OTHER WORLDS: Explorations in Space Opera

Ted Colless and Leon Marvell

“Space opera” is the tag for a subgenre of science fiction that unashamedly chases imaginative adventure and the romance of travel across planets, star systems and galaxies. It can include melodramatic stories of individual exploration as well as the sagas of business families or clans staking colonial claims in outer space, as well as warfare between vast galactic empires. To call these stories “operatic” doesn’t mean they’re sung (although there are instances of this!), but that—whether literary, cinematic or graphic art— they usually deliver spectacle with a good dose of histrionic special effects.