Deploying the monomyth in Space Opera

One of my personal favorite writers, Charlie Stross, wrote an excellent post about Monomyths and Space Opera a while back. An excerpt of this is below and you can click the link at the end to read it all.

#

So: in the ongoing investigation of space opera, I’ve looked at cliches, I’ve tried to come up with a rough definitional rule of thumb … but I’ve avoided what’s possibly the largest elephant in the room, namely, plot structures.

A key aspect of space opera is that it’s about epochal events and larger-than-life characters. Most genres can be written to work in a variety of modes; for example, consider the difference in the level of melodrama in spy thrillers betwee James Bond and Graham Greene’s The Human Factor. Similarly, high fantasy can be quietly introspective and pastoral, or focus on the clash of kings and dark lords, and horror can run the scale/focus gamut from The Yellow Wallpaper to The Stand.

But space opera is different: it’s almost impossible to conceive of a space opera with a plot that revolves around the eqivalent of a middle-aged English professor’s mid-life crisis as he carries on a furtive affair with one of his female students under the nose of his long-suffering wife (the somewhat cruel stereotype of the MFA-approved Great American Novel). I mean, you could do it, but your professor would have had to have invented a new type of FTL drive that threatens to revolutionize interstellar travel, the student is a spy from a cartel of space traders and is trying to get the blueprints out of him before she stabs him in the kidneys (because: lecherous middle-aged prof, ew), and his wife—the professor of political science at Galactic U—is actually a retired assassin (and just wait ’til she finds out about the student). Into the middle of this quiet literary novel of academic infidelity and domestic lies, we then add an evil religious cult of alien space bat worshipers who want to steal the new space drive to equip their battle fleet when they sweep in from the Orion Arm to bring fire, the blaster, and the holy spacebat inquisition to the Federation, and when they kidnap the professor his wife and his grad student have to work out their differences to get him back before he cracks under (well-deserved) torture and gives the fanatics the ultimate weapon …