Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
March 5, 2016 1:27 PM   Subscribe

SF author (and Mefi's own) Charles Stross is thinking about the cliches in Space Opera and tries to put together a complete list of the hoary genre tropes that literary (no TV or movies) Space Opera is prone to.
posted by The Whelk (85 comments total) 44 users marked this as a favorite
 
So transcribing the Lensman series or any EE "Doc" Smith?

Off to RTFA now.
posted by Splunge at 1:30 PM on March 5, 2016




For those of us not privy to the inside baseball, what is a "literary (no TV or movies) Space Opera"?
posted by panama joe at 1:48 PM on March 5, 2016


it means space opera written in books, using words.
posted by The Whelk at 1:49 PM on March 5, 2016 [15 favorites]


Stories in prose form only.

Okay, maybe also poems.
posted by Artw at 1:50 PM on March 5, 2016


(Lets face it, most film and TV doesn't really even meet the loose standards of "hard SF"and mostly consists of a barely SFnal rearrangement of tropes, so might as well leave it be and enjoy it for what it is)
posted by Artw at 1:51 PM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Planets have magnetic poles that approximate their rotational axis

Given that there's an actual physical reason for that, I'm guessing it doesn't actually belong on the list?
posted by Zalzidrax at 2:02 PM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Probably lots of actual planets don't have strong magnetic fields?
posted by grobstein at 2:02 PM on March 5, 2016


Is this intended as "To Do" list for the producers of the upcoming New Star Trek show?

Of course, there's a reason why the most fun Space Opera movie in recent years was part of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" (We are ALL Groot). Because once you've handwaved away the 'radioactive spider-bite' superhero origin, you're free to remove ALL the real science from Science Fiction. And why the Marvel-published Star Wars comics seem so perfect (the Disney Corp. synergy is only a coincidence).
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:13 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


There's an insightful, despair-laden reading of MeFi fave the Culture series buried in the link.

Of course there are no Culture novels that explore the average Culture citizen; all of the novels are set. on the edge of their civilization, with people who aren't welcome in polite society. The activist Minds represent the West, frolicking in mental escapism most of the time with only brief excursions into brutal realpolitik and remarkably compassion-free culture wars fought by proxies and the irredeemably antisocial.
posted by infinitewindow at 2:19 PM on March 5, 2016 [5 favorites]


I kind of wish he'd separated errors from clichés. I mean:
● Everyone uses Money to mediate exchanges of value
● Money is always denominated in uniform ratios divisible by 10
● Money is made out of shiny bits of metal, OR pieces of green paper, OR credit stored in a computer network
There's nothing wrong with any of those except that they're assumed unthinkingly and cstross presumably wishes writers would be more creative.
posted by languagehat at 2:20 PM on March 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


There are no Culture novels that explore the average Culture citizen;

Check out Player of Games. Probably my favorite Culture novel for that reason -- it's very much about how the average Culture person (or a representative thereof) deals with being part of such a sheltered Utopia.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:25 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


He's late by a decade: The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy, itself a homage to Diana Wynne Jones's classic.
posted by Apocryphon at 2:29 PM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


If the Culture novels as a whole have a theme is say it was certainly one of interventionism versus non interventionism. I wouldn't say they particularly come down on a side, even when stacking the deck by giving interventionism near godlike powers and a relative lack of selfish agenda.
posted by Artw at 2:31 PM on March 5, 2016


I like this a lot but "cliché" isn't really the right word for much of it. There's nothing particularly hackneyed, verbally or otherwise, about many of the imaginary-world characteristics on the list (you don't groan "oh no, once again I am reading a book that hasn't reckoned with soil exhaustion"). It's a very mixed list but I'd call a lot of these something more like genre features or topoi than tired tropes or stock plots or overused character types or verbal tics.
posted by RogerB at 2:33 PM on March 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


C'mon... Why you got to hate on Larry, Charlie? Sheesh, dude got a lot of stuff wrong but at least he tried.
posted by GuyZero at 2:41 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


There's an insightful, despair-laden reading of MeFi fave the Culture series buried in the link.

Of course there are no Culture novels that explore the average Culture citizen; all of the novels are set. on the edge of their civilization, with people who aren't welcome in polite society. The activist Minds represent the West, frolicking in mental escapism most of the time with only brief excursions into brutal realpolitik and remarkably compassion-free culture wars fought by proxies and the irredeemably antisocial.


I've written a post about this.

I don't like The Culture enough to have read all the books, but Consider Phlebas really lends itself to the reading of Tolerant Genocidal Hedonistic Boredom as the best political system just because the alternative is infinite suffering.
posted by grobstein at 2:41 PM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


I wonder how many of these are cliches simply because most authors simply don't care that much about envisioning a truly exotic, otherworldly setting, and are in some sense using space opera merely as a backdrop for very human dramas? Or to put it another way, if every space opera took great pains to explain the complex weather patterns, geological makeup, biological mix, agricultural concerns, atmospheric composition, food/waste cycles, financial systems, taxation regimes, etc., etc., etc. of every goddamned planet its characters fly past, we'll never get an actual book, just an encyclopedia entry.

I do get that many of these things are never intended to be addressed directly, more things for the author to think about when depicting the universe. It's just interesting to think about how much you'd have to keep in your head to write a space opera that only makes "new and original mistakes," as Strauss says in the intro, compared to books that are set on Earth and thus have an easily understood environment whose rules don't have to be reinvented from scratch. Maybe that's why so many sci-fi books have long stretches of breathless description of technology and environments completely mundane to everyone in the book but otherworldly to you: because if the reader doesn't have that work shoved in their face to admire, who's going to appreciate all the worldbuilding work?
posted by chrominance at 2:51 PM on March 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


I don't like The Culture enough to have read all the books

I understand all those words but not when put in that order? Are you sure you didn't mean to delete the word "don't"?
posted by Justinian at 2:51 PM on March 5, 2016 [12 favorites]


I wonder how many of these are cliches simply because most authors simply don't care that much about envisioning a truly exotic, otherworldly setting, and are in some sense using space opera merely as a backdrop for very human dramas? Or to put it another way, if every space opera took great pains to explain the complex weather patterns, geological makeup, biological mix, agricultural concerns, atmospheric composition, food/waste cycles, financial systems, taxation regimes, etc., etc., etc. of every goddamned planet its characters fly past, we'll never get an actual book, just an encyclopedia entry.

Exactly. A space opera elides the gritty details in favour of melodramatic sweep. That's why it's space opera, not space kitchen sink.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:00 PM on March 5, 2016 [5 favorites]


Check out Player of Games. Probably my favorite Culture novel for that reason -- it's very much about how the average Culture person (or a representative thereof) deals with being part of such a sheltered Utopia.

To some extent, sure, but Gurgeh is regarded as weird both for his hypercompetitive spirit and his apparent heterosexuality. He's definitely a Culture citizen, and a product of the Culture, but he's hardly the average Culture citizen.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:00 PM on March 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


I would like to point out that the Culture is the work of the recently deceased Iain M. Banks. And while it's true that none of his Culture novels actually covered normal members of the Culture, he did get close in a few places, and it was very clear he was uncomfortable doing so. The edge case personas who were his Culture heroes had neuroses and quirks that made them familiar to us. But a person who was just fine with it all, living their three or four hundred years and as Zakalwe would sneer "dying with their boots off," is much harder to imagine.
posted by Bringer Tom at 3:02 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I mean, the fundamental problem here is that wanting to make "new and original mistakes" is in open contradiction with wanting to write in a genre with a clear set of topoi. There's a subset of these "mistakes" or "clichés" that would serve to define space opera; if you don't "commit" a single one of those, what you're writing won't be space opera anymore.
posted by RogerB at 3:02 PM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Since Interesting Space Travel is physically impossible, hard SF space opera is an exercise in seeing how much you need to mutilate the ground rules to create possibilities for drama.

That does mean that it's not unforgivable for a space opera to have something deeply unrealistic in it. Duh, it has to. But my favorite entries are the ones where a judicious choice has been made about what rules to bend. We don't just accept the clichés and go to work on Space Master and Commander, we figure out what sorts of assumptions could actually make the universe a more dramatic place.

A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, two of my favorite books, both have this form. Faster than light travel is introduced, but limited by a clever bit of fantasy physics. For added realism, we Earthlings live in a region where FTL is in fact impossible, which is why we have never seen space travelers. The same physical conceit is made to do double duty, explaining both the limits of FTL and the absence of super-intelligences. In other respects the novels are extremely inventive, dispensing with many conventions and reverse-engineering others.

For a very different approach that I also appreciate, The Urth of the New Sun and The Book of the Long Sun include space travel as major elements, most of which are hard to describe as realistic (although Gene Wolfe definitely cares about science and engineering details, too). Rather, the conventions of space travel are re-used but given metaphorically rich re-interpretations. For example, here a (shall we say physically inspired) description of a black hole is used to talk about faith and miracle:
We know it to be far more, for it is a discontinuity in our universe, a rent in its fabric bound by no law we know. From it nothing comes— all enters in, nought escapes. Yet from it anything may appear, for it alone of all the things we know is no slave to its own nature. (Shadow & Claw, 360)
Greg Egan, too, writes space opera where at least a few points of the setting are staggeringly unlikely. But they are unlikely in interesting and careful ways, and they open novel possibilities to exploration. This is, to me, the good stuff, and even when it partakes of conventional physical untruths and distortions it is not cliché.

On the other hand, there is a place for cliché and space-travel as backdrop. I'm a big fan of The Next Generation, which ranges from careless to downright stupid in its elaboration of its SF premises. What is interesting is not its selection of Space Opera tropes but other aspects of its setting and characters. And that's fine!
posted by grobstein at 3:02 PM on March 5, 2016 [14 favorites]


On the subject of Iain M. Banks it is probably worth mentioning The Algebraist, one of his most perfectly brilliant novels set in an almost anti-Culture universe where cruelty is the engine of life, FTL is possible but only through black holes that have been joined and then separated at sublight velocity, and relativistic sublight travel is easy.
posted by Bringer Tom at 3:08 PM on March 5, 2016 [5 favorites]


There is sort of an ambiguity in Charley's exposition though -- are the listed mistakes really clichés, calcified tropes that have become conventional over the 30 years of "new" space opera? Or are they more like simple carelessess about physical realism, that would be re-discovered by new careless writers even if there wasn't a 30-year tradition?

It seems like mostly the latter. I would like to see a list geared toward the former.
posted by grobstein at 3:12 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I wonder how many of these are cliches simply because most authors simply don't care that much about envisioning a truly exotic, otherworldly setting, and are in some sense using space opera merely as a backdrop for very human dramas?

This. It feels like a large chunk of this list (especially the sections on economics and politics) seems built around the assumption that a major purpose (perhaps the primary purpose) of literary space opera is to show off the world-building that the author has done. And sure, in lots of space opera, the world gets first billing as the main point of interest, but there's lots of space opera where that's just not the case. And once you step away from the assumption that a big part of the fun is a complete encyclopedic description of the entire world and society that the story takes place in, the answer to questions like "How are taxes structured in this society?" is "Who cares? It doesn't matter to the story that's being told." It's a bit like complaining about a road trip novel because it never explains what percentage of the construction and maintenance funding of the interstate highway system comes from taxation vs. use fees. It's not a failure of world-building to not get into details that are irrelevant to the story.
posted by firechicago at 3:14 PM on March 5, 2016 [8 favorites]


It's a bit like complaining about a road trip novel because it never explains what percentage of the construction and maintenance funding of the interstate highway system comes from taxation vs. use fees. It's not a failure of world-building to not get into details that are irrelevant to the story.

Sure, but what details are considered irrelevant to the story vary widely with the reader's knowledge. Wouldn't you have a hard time with a month-long road-trip story that revolves around the pennilessness of the protagonists but never bothers to mention where they get their gas money?
posted by straight at 3:19 PM on March 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


Why you got to hate on Larry, Charlie? Sheesh, dude got a lot of stuff wrong but at least he tried.

He tried occasionally. Mostly he just didn't give a shit, and it annoys me to no end that people want to call his Known Space stuff "hard SF" just because Niven blusters about science with faux-authority. I mean, the list of shit he pulled that's wrong or just plain stupid is long, but I will just put GENETICALLY DETERMINED LUCK in capital letters because I can't put it in thirty-foot high letters of fire.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:31 PM on March 5, 2016 [27 favorites]


•Moons are good, the more the better!

•Asteroids are so close together that you can hide between them
•... but they never clump into planets


Mystery solved.
posted by biffa at 3:34 PM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


in some sense using space opera merely as a backdrop for very human dramas

Yeah, I kinda thought that's what space opera was. It's not hard SF. You can write hard-ish space opera (Leviathan Wakes has one glaring plausibility break with their torchships, but plays the rest straight... mostly) and you can write completely soft space opera (Star Wars) and anything in between. A Deepness in the Sky (as mentioned above) manages to do both, which is a lot of fun.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:37 PM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


I like where the author doesn't even try to explain WTF is going on, like the planetoids in Flash Gordon. Like are they planets or what and how does gravity work? Or the Twelve Colonies in Battlestar Galactica. Are they planets in one system or moons or what? Stuff that makes the Forest Moon of Endor look like hard SF.
posted by GuyZero at 3:39 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I will just put GENETICALLY DETERMINED LUCK in capital letters because I can't put it in thirty-foot high letters of fire.

Hundreds of years of birthright lotteries have to lead to something right???
posted by GuyZero at 3:39 PM on March 5, 2016


Planetary gravity can be approximated to a point source for purposes of calculating orbital dynamics

AKA the shell theorem or Gauss's Law. Planets tend to be round enough that it's a pretty good approximation, I would guess, unless perhaps your orbit is an extremely low one.

Also, ignoring plate tectonics does not seem like a proclivity unique to the genre. Young adult romance novels do it just as often.
posted by sfenders at 3:40 PM on March 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


Also, ignoring plate tectonics does not seem like a proclivity unique to the genre. Young adult romance novels do it just as often.

I kinda want to read a young adult romance novel that gets real with plate tectonics now.
posted by jason_steakums at 3:46 PM on March 5, 2016 [28 favorites]


Frank Zappa did something sort of similar with The Radio Is Broken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzgKUCYVhl0
posted by fartknocker at 3:50 PM on March 5, 2016


Wouldn't you have a hard time with a month-long road-trip story that revolves around the pennilessness of the protagonists but never bothers to mention where they get their gas money?

Well, of course, but that's because I know something about how cars work, and the economics of fueling them. If the story were about a bunch of penniless vagabonds flying around in a spaceship powered by an unobtanium drive, I'm happy to assume that the drive doesn't need fuel, or it has fuel assemblies that only need to be changed every few years, or fuel is so trivially cheap that even the terminally broke can afford it, or any number of other possible explanations, without needing the author to tell me which one it is.

(Which is different from being told that the unobtanium drive needs expensive fuel, and then having the author break their own rule by allowing the penniless heroes to always have as much fuel as they need without any explanation.)
posted by firechicago at 3:52 PM on March 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


I like where the author doesn't even try to explain WTF is going on

i just lent signal all my books, so can't quote, but am pretty sure john m harrison has different technologies (from different alien civilisations) that rely on different, inconsistent physics. and acknowledges this. and then continues with the story like nothing happened.
posted by andrewcooke at 3:58 PM on March 5, 2016


Or maybe it's about wanting to tell human stories in a universe that doesn't resemble a shallow version of an 1860s Oklahoma farmstead, a galleon on the Spamish Main, or a libertarian wank fest cause that's been done to death and maybe thinking about what's usually not gone into and the unspoken assumptions about the genre would open it up to something new.

Or something.
posted by The Whelk at 4:00 PM on March 5, 2016 [7 favorites]


(Leviathan Wakes has one glaring plausibility break with their torchships, but plays the rest straight... mostly)

They at least have the decency to point at MYSTERIOUS ALIEN SUPERSCIENCE and go "But that's impossible!" when they're going to do dumb but fun shit.

At some point I half expect the authors to pull a Redshirts and have Roci's crew learn that the alien masters of the protomolecule are actually just the authors.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:06 PM on March 5, 2016 [7 favorites]


If all you want to read is lists of hackneyed SF clichés, there is this little website called TV Tropes...
posted by mubba at 4:10 PM on March 5, 2016


a galleon on the Spamish Main

"Sir! To port, sir! FR33 C14L1S, and closing fast! Shall I order the Bayesian cannon out?"

"No, not yet — run up the Nigerian flag and let's see if we can phish them in a bit closer. Tell the crew to make ready for a Reverse 419."
posted by RogerB at 4:16 PM on March 5, 2016 [41 favorites]


Note, this is one site where (assuming liberal free time) one should certainly read the comments!
posted by sammyo at 4:17 PM on March 5, 2016


"Sir! To port, sir! FR33 C14L1S, and closing fast! Shall I order the Bayesian cannon out?"

I was going to start a string of pork puns, but that also works.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:18 PM on March 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, two of my favorite books, both have this form. Faster than light travel is introduced, but limited by a clever bit of fantasy physics.

What I love is that the clever bit of fantasy physics is that the Principle of Uniformity turns out to be false. Which isn't actually, so far as I am aware, fantasy physics so much as a physical universe where something we have assumed is true turns out not to be. The principle of uniformity is an axiom rather than something we have proved or, so far as I am aware, could prove.
posted by Justinian at 4:31 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


"Will you be joining us for Generic Religious or Cultural Observance this year?"

"Why, yes- I will be attending Generic Religious or Cultural Observance this year!"



Generic Religious or Cultural Observance has gotten so commercial- it's not like when we were kids. I mean, Seasonal Festival is barely over, and they're already putting up the Generic Religious or Cultural Decorations!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:34 PM on March 5, 2016 [11 favorites]


WAR ON LIFE DAY.
posted by Artw at 4:39 PM on March 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


"Why, yes- I will be attending Generic Religious or Cultural Observance this year!"

I always get kind of quiet and pensive around Generic Observancetime, it really helps me to be mindful of, like, the seasons' passing, the change of generations, respect for nature, some similarly mushily inoffensive triviality, or else of the thinly concealed horrible injustice at the root of our entire society about which no one may speak

posted by RogerB at 4:49 PM on March 5, 2016 [10 favorites]


Or maybe it's about wanting to tell human stories in a universe that doesn't resemble a shallow version of an 1860s Oklahoma farmstead, a galleon on the Spamish Main, or a libertarian wank fest cause that's been done to death and maybe thinking about what's usually not gone into and the unspoken assumptions about the genre would open it up to something new.

Yeah, that's where I kind of softened up my original stance of "oh god this is so much wankery." Stross throws in a bunch of cliches that are actually what I was expecting to see, like "other cultures have somehow never seen a ponzi scheme" or "planets only have one type of climate/clime" or everyone's favourite, "navies are a lesser threat to smugglers than random pirate attacks." Those are the kinds of cliches that I think lead to the thinly-papered-over settings above, or similar variations on an earth theme. But I can't say "the author declined to explain the inflationary pressures and taxation regime of this planet's economy" has been a particularly worrying cliche, or at least any more worrying than "the author wrote their space opera novel using words."
posted by chrominance at 4:54 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm sure cstross is completely aware of all the points raised because he's probably p smart, but I'm not even sure I want to read the fiction he's implicitly praising, let alone the space opera.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:04 PM on March 5, 2016


the answer to questions like "How are taxes structured in this society?" is "Who cares? It doesn't matter to the story that's being told." It's a bit like complaining about a road trip novel because it never explains what percentage of the construction and maintenance funding of the interstate highway system comes from taxation vs. use fees. It's not a failure of world-building to not get into details that are irrelevant to the story.

I mean, as far as I'm concerned, worldbuilding details should either be rich and detailed and well-thought-out or else basically hidden.

If money is relevant to your plot, and you're writing science fiction, you might as well take the opportunity to make it relevant in interesting or unexpected ways — which might well involve thinking about how taxes work in your particular setting. And if it isn't relevant to your plot, just don't talk about it at all.

But don't do the halfway thing where you rename dollars "credits" and make a point of using the word a lot even though they just work like dollars. And don't do the other halfway thing where you use money as a major plot device — not just a hazy macguffin to make things go, but a real active element of the story where the details matter — and then fudge those details.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:16 PM on March 5, 2016 [7 favorites]


Perhaps cstross should take a new tack, and write an actual Space Opera: Libretto, staging, orchestral score and all.
posted by nickggully at 5:18 PM on March 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


That list was exhausting. Chapeau to him for making it, but honestly it doesn't speak really well to the present state of Sci-fi for him to be so reductionist about it. I considered trying to think about Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series with this list in mind but decided not to bother. I thought she did a good job of creating a compelling space opera that didn't scream 'tropes' to me, which is the purpose he states for making the list in the first place. And she didn't make me hate the idea of reading one.
The one thing i've always held about an enjoyable book: It's not the tale, it's the teller.
posted by OHenryPacey at 5:18 PM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


I actually thought, in terms of spiritual life, that Leckie's Ancillary novels were really well constructed. There is a lot of diversity and detail in there, both in terms of the official Amat cult within Radch space, the various sub-cults, and religious beliefs outside of the Radch. Some of it is a bit Mary Douglas/Lévi-Strauss, but there's nice detail in there, beyond just the differential gender stuff. There's good hints around different kinship taboos for various groups, and the Radch funerary rites and related practices are really well-constructed. The glass food effigies at the temple of Amat was an especially good detail.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:47 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]




Only Earth has reptiles, amphibia, fish, birds, insects, mammals, fungi, etc.

I'm not quite getting this one. Why would there be those types of animals? There might be life that shares certain characteristics (I can see hair and feather-like structures evolving again and again) but a straight-up mammal on an alien planet? Earth was without mammals for a long ass time!
posted by brundlefly at 6:00 PM on March 5, 2016


I think the point was that other planets with complex life should have the same amount of taxonomic diversity we do — not that they should all have mammals exactly, but they should all have the sorts of distinctions that we have between mammals, insects, etc etc etc.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:34 PM on March 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


Ahhhh, yes. That makes more sense.
posted by brundlefly at 6:45 PM on March 5, 2016


the elephant in the room: what is sci-fi like on other planets?
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:46 PM on March 5, 2016 [8 favorites]


Spacey Operas are just a classic convention, like the I-IV-V chords in 12 bar blues. Nice enough if you like the genre, maybe boring if you've heard it too many times before. I.M. Banks is like the Led Zeppelin of Space Opera, he added some fancy chords, Marshall stacks, and mysticism. He made it seem new and different.

There are generic tropes in Space Opera which do not always conform to reality, this we understand. All arts work with the focus of attention, sometimes misdirection, sometimes distancing devices. Hard SF is focused on technical plausibility, but most other genres focus on character. Space Opera is marooned somewhere in between. A functional Space Opera, like television's Star Trek, puts enough focus and attention on the interpersonal dynamics to make the background details seem insignificant. And when it doesn't work, then the flaws pop out.
posted by ovvl at 6:58 PM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


I think the "But these are just useful, conventional tropes!" objection misses the point that there are some authors that like to reexamine and reject conventional tropes. Charles Stross, for instance. He's written books where FTL travel is impossible, books where the precise nature of interstellar money is important, books where humans have gone extinct through carelessness. Writing space operas in a new way might be fun for both author and reader.
posted by zompist at 7:52 PM on March 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


> "I kinda want to read a young adult romance novel that gets real with plate tectonics now."

"Oh! Flow cleavage! Deeper in the rift." "Deeper ..."
posted by kyrademon at 11:32 PM on March 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


When authors fail plate tectonics, it shows. In ASOIAF you have a giant wall made of ice built on top of a geologically active zone, with obsidian deposits from volcanic activity north of the Wall and thermal springs in a strangely earthquake-free Winterfell. Leaving aside that the ice wall is supposed to be magical, these details drive me bonkers.
posted by sukeban at 12:08 AM on March 6, 2016 [5 favorites]


Planetary gravity can be approximated to a point source for purposes of calculating orbital dynamics

This isn't a mistake. It's a fact. The fact that planets aren't points is relevant to their rotation but their orbits really are the same as if they were points.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:16 AM on March 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah, Stross's Neptune's Brood is incredibly inventive, and the obvious product of this type of thinking. I enjoyed it quite a bit and I'd like to see more space operas from him. Obviously you can't fight all those battles all the time, but picking a set of them to disrupt can lead you interesting places.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:08 AM on March 6, 2016


@jpfed - i wondered abut that, too. i think he might be referring to this kind of thing - local orbits are sensitive to variations in the gravity field.

(physics-wise it makes sense - it has to be something near to the earth's surface) (it still feels a little pernickity - almost everything has second order effects if you look in enough detail....)
posted by andrewcooke at 2:21 AM on March 6, 2016


Or to put it another way, if every space opera took great pains to explain the complex weather patterns, geological makeup, biological mix, agricultural concerns, atmospheric composition, food/waste cycles, financial systems, taxation regimes, etc., etc., etc.

Well... Dune worked.
posted by Avelwood at 3:00 AM on March 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


Dune worked because it was a story about ecology, and about humans surviving and reshaping the most hostile environment Frank Herbert could think of. It could afford to spend thousands of words on world building because those details were relevant to the story.

Whereas Star Wars worked best when it sketched the world in broad strokes. Tatooine and Arrakis both capture the imagination, but a detailed discourse on the economics of moisture farming would have ruined the story of one and was critical to the other.
posted by JDHarper at 5:39 AM on March 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


The principle of uniformity is an axiom rather than something we have proved or, so far as I am aware, could prove.

Atomic spectra are sensitively dependent on the values of the dimensionless physical constants, though, and the spectra from galaxies billions of light-years away are the same as they are here. This means that all the particles and forces of the Standard Model have to exist and interact the same way they do here, so your extra fantasy physics still has to fit in the same framework it would here.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:07 AM on March 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


Star Wars is a movie, and therefore Fantasy.
posted by Artw at 7:06 AM on March 6, 2016


vibratory manner of working: This list of cliches is basically my brainstorming file for what I don't want to do in my next space opera. Which will hopefully be written in time for publication in 2018.

Just sayin'.
posted by cstross at 9:09 AM on March 6, 2016 [13 favorites]


I assume in most space opera that humans have been engineered to be radiation resistant, can synthesize all vitamins, have hibernation built-in, are decoupled from environmental cues like blue light, and have some mental stability addons.
posted by benzenedream at 10:08 AM on March 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


cstross, Warren Ellis included your list in his weekly newsletter and characterized it as you "trying to talk [yourself] out of writing a book." Glad to hear he's wrong!
posted by infinitewindow at 10:17 AM on March 6, 2016


Well cstross, I'm looking forward to your novel, as long as you can avoid these space opera cliches:
  • Interstellar travel is at all possible.
  • Sentient beings will colonize space or even explore it themselves, rather than sending a scattering of non-sentient probes.
  • Robots will be sentient.
  • Sentient robots will think and have emotions like humans.
Avoid these, and I think you might have a really cliche-free space-opera story.
posted by happyroach at 11:23 AM on March 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


So asteroid mining is actually feasible, y/n?
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:12 PM on March 6, 2016


Ask Kanye
posted by grobstein at 2:25 PM on March 6, 2016


happyroach: already wrote that book, go pick up a copy of Neptune's Brood (or prequel Saturn's Children). Just bear in mind that I've got a warped sense of humour (and, oh, both of them were shortlisted for the best novel Hugo in their year of publication).
posted by cstross at 3:18 PM on March 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


Unreliable hotheads, who have the morals of a house cat, have no difficulty getting jobs as spaceship captains
posted by thelonius at 3:26 PM on March 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


So asteroid mining is actually feasible, y/n?

Well yeah, in a "Sorta, kinda, maybe if there's ever enough space development to warrant bringing the resources in from asteroids, rather than Earth" kind of way. And not to compete with Eart,h resources, or make a profit.

But if we do asteroid mining, we'll do it using non-sentient robots. The big problem with The Expanse is not so much that they did water mining, but that they had PEOPLE doing the mining. Which is idiotic.


happyroach: already wrote that book, go pick up a copy of Neptune's Brood (or prequel Saturn's Children).


It still had the sentient robots, interstellar travel and space colonization. Get rid of those, and you'll have the cliche-free ideal.
posted by happyroach at 5:24 PM on March 6, 2016


All I really want to know when choosing space opera to read is, do women get to fly the spaceships?
posted by yarntheory at 7:03 PM on March 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


Cstross, what was this one about?:
It is safe to put bleach down the toilet on a starship; your algae/tilapia/soy will totally deal with it it when it comes out of the recycler
So this has not only happened in a book, but happened often enough to merit a mention? Is there an entire "starship serial killer corpse disposal" sub-genre I'm not aware of?
posted by Bugbread at 10:54 PM on March 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


Not to speak for Charles when he can speak for himself, or to throw a cold bucket of wet blanket over this entire thread, but I didn't read that list as prescriptive; i.e., you must make sure your scifi world has a believable, functioning economy and biology.

Rather, I saw it as proscriptive: If you're gonna talk about these things and spend hours in world building (and as far as I'm concerned, please don't!), then at least make them believable/consistent/viable/logical.
posted by oheso at 3:08 AM on March 7, 2016


straight: Wouldn't you have a hard time with a month-long road-trip story that revolves around the pennilessness of the protagonists but never bothers to mention where they get their gas money?

Oh, you've read On The Road too?

(Careful: don't go all Cervantes on us or anything ... )
posted by oheso at 3:17 AM on March 7, 2016


There's plenty of interplanetary space opera that's constrained to our solar system. It's just often they are Japanese military sci-fi focused on the horrors of space war once humanity invents giant bipedal robots.
posted by Apocryphon at 4:17 PM on March 9, 2016


All I really want to know when choosing space opera to read is, do women get to fly the spaceships?

CJ Cherryh has this covered in her brilliant Chanur books - the protagonist is from a well-drawn culture of ragingly sexist space cats where all the action belongs to the women, slowly getting her head around the idea that mayyyyybe male cats aren't completely useless wastes of fur outside their narrow cultural ambit.

It's clever as hell.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:21 PM on March 10, 2016


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