(Yes, I’m consciously
stealing from a classic WB cartoon title.)
The whole universe? |
Space opera is back. On the
screen it never entirely left. When I was a youngster the Flash Gordon and Buck
Rogers serials from the 1930s still played on Saturday morning TV. My friends
and I knew they were ridiculous and we laughed at the special effects including
the model rockets with sparklers. (Side note: My mom later in the decade commented
that 1960s women’s fashions – notably miniskirts and boots – were exactly what appeared
in 1930s/40s scifi comics and serials; she was sure one had inspired the other.)
We didn’t mind the cheese though. Hey, the serials still were high adventure in
outer space with alien civilizations, evil emperors, daring princesses, dogfighting rocket ships, and hand-to-hand derring-do. They satisfied my
10-year-old soul, but the times they were a-changing. With Star Trek and 2001: A Space
Odyssey scifi became consciously higher concept. While this was a very good
thing overall, Star Wars showed there
was still a place for rousing old-fashioned space opera, too, this time with
stunning fx.
The printed word was another
matter. By the 1960s the big name authors had more than just adventure on their
minds. Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein and others had messages. Their protagonists
still zipped around the galaxy on occasion, but they tended to leave space
battles and evil emperors on alien planets to lesser lights. Scifi definitely
benefited from this and the authors’ messages often were thoughtful, e.g as a
random example Frank Herbert’s The Dosadi
Experiment, which painlessly encapsulates much of Machiavelli and
Nietzsche. In recent years, however, a number of topflight scifi authors have
returned to space opera with an entirely good conscience. It’s not all they do,
but they don’t outright avoid it. It is hard to argue that the results are often
deep, but they are generally entertaining and the quality of the writing
certainly helps. Two examples worth a scifi fan’s time are Revenger and The Collapsing
Empire.
**** ****
Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
As an author, Reynolds
somehow manages to be imaginative, literate, and prolific all at once.
Published in 2016, Revenger is a
solid addition to his impressive bibliography.
The setting is unspecified
thousands of years hence. The solar system has been abandoned and reoccupied
many times. Presumably it is this solar system; this is not definitively
stated, but there are references to the original sun, which would seem to
indicate the Sun. Civilizations have come and gone. The current one exists
mostly on terraformed asteroids (there are answers to the reader’s technical
objections to that) but the ruins of the earlier civilizations are scattered
everywhere. The central characters are the sisters Adrana and Arafura Ness, who
despite their father’s objections joined the crew of Monetta’s Mourn, a salvage space ship designed to exploit those
ruins.
It’s a tough universe out
there, however. The ship is attacked by a raider captained by the legendarily
ruthless Bosa Sennen. Bosa orders a massacre of the Monetta’s Mourn crew except for Adrana whose talents she can use.
Arafura escapes by hiding in the bulkhead and surviving until rescued by
another salvager. The rest of the novel is Arafura’s quest to recover her
sister and take revenge on Bosa. In the process she develops from innocence to
harshness. Her chances of success depend on tapping into darkness within
herself.
It’s not a typical heroine’s journey:
though Arafura develops the character and skills she needs to do what she has
to do, she clearly loses much in the process. Her pre-revenge self was less
impressive but much more likable.
**** ****
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
Scalzi is one of my favorite contemporary
scifi writers, and he doesn’t disappoint in The
Collapsing Empire, which was released earlier this year. Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series should be on the
shelf of any serious scifi fan, but his new novel has an entirely new setting
and milieu.
Once again we are in a
distant future. This time civilization spans the galaxy in a particularly
hodge-podge way. This has to do with the Flow, which is a natural phenomenon
that exists outside of normal space and effectively permits faster than light
travel. The Flow, a kind of web shaped by the (gravitational?) features of the
galaxy, doesn’t extend everywhere, so most of the galaxy remains inaccessible. Ships
cannot travel FTL without the Flow. Even the most far flung star systems are
reachable, however, if the Flow happens to pass near them.
The youthful Cardenia
Wu-Patrick becomes the new Emperox when her brother is killed in an accident
that might not have been an accident. It is not an elevation she expected or
wanted. She has to deal with a council of oligopolistic Merchant Houses who form
a nobility. (Future interstellar empires nearly always have medieval politics.)
Cardenia learns a frightening secret: the Flow’s shape is not permanent. The
galaxy changes and the Flow changes, too, and soon will strand populated star
systems and fracture the empire. Meantime one of the Merchant Houses has caught
wind that something is up with the Flow and is betting that a currently
unimportant distant mudball of a planet will be the center of a reshaped web.
Throw in ruthless traders, space pirates, and ambitious suitors of the new
emperox and we have elements for intrigue and action. Scalzi’s prose is both
literary and effortless to read, which is a rare combination.
**** ****
We all like to escape now and
then, and both books are fine escapist fare: fun without being simplistic. And,
hey, they are high adventure in outer space. They satisfy the soul of the
10-year-old boy inside this…um…somewhat older fellow.
t.A.T.u. – Космос
(Outer Space)
Both books sound pretty good to me. I loved to watch the old serials too. I can overlook a lot of special effects or a little bad acting as long as it makes sense (without having to go to the web to explain it). That's one of my faults with the new Dr. Who reboot. I did like the Eccleston era pretty much, but after that it really got silly and spotty. There was just some really bad writing imo.
ReplyDelete2001 & Trek were a game changer, and I'd add Planet of the Apes too in some aspects.
I’m happy to make allowances for budgets and venues, too. The Vlogger I appended to my “Buffy” blog last month makes the point by saying that one doesn’t go see a performance of “The Merchant of Venice” and say, “That totally doesn’t look like Venice; this play sucks.” If we adjust our expectations to the realities of the production, we can enjoy a show, play, or movie on its other merits.
DeleteNeither book ever will be assigned in school as a must-read classic, but both are fun and smartly written.