A whole decade ago I blogged about a taxonomy of cliches in space opera, with a considerable checklists of things to watch out for in the space opera I was just then starting to work on.

This was almost entirely a background task for most of that time. During the period I was poking at the new space opera project I wrote: the Empire Games trilogy, the New Management trilogy, A Conventional Boy, The Labyrinth Index and The Regicide Report. So, nine other novels. Meanwhile the space opera went through two and a half rewrites, spawned a spin-off novel, and the spin-off novel is now getting its second rewrite, because Reasons (it has to be perfect: also, I'm going to go back to the original space opera next and finish that, too, probably next year, not to mention already having the first 50,000 words of a sequel.).

But anyway: the space opera project has resulted in maybe a third of a million words of fiction so far, and absolutely humongous quantities of world-building work. Which is why I'm now revisiting my earlier thoughts on space opera, to try to better understand what I'm doing here.

First, some clarification. What even is space opera, when it's at home?

While there's no short, concise definition of space opera, there's an extensive monograph on Space Opera in the SF Encyclopedia, tracing its roots back to the US pulp magazine sector around 1900 and following it to 1941, when Wilson Tucker defined it as the appropriate term for the "hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn": alternatively, space-adventure stories which have a calculatedly romantic element.

Let's stick a magnifying glass on top of that last phrase. Romaniticism in this context does not have anything to do with the romance genre of fiction (which focusses on love and relationships). Rather it's a shout-out to the romantic movement of the 18th to 19th centuries and its modern descendants, which prioritize passion, intuition, and individualism over social convention—the pursuit of beauty entails an interest in the exotic and mysterious, a celebration of the heroic and the divine, respect for the supernatural, and arguably the will to power and worship of force that took a darker turn in the fascist and totalitarian movements of the 20th century. Stick starships and light sabres and vast vistas of time and space on top of this and you can get an impression of where it's going.

As a romantic genre, space opera requires its protagonists to have enough agency (personal autonomy) to break out of their quotidian setting and have adventures—travel is a big part of this, for it cuts them free of the ties that bind, leaves family behind, and promises escape. To which end, the spaceship is central in space opera just as the sailing ship was key to the age of (ahem) sail. Trying to imagine Moby Dick or Master and Commander without sailing ships is like trying to imagine Star Trek or Star Wars without starships.

You can write romantic adventure-focussed SF without starships (use stargates/wormholes or just set it on a planet where adventure-shaped activities dominate the plot) but what you get then isn't space opera, it's a planetary romance.

(Planetary romance (the sub-genre Jack Vance was famous for) inherently places more constraints on what you can do with your fiction. You can't easily have a planetary setting which combines long travel times, high energy technologies and high population density, for example: long travel times imply no fast vehicles (no high speed rail or air travel, never mind spaceships), which are a side-effect of high energy technologies (internal combustion, gas turbines, big-ass electrical generators and HV grid of any kind) and you can't easily get to any of those things without a sufficiently high population density to support the industries that make them feasible (not just engineering and factories but universities and schools with mass literacy and mining) which in turn implies advanced agriculture—you've got to feed those cities somehow. (Memo to self: hunt down James Burke's Connections on video (they're somewhere on YouTube) and re-watch the series.) It also makes it difficult to justify sub-settings with wildly divergent levels of technology because that stuff leaks—to keep it out you need a North Korean level hermit kingdom, or totally impenetrable jungles that haven't been penetrated by colonialists, or something of that level. (NB: I have found a workaround for this, but I'm not going to spoiler the coming novels!)

Ultimately economics are your enemy if you want to write convincing romanticist fiction without turning into a fantasy-without-the-magic secondary world setting: all it takes is one country inventing capitalism and/or imperialism to muck it up for everybody else). And economics fucks with space opera too: ask yourself what markets plausibly exist for goods and services transported across interstellar distances, and after digesting Paul Krugman's Theory of Interstellar Trade (PDF) you may be left scratching your head.

My go-to answer for economics in space opera is that interstellar expansion/colonization is most plausibly driven by (a) religion ("manifest destiny" is a religious belief, built atop Genesis 9:7), or (b) escapist colonialism (but only if travel is cheap and compatible biospheres are abundant). In third place we probably get pyramid schemes (eg. Neptune's Brood by some guy called Stross: prior art for that one existed in the shape of colonial pyramid schemes, eg. the Darien Scheme which bankrupted Scotland, or the South Sea Bubble, which nearly bankrupted the British government a generation later). Then a long way down the list we get to trade in Veblen Goods, and maybe—if interstellar transport is very cheap—recreation. What the latter two items have in common is that they're status signifiers—the wealthy have been having yachting adventures while the peasants labor on their estates to pay for them for a very long time, and as for Veblen Goods, Faberge eggs are pretty obvious. So we have status as a driver for space opera: a side-effect of hierarchical social structures where the elite seek to maintain their status by signaling their affluence in various ways.

Did I mention hierarchical social structures and capitalism? The thing about capitalism is that it's a totalizing ideology, like the divine right of kings, or religious fundamentalism. It seeks converts, it refuses to be gainsaid, and it confers a competitive advantage on cultures that adopt it (as opposed to those that reject it). Yet, as Ursula le Guin said, "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings..."

Space opera embraces the romanticist outlook. This is inherently problematic, for it is capable of spawning totalitarian nightmares. To understand this point, I dare you to read Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto from 1909 and not recognize it both as a masterpiece of romantic rhetoric and as one of the founding texts of Fascism—very specifically the Italian Fascist movement (Nazism and Spanish clerico-fascism were later tumors on the rancid politics of violence and misogyny that Marinetti unleashed).

It's not possible to examine space opera, or planetary romance, and not acknowledge the pernicious fascistic imagery in both subgenres. Michael Moorcock wrote a magisterial essay about this nexus in the wake of Star Wars (the first movie): I strongly recommend reading his Starship Stormtroopers before pressing on if you're not already familiar with it.

Pace Le Guin, it is possible to write space opera that doesn't pander to fascism directly, as the late Iain M. Banks demonstrated. But even in his magisterial Culture series the pustules of fascism can easily be seen on the faces of the Culture's adversaries: from the Idiran imperialists to the Empire of Azad, perhaps most clearly in the character of the Affront, it takes a bad dose of fascism to introduce the romanticist element necessary for space opera to be perpetrated. Otherwise you're left with something like Inversions, which is a Culture novel with merely homeopathic traces of space opera remaining. Incidentally I make no apologies for assuming a familiar with the Culture novels on the part of the reader: if you haven't read it already, you're missing out, because it's the nearest thing I've seen to a refutation of the core conceit of might-makes-right inherent in the fascist strain of space opera. Iain wrote A Few Notes on the Culture in 1993 to explain what he was about: in particular, I was struck by this summary: The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there. ... Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

Totalizing ideologies like capitalism or Christian Nationalism aren't immutable, and opposition is possible. They rely on a perception of inescapability on the part of their subjects, and space opera should be the ideal fictional vehicle for escapism from such certainties: if our protagonists can board a starship and flee, there is in principle no reason why they can't shed the chains of a pernicious ideological system.

Now I want to cut to a different question. What about the human-scale story?

Space opera isn't usually a genre of high conceptual merit that tries to tell us something about the world we live in. It can be, in the hands of a determined author who knows what they're doing (I'm thinking specifically of Iain Banks, of Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, of some of Alastair Reynolds' work—notably House of Suns) but it's more often deployed as a giant shiny backdrop for human-scale drama. Fiction is generally the art of confabulating plausible lies that illuminate the human condition, but stars and galaxies exist on a very superhuman scale: if we took them seriously as a setting they'd dwarf the merely human concerns of the protagonists—the emotional cursors that traverses the story universe—into insignificance, as in the more philosophical works of Olaf Stapledon. (For a fine example, see Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear.) Most of us don't have the imaginative flexibility to conceive of time scales significantly longer than a human lifespan and vistas larger than a single planet (and even that is a recent development: I think before mass intercontinental air travel our imaginative horizons were far more constrained). So a common problem in space opera is for the scale of distances to collapse: modern authors tend to fall back on the durations of international air travel, rather than thinking in terms of age-of-sail voyages, let alone more realistic interstellar durations at slower than light speeds. (Honorable exception to that one: Alastair Reynolds, and to a lesser extent, Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Worlds stories and Ken Macleod's Engines of Light tetralogy.)

A side-effect of the romantic outlook is a demand for individual human agency—that is, that despite the vast scale of the backdrop, the protagonists have the ability to effect change, or at least to change their own circumstances. Here in the real world most of us are trapped by situational constraints: our employment system is parodied as wage slavery for a reason. Opportunities for adventure are scarce, and your chances of self-betterment are minimal. (You can found a business and spend 30 years trying to become a millionaire, most likely to end in ignominious failure, or you play the lottery, be it by explicit gambling or by speculation on the cryptocurrency markets, but the game is rigged against you from the start.) Money in large quantities, as capital, exerts a gravitational attraction and we are individually just dust particles. So space opera tends to focus on protagonists who acquire individual agency, have adventures that take them away from the quotidian grind, and let them change themselves or the worlds around them.

A classic plot skeleton for this sort of fiction is the Hero's Journey template, as popularized by Joseph Campbell and demonstrated by George Lucas in Star Wars, and it's less-familiar-to-many sibling, the Heroine's Journey: interestingly the Heroine's Journey can be seen as an explicit rejection of the frenetic diktat of Futurism even though it's compatible with space opera, as demonstrated magisterially by Lois McMaster Bujold, whose Vorkosigan series is bookended by a Heroine's Journey narrative (starting in Shards of Honor, continuing in Barrayar, finally winding up in Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen)—and which holds the singular record for most Hugo awards for a single SF series (so this isn't just my opinion). Character development lives at the heart of both these templates, and I suspect you can't have a working space opera without the scope for such changes.

To briefly hark back to the Futurist/fascist imagery inherent in space opera: the Vorkosigan series is arguably Ruritanian romantic space opera set against a recognizable 19th century central European flavoured empire. (It's no accident that space opera emerged at the end of the age of empires, the turn of the 20th century.) Our main viewpoint character, Cordelia Vorkosigan, is a woman with modern sensibilities who effects change in that society to great effect, working largely behind the scenes as a noblewoman in that setting—indeed, that's the nature of her modified Heroine's Journey arc. (Assuming, of course, that you buy either the Hero's Journey or Heroine's Journey templates, both which are heavily influenced by Jungian psychology and early-to-mid 20th century conceptions of masculine and feminine gender identity, all of which are highly problematic in my opinion.)

Ultimately, though, the romanticist aesthetic is inimical to social convention and formalism—and also to sustainability. The romantic impulse renders space opera antithetical to solarpunk. A fictional setting composed entirely of wild individualists isn't going to end up as some sort of libertarian utopia, it's going to be a cat ranch: meanwhile someone needs to stay behind and tend the home fires, someone has to mind the grain silos on that "small farming planet", someone else needs to manage the shipyard that repairs the interstellar freighter. There's a lot of implied background in space opera, a civilization with enough surplus wealth production to build and operate starships, and this implies some degree of continuity—continuity of biosphere stability (or there'll be nothing to eat), continuity of infrastructure (including education/apprenticeships, to train/socialize the starship crews), continuity of the society our adventurer-protagonists emerged from. Social structures, governance, and politics are a given in every human society, and the romantic movement emerged from a very specific context that coincided with the age of enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Our protagonists are either privileged enough to transcend the daily grind or sufficiently motivated to take a hideous gamble with their own safety. And this tells us something about the constraints within which space operatic storytelling takes place—and my work-in-progress in particular.

Any questions?

I remember two bronze plaques in an Emporia park, each cast with the anguished writing of a father recounting the death of his 16-year-old daughter. I was only 8 years old, but the words of William Allen White in Emporia’s Peter Pan Park left a permanent impression.

I didn’t understand what a newspaper editor or columnist did back then, but I surely knew White was important. A bronze bust of the Emporia Gazette editor and publisher watches over the park from between those bronze plaques, after all.

My family only lived in Emporia a year, nearly four decades ago now, but I never forgot how one man captured a profound event of his life with indelible words. Those plaques, I’ve come to believe, represent the beginning of my lifelong fascination with commentary writing and opinion journalists. I became a writer and editor myself, and now my book on the topic has arrived in bookstores.

That fascination didn’t stop with William Allen White. When my family moved to El Dorado in the early 1990s, I frequently heard stories about longtime El Dorado Times editor Rolla Clymer. His name adorns a room at the library, a local pond and a property development. His collection of editorials about the sweeping Flint Hills landscape could be purchased across town.

In the early 2000s, I attended the University of Kansas (and the William Allen White journalism school) in Lawrence. It didn’t seem peculiar to watch Lawrence Journal-World editor and publisher Dolph Simons Jr. write weekly columns that enraged or amused locals. This was what Kansas newspaper editors were supposed to do, I reasoned.

By that time I had decided to make journalism my career, and that fact seemed self-explanatory that no one needed to voice it. The history of Kansas and its towns was defined by opinion writers and commentators, those men and women who wrote about daily life in the pages of community newspapers.

Since then, journalism has gone through tumultuous shifts. Newspapers have shrunken or closed, and local opinion writing has all but vanished from the number that remain.

Figures like White and Clymer and Simons were not just flashes in the pan. They worked for decades. They strengthened their cities and built bonds with residents. While they were not perfect — none would have claimed to be — they provided an essential civic good.

They helped Kansas know itself.

I’ve written a book that’s coming out Tuesday called “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now.” It’s published by the good folks of the University Press of Kansas.

My book isn’t just about old white men. It’s about old women, too — including the indomitable Mamie Boyd, who worked and wrote through her 97th birthday in 1973. It’s about legendary Black journalists like Lucile Bluford of Kansas City and Hollie T. Simms of Wichita.

It’s about Soviet-curious socialists like Emanuel Haldeman-Julius of Girard, whose Little Blue Books spread the classics to teenagers of America. And it’s about homemakers like Lindsborg’s Donna Burough Opat, who raised nine children while writing a column for the Salina Journal.

These people told the stories of Kansas. These people were Kansas. There was little distinction between their words and the lives they lived. For those of us devoted to local journalism, that has always been the case.

Recently, opinion writing has come to mean something else. It’s come to mean something more partisan and performative, more focused on horse races than hometowns.

As local journalism struggled, local opinion pages withered or disappeared. At the same time, a national political entertainment complex developed, treating deeply held personal beliefs as fodder for ratings. That approach trickled back down to the local level, where commentary began to be seen as destructively divisive.

For anyone who has followed the travails of local news media, this should sound familiar.

What I couldn’t forget or overlook is how popular opinion writing remains among readers. Americans may have a dim view of national talking heads, but they gobble up opinion pieces like a hungry teenager devouring chicken nuggets.

National newspapers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post maintain expensive editorial page staffs. Magazines including the Atlantic and Harper’s commission lengthy think pieces about current affairs. Meanwhile, digital platforms such as Substack attract millions of readers for opinionated posts.

In my five years at Kansas Reflector, I’ve seen it happen repeatedly. During our legislative session, from January through March, news stories predictably attract the most readers. But for the rest of the year, columns and opinion pieces from a diverse assortment of Kansans frequently take the top-read spot at our website.

People enjoy reading local opinion — yes, even if they disagree with it.

My favorite comment from readers? “I like your column, but I don’t agree with everything you write.”

That’s the whole point of writing opinion and running an opinion section, in White’s day or the present. Serious opinion journalists devote their careers to making people examine their preconceptions and engage in a dialogue about the future of their communities.

In the words of Iola Register editor and publisher Angelo Scott, whose 1958 speech on this subject help inspire my book:

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. His first book, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now,” comes out Sept. 29 from the University Press of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

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Hovertext:
And when Babbage arrived the whole thing was actually running on a series of Pascalines.

...in 70mm IMAX!

I kind of regret it. I saw it at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood - like, real downtown Hollywood, the part of Hollywood with the stars on the sidewalk and the smelly guys in Spiderman outfits. The picture in the theater was massive but the audio in that theater is pretty crazy, and the movie is full of deep, rumbly sounds which swallowed the entire mix and made it impossible to hear what anyone was saying clearly.

That rumbling is sometimes supposed to be thunder, and it's often relevant to the conversation or to the decisions the characters make, because they take it as a sign from Zeus that he approves or disapproves of things happening in the scene. I didn't realize this until halfway through the movie because I could not tell that it was thunder! It was just boneshaking growling to me.

Anyway, that's my first big complaint out of the way - I think I need to see this movie again in non-IMAX, because I think I'd enjoy it more if I could hear what everyone was saying. I did enjoy it! I had a great time. I think it's a great movie.

There's been a lot of hay made about adaptation and the Odyssey's choices in adaptation. I actually think it's good for the movie to be so 2026 in its choices. There's no point in pretending like your adaptation says nothing, or in pretending like you aren't present inside it. The movie embraces being an adaptation and it embraces the attempt to wedge a modern thematic arc into an ancient story. This work is essential, I think, if you're going to make big budget shit. Adaptation which takes the present moment into account is why we still know and care about ancient myth.

The movie seems aware of the burden and opportunity associated with making a massive-budget summer blockbuster out of it. It feels like Nolan is aware that he was making the most 2026 Odyssey ever, and that if he did a good job, this could stand a good chance of becoming one of the things we point to in the future when we want to talk about what the mid-2020s were like. It's Trauma Odysseus. Why not? Making Trauma Odysseus says something about who we are today.

I thought Damon was a great choice in the end. I struggled with Jon Bernthal Menelaus, partially because he seems like he's just playing the same guy he always does, but I bought him in the end, too. Anne Hathaway is great. Robert Pattinson is doing his Goblin Man deal again after Mickey 17, and this is also great. John Leguizamo is a ton of fun. They really juice the big important moments, and everyone is acting their butts off, and it's very inspiring and fun to think about how this story has affected all the storytelling I've ever known. All the movie shit that feels like Movie Shit is actually just from the Odyssey. Coming out of the theater, my friends and I were going over how most of the moments which feel Hollywood in this story - the reunions, the twists, the fuckin dog - are just original to the story. Storytelling is so cool!!!

One thing I did not enjoy about the story was the fact, however, that all the characters keep discussing the Bronze Age collapse and the Sea Peoples. I admire and again think it's important to try wedging a modern thematic arc into your adaptations, but this one felt like a miss to me. Odysseus is Odysseus. He is not a 20th century scholar. He should not be discussing the Sea Peoples using the phrase "the sea people."

You can keep that shit if you rephrase it! He could say, "Wow, it feels like the world is getting more violent and dangerous. We constantly hear stories about people coming to pillage and kill from the ocean. That's so crazy. Can those people even read? Ever since the Trojan War it feels like society is falling apart." But saying "the sea peoples" in a movie like this feels like hitting me in the head with a frying pan. I don't like it!

Anyway, strong recommend. Watch the movie! It's fun! I think I might see it a second time!! I might even read the Odyssey. I read the Illiad in 6th grade, I read all the boat chapters because nobody told me it was okay to skip them, but I've never read a translation of the Odyssey. I took Latin for six years in middle school and high school but all of that is slipping out of my soup brain now that I'm old. I should know about this shit! It's fun to know about!