Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

When the general public thinks of science fiction, they most often think of one kind of SF – space opera. In such a story, action forms the plot, usually in a space battle or on another planet. It’s the Buck Rogers of 1930s and 1940s radio and Saturday matinee dramas.

This type of science fiction also is known as a “space western” because it largely adapts the conventions of the Western genre to space: horses become spaceships and Indians become aliens. To a large degree, it utilizes “used furniture” and in part because of it is rarely critically acclaimed.

This is not say that all space operas are bad. “A Mote in God’s Eye” by Larry Niven and James Pournelle, for example, stands out as a worthy work in this genre.

Space opera is characterized by a number of conventions:

n Good guys - The two-fisted hero, the brilliant but eccentric scientist and his beautiful daughter all inhabit this genre.

n Bad guys - Our good guys invariably must confront invaders from space, space pirates, interplanetary smugglers, space dictator and his henchmen or other evil-doers.

n Dazzling new invention - To resolve conflict, good guys usually have to devise a dazzling new invention and then fight the bad guy in hand-to-hand or ship-to-ship battle with the dazzling new invention playing a key role in the victory.

n Heaps of non-explained technology - Space opera isn’t about science. It’s about good guys defeating bad guys and the neat gizmos they use to do it. How the gizmos work is irrelevant.

Given these characteristics, space opera isn’t concerned about internal conflicts among the characters, or at least none of worth. As there are no incompatible desires and aims to drive the story, the story typically becomes no more than mindless, pointless violence. It’s the kind of story we love as kids – and really only love as adults either because we fall in a nostalgic mood or because we haven’t quite yet grown up.