a little, I would recommend Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers by Harry Harrison. It’s actually a parody of the classic space opera genre.

22

Apparently Vance was asked by his publisher to write a ‘space opera’ and this is what he came up with - a literal space opera novel, about an opera company, um, in space…

Not too bad a read, either, although not up to his usual standards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Opera_(novel)