A few months ago, Harper Collins released an anthology called The New Space Opera, which includes faves like Dan Simmons and Stephen Baxter, but also several hot new authors who are reinventing a genre whose name was originally intended as an insult. In the 1940s, scifi megafan Wilson Tucker derided bad pulp fiction by comparing it to the ladies' genre of soap operas. At the time, it was a kind of "you're a bunch of sissies" insult to books and movies that were supposed to be the most manly of the manly.

These days, though, space opera really is a pure blend of ladies' soap and manly warfare. Probably the best example is Ken Macleod, a Scottish writer included in the HarperCollins anthology whose books seamlessly combine interstellar political intrigue with sexual entanglements that rival those in any episode of Tip/Tuck. A good place to start with Macleod is his novel Newton's Wake: A Space Opera. It combines interstellar black market gang rivalry with several sexy subplots involving genetically-engineered gay people, a woman with a nanotech brain, and several love-struck clones.

Space opera is also being reinvented on Battlestar Galactica, where romantic entanglements between Cylon and human are at least as crucial to the plot as the battle scenes. And you can expect an even bigger helping of space opera in the upcoming movie version of Ender's Game, in which strange incestuous entanglements and other family melodramas unfold against a backdrop of space battles and alien invasion. Long live the new space opera!

SPACE PRISON [is] as bleak and horrible a book as you'll find in science fiction. Four thousand humans are dropped on a high-gravity planet, rejected by a slaving alien invasion force. One thousand one hundred of them die during the first night. And it really doesn't get any more cheerful from there. [Author] Tom Godwin, on almost every page, says to the reader, "oh, you liked this character? He falls off a mountain now. That one? Dies of exposure. This one? Eaten by goats. That one? Stabbed into meaty chunks by psychotic unicorns." And on and on. I must have read that book twenty times. It just rips along (in many senses of the word "rips"), as shamelessly gleeful as a short genre book should be.

Space Prison by Tom Godwin [Project Gutenberg, via Warren Ellis]

In "Boom Town," which aired during the first season of the new Doctor Who series, our time traveling hero goes to Cardiff in Wales and discovers that a bunch of overweight city planners are building dangerous power plants. For some reason, these city planners are also prone to farting, which they follow up with polite English excuses ("oh dear happens to everyone! must have been the curry!") Turns out, however, that these farters are actually aliens called the Slitheens who because they're too big for the human body suits they're wearing and therefor are always having to let off a little, erm, gas. Though universally loathed by fans, the Slitheens showed up in other episodes, and later starred in a story from the Doctor Who spinoff series Sarah Jane.

Are farts sort of like a wacky gas version of the Danger Drool in Alien? Possibly, though as a counter-example there are Rygel's nervous helium farts in Farscape, which cause him and his human pal Crichton to speak in high voices when they're trapped in a fart-saturated capsule.

Maybe farts don't always equal death, but it's definitely a sign that creators are scraping the bottom of the barrel when conspiracies are unveiled by bad guys who cut the cheese.