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Space Opera Has Come Of Age — But Has It Left Humans Behind?
San Francisco, 11:59 AM
Thu Dec 10
27 posts in the last 24 hours
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05/05/09
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05/05/09
Also, make fun of it all you want, but shouldn't someone get shot with a damn blaster in Space Opera? If you're going to write a telenovella in space, however gussied up with fancy science talk, you can't skip the intergalactic equivalent of the sinister dude with a moustache and a gun. It's like picking up a short story collection called "The New Wild West," that's all about guys actually herding cattle, and never shooting someone over a poker game.
05/05/09
Maybe I'm the kind of reader the DelReys were thinking of back in the 1970s (Grodd knows, I'm the right age). I read Science Fiction for the fun of it. I never avoid the Deep Thoughts and tricky new science, but I'm really there for the thrilling action and characters. In the end it's all about entertainment.
05/05/09
05/05/09
I don't agree that short stories inappropriate for space opera. Let's remember that Niven, before he wrote novels like Ringworld, World of Ptaavs, Gift from Earth and others, had laid most of the foundation of Known Space with more than 5 years worth of short stories and novellas in magazines.
If anything I think that part of the brief decline of science fiction in the late 80s was due to this overemphasis on long, usually forced to be overly long, novels. Authors realized that they'd get paid more for writing huge, doorstop-sized books and this gave us endless guff.
Only a few writers can really pull huge books off (Hell yeah, Stephenson!) but all writers shouldn't try to force a story to be too short or too long, readers can spot this and see the decline in quality when the writer is forcing it for money.
Me, I kinda miss the old days when short story and novella collections were king.
However I do agree that stories that focus on alien or artificial creatures with superhuman intelligence are hard to write and often hard to sympathize with. Vinge handled this pretty well in A Fire Upon the Deep by inventing some bizarre physics to keep the superintelligences off the screen so we could focus on the human element.
05/05/09
Still, I'm surprised that Jay Lake's offering left me so cold. He has always been a wizard at the short story. Perhaps it's because of the focus on posthuman characters. In that story they avoid dealing with the mere human relationships they had way back when. It is kinda interesting to see them squirm, but at the same remove that a student has looking at paramecium through a microscope. Maybe he meant it that way.
05/05/09
Science fiction has always been struggling with how to depict, how to entertainingly depict, ETs and superhumans from the very, very beginning. Odd John, Flowers for Algernon and Slan are three early examples.
I guess the challenge for writers these days is that technological trends seem to indicate that superhuman intelligence is going to be a lot more ubiquitous than we previously thought--so it's not just small elite of superhumans but it's nearly everyone who is going to be.
This is something that seems without precedent in human history but< I don't think that's really true. How about Native Americans growing up on a reservation? How about the Amish? How do they look at our global society as we hurtle into the future?
The Native American or Native Hawaiian example is particularly relevant. Each nation or tribe is under a constant pressure. They have to decide how adopt various expects of outside modern life without losing their cultural distinctness. How do they revive nearly destroyed aspects of their culture while still plotting their own path into the future?
This is something we'll all face in a future of ubiquitous artificial life and superhuman intelligence.
05/05/09
I would really like to see an advancement of morality as well as intellect, but am afraid that the former will be the first thing the supermen will shed.
This is probably from seeing people applying Nietzsche badly.
Tell me for true, as someone who "wants to see the last stars burn out", won't there be an ugly divide between the Ascended and the mere animal humans? I think any advanced population will always want an underclass. It ain't right, but it human nature no matter how smart they get.
05/05/09
05/05/09
"...the early adopters will convert the rest of us into extra processing power...."
It's a very real fear. Humans seem to be converting much of the biodiversity on this planet into more human biomass. The pattern of behavior may still hold as we scale things up. The scary thing is that it may not really be out of spite so much as indifference or neglect.
This is a really big question and I've yet to see a good answer for it.
"I would really like to see an advancement of morality as well as intellect...."
Well, again, everything seems to be scaling up. It's not that these new creatures will be more evil or more good, it's that their capacity to do evil or good is greatly magnified. For them vaporizing a planet is on the same scale as mistakenly stepping on an earthworm in the rain. Galactus occasionally feels something like guilt, or maybe even mild revulsion, as he eats life-rich planets, as we would when we step on an earthworm.
That's the real horror behind Lovecraft's stories. His primordial space creatures aren't really evil so much as indifferent to our suffering. They aren't really gods or demons, they just are hyperadvanced ETs that look that way to our limited understanding.
But look at the flipside. If you are cat or a dog, humans have done your species enormous goods without even breaking a sweat. Maybe this is the future in store for us. "We'll make great pets" as Porno for Pyros says.
05/05/09
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05/05/09
Love me those Culture novels. Big time.
05/05/09
For all the future-casting "won't it be cool when we're all disembodied gods with Ray Kurzweil forever and ever" chatter, I just want people, weird people, mutant people, robo-people, coming up against problems. That's just good fiction.
05/05/09
05/05/09
Currently reading the Lt. Leary series by David Drake. Now that is good space opera.
05/05/09
Honestly, I prefer Military SF to Posthuman stuff, but that's because I am not sufficiently evolved or whatever.
05/04/09
Best stuff I've come across since I first red Stephenson.
05/05/09
05/04/09
Star Trek has military tradition and Star Wars has religious mysticism.
These connect with fundamental emotions that science don't need to jive with.
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05/04/09
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05/04/09
I'll probably get this from the library so I can skip the not-space-opera-enough stories.
05/04/09
I LOVE Watts (Blindsight is a work of genius, as everything else of his), for instance, but give me a Banksie any day, even a rambly one.
05/04/09
05/04/09
Say what? Aldiss enthusiastically edited anthologies of old space opera (Space Opera and Galactic Empires). I don't have as blatant counter-evidence in the case of the other two, but I question whether you've correctly represented their attitudes.
05/04/09
"When Aldiss edited Space Opera in 1974, ... In his introduction, he pronounced space opera dead, except as a hothouse cultivation: Essentially space opera was born in the pulp magazines, flourished there, and died there. It is still being written, but in the main by authors who owe their inspiration and impetus to the pulps.
He presented space opera as a guilty pleasure for readers of good, serious SF: This is not a serious anthology. Both volumes burst with voluptuous vacuum. They have been put together to amuse."
[www.sfrevu.com]