Re:Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera (2016)
by TheOtherHobbes on Monday September 06, 2021 @07:22AM
(#28432610)
This reduces to "Space Opera is 1950s/60s US TV in Space"
Which is almost tautological.
It's very difficult to do free-form SF that isn't rooted in familiar cultural tropes because readers need something relatable to stand on.
Something like Dune is probably as far as you can go without falling off the edge of the world.
It has exotic elements - drug-producing giant worms, drug-induced space navigation, and so on - but it's really just a novel about colonisation and imperial politics. Everything - including the worms, the spice, the fremen, and the BG - is a metaphor for different vectors of power.
If you wrote a novel where humans were a kind of cancerous fruiting body evolved by an intelligent forest - not too far from the truth, in a very lateral way - it would be far too weird for most readers because it would be too distant from familiar experience.
Carping about hard SF details is beside the point, even when the points are valid. It's trying to turn fiction into engineering, which is not what fiction is for.
Most readers don't give extra points for build-ability in SF, and if they did writers would be left with a very small imaginative space to explore - the one we have now, where everything is chemical rockets and budgeting.
Which is almost tautological.
It's very difficult to do free-form SF that isn't rooted in familiar cultural tropes because readers need something relatable to stand on.
Something like Dune is probably as far as you can go without falling off the edge of the world.
It has exotic elements - drug-producing giant worms, drug-induced space navigation, and so on - but it's really just a novel about colonisation and imperial politics. Everything - including the worms, the spice, the fremen, and the BG - is a metaphor for different vectors of power.
If you wrote a novel where humans were a kind of cancerous fruiting body evolved by an intelligent forest - not too far from the truth, in a very lateral way - it would be far too weird for most readers because it would be too distant from familiar experience.
Carping about hard SF details is beside the point, even when the points are valid. It's trying to turn fiction into engineering, which is not what fiction is for.
Most readers don't give extra points for build-ability in SF, and if they did writers would be left with a very small imaginative space to explore - the one we have now, where everything is chemical rockets and budgeting.