To get to the new, sometimes you have to catch up on the old. In this Big Idea for the New Adventures in Space Opera anthology, editor Jonathan Strahan takes you on a quick journey through the genre, and lands you on the frontier of exploration in the form.
JONATHAN STRAHAN:
Everything you need to know about New Adventures in Space Opera is right there in the title. Well, pretty much. New Adventures… is the book I put together because I love space opera and wanted to know what happened next. It’s that simple.
I began reading space opera in the early 1970s. I was a precocious reader. I found Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy at the local library when I was seven and was hooked. From that time on science fiction was most of what I read. and a lot of the science fiction that I read was space opera. There was Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov, of course. And ‘Doc’ Smith , Jack Williamson, A.E van Vogt, Piper and Vance. There were a lot of imperial navies, clashing battles, exploding universes and such. And it felt like that would never change, which at the time I was very happy about. Through the ’70s and ’80s there was Niven, Brin, Card, Cherryh, Bujold, and many more. Space opera was changing, though I wasn’t really aware of it the time.
The space operas I read during the 1980s were different from the ones I’d read in my teens. Perhaps in response to a famous call by Interzone editors for a new radical hard SF, or perhaps it was in response to economic and political trends in the US, UK, and elsewhere, but just as cyberpunk was emerging in the US so too was a new kind of space opera. The old stuff was still there, in books from David Brin and Orson Scott Card and others, but in the UK particularly Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, M. John Harrison, and Colin Greenland were sketching out a darker, more political kind of space opera that was less interested in tales of imperial war and manifest destiny and more interested in the stories of the people who were affected by the other end of the stories…
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Source: The Big Idea: Jonathan Strahan
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