The Evolutionary Void
Peter F. Hamilton
Del Rey, 704 pages, $28.00 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-345-49657-7
Series: Void Trilogy 3
Genre: Space Opera |
Space opera isn’t what it used to be. And that’s a good thing.
When Wilson Tucker coined the word in 1941, “space opera” was a term of derision. It was analogous to the earlier term “horse opera,” a pejorative label for Western films. Tucker used the expression to refer to “the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn.” He decidedly did not mean the stuff John Campbell was publishing in Astounding; Tucker was thinking of innumerable hack stories appearing in pulp magazines such as Amazing, Future Fiction, Planet Stories, and Comet Stories. These tales, most of them long forgotten, were also described as “westerns in space”—stories that read as if the author had taken a familiar cowboy story and changed horses to spaceships, six-shooters to blasters, and wide-open prairies to trackless interstellar space.
As SF matured over the next decades, the old-fashioned “western in space” story became scarcer than water in the desert. But “space opera” was too good a phrase to give up. For a while “space opera” meant any adventure story involving space travel, other planets, and/or aliens. Eventually, however, “space opera” came to mean what used to be called “super-science stories” of the sort written in the late 1920s and 1930s by Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, and the master of super-science, E. E. “Doc” Smith. By this time, the “super-science story” had fallen out of fashion, and no one was publishing them any more. “Space opera” became a term of affection, heavily flavored by the nostalgia of older fans for the stirring stories of their youth. In this period, space opera was a sort of guilty pleasure among readers.
Then the marketing divisions of publishers, sensing the good feelings that the words “space opera” evoked, started using the term to sell books. Before long, anything and everything was being marketed as space opera—including the likes of I, Robot and Stranger in a Strange Land (two titles that would top my list of “Books Not At All Resembling Space Opera.”) To a degree, this tendency continues today, so be careful when reading publisher’s blurbs and other advertising material.
In 1977, a tiny little art film called Star Wars brought pure-quill space opera to a larger audience. (If you haven’t seen the movie, you’d probably enjoy it.) In the me-too world of film, space opera enjoyed a brief renaissance (although no one called it that outside the SF field).
Notice the delicious anachronistic irony here: those books and stories now falling under the category of space opera were not called that when they appeared. Historians of SF, wrangling over which stories are space opera, are in somewhat the same predicament as modern mundane historians trying to determine what, if any, abnormal psychology applied to Lincoln, Nero, or Akhenaten. Take the works of Olaf Stapledon as a prime example. Stapledon’s books Last and First Men and Star Maker are both star-spanning epics in true space opera fashion, but they certainly aren’t “Doc” Smith style super-science stories. If you want a long pointless argument, ask some old-time SF readers if they are space opera or not.
In the late 1980s a small number of British writers began to consciously reinvent literary space opera in the “Doc” Smith style. These included M. John Harrison, Iain M. Banks, and Paul J. McAuley. (At the same time, Brit Harry Harrison started his Bill, the Galactic Hero series, which was a hilarious satire of space opera.) These “new space opera” books were of higher literary quality, featuring non-cardboard characters and more elegant prose, and also included speculations based on cutting-edge science. In time, this new space opera became very popular—as it remains to this day.
But why did the space opera renaissance spring from Britain, not the States? I’ve seen a number of analyses, but nothing authoritative. My own theory is that American publishers in the 1980s were reluctant to publish space opera, considering it either old-fashioned or like Star Wars—and in those pre-Timothy-Zahn’s-Admiral-Thrawn days, there was no market for Star Wars-like books. It took the Brits to convince American publishers that space opera would sell . . . at least, space opera written by British writers.
Today’s big names in space opera include the fellows mentioned above, and also Steven Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, and Peter F. Hamilton.
Two subgenres often related to space opera are hard SF and military SF. There’s a lot of overlap around the edges; it’s impossible to draw hard-and-fast dividing lines. Similarly, the subset of SF that deals with Galactic Empires often bleeds into space opera. Are the Foundation books space opera? Almost certainly not. The Dune books? That one’s a little harder.
So what is space opera? The term defies exact description, but lately I’ve been calling it “grand, melodramatic science fiction productions without the music, but with lots of great scenery, anguish, death, and an occasional fat lady.” It’s as good a definition as any.
If you want to know more about space opera, look for David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s comprehensive 2006 anthology The Space Opera Renaissance.
But on to some recent titles.
The Evolutionary Void
Peter F. Hamilton
Peter F. Hamilton is one of the best space opera writers around today. He writes big, meaty books that interweave the adventures of dozens of characters on many different worlds, with technologies that perfectly exemplify Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. His themes are grand, worthy of space opera: interstellar war, Byzantine politics, the clash of religions and civilizations.
With a book of 700+ pages, you’ll want to know right away what you’re getting into, and Hamilton isn’t shy about giving you the clues you need. Take this small excerpt from the second paragraph: “Navigation at that awesome velocity was by quantum interstice similarity interpretation, which determined the relative location of mass in the real universe beyond. This alleviated the use of crude hysradar or any other sensor that might possibly be detected.” If this leaves you twitching and foaming at the mouth, then this is not the book for you. If you’re left thinking, “Oh, good, let’s hear more,” then you’ll love it.
The Evolutionary Void is the third in a trilogy (the two previous books are The Dreaming Void and The Temporal Void). The Void Trilogy, in turn, is set in the same universe as the earlier Commonwealth Saga, Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained. That’s an enormous amount of back-story, about 3300 pages worth if my calculations are correct. There are two choices: read the earlier books first, or just take a deep breath and dive in.
If you dive, be prepared to be confused for a while—but after the first 50 or so pages, you’ll discover that the water’s fine. Strong, sympathetic characters grab the reader quickly, and soon you’ll be so intent on following them that you’ll forget that you don’t know all the details of the back-story.
Big, detailed space operas like The Evolutionary Void are like a visit to a foreign country where you don’t speak the language. Fortunately, Hamilton is an excellent tour guide; he pays attention to the familiar as well as the exotic, and if you trust him you’re in for an enjoyable and enlightening trip.
Transformers: Exodus
Alex Irvine
Del Rey, 276 pages, $27.00 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-345-51985-6
Genre: Space Opera, Media SF |
Ever since Star Wars there has been an unspoken connection between space opera in movies (and on TV) and space opera in the pages of books. Transformers, which started life as a line of toys and inspired both children’s cartoons and comic books, might seem an odd choice to appear in this column. Trust me, Transformers: Exodus is a fun space opera.
It ought to be fun. The author, Alex Irvine, is an accomplished SF writer—his most recent SF book is last year’s Buyout. He knows how to tell a good story, and he knows that good characters can save even the most childish premise. Take a deep breath, ignore some of the names (Irvine got stuck with a planet called “Cybertron” and the “Matrix of Leadership,” he didn’t invent them), and you’ll find it fairly easy to enjoy this one.
A gladiator called Megatron (another one of those names) rebels against the corrupt, ordered society of Cybertron. Soon he has followers and a movement all his own, and he becomes a threat to the Powers That Be.
Meanwhile, Megatron’s defiance has attracted the attention of a minor office functionary named Orion Pax. Pax first becomes Megatron’s disciple, then his friend. But there are betrayals and attacks, and soon the two friends become bitter enemies caught in the middle of a civil war that wracks the entire planet.
’ll find a lot to like in this book. But if you don’t know Optimus Prime from Omega Supreme or an Autobot from a Decepticon, you’ll still be able to enjoy this fun little space opera.
Star and Gods
Larry Niven
Tor, 368 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-0864-1
Genre: Short Fiction |
Larry Niven doesn’t exactly write space opera. He made his reputation with hard SF, with stories based on reasonable extrapolations of accurate science, told in sparse language with uncomplicated characters. His masterwork is the Known Space series, about 20 books set in a consistent future, of which the most notable are the classic novel Ringworld and its three sequels. He is a multiple Hugo Award winner and a perennial bestselling author. In recent years Niven has been collaborating a lot, most recently with Edward M. Lerner (the Fleet of Worlds Trilogy) and Jerry Pournelle (Escape From Hell).
Stars and Gods is a sampler for the reader who wants to know what Larry Niven has been up to during the past six years or so. There are excerpts from seven novels, both solo and in collaboration; more than a dozen short stories; an assortment of nonfiction pieces; and introductions to many of these items.
If you are a fan of Niven, you’ll no doubt want to get this book. You may have already read all the novels, but you might not have seen some of the short pieces, and the personal introductions give an interesting glimpse into the author’s mind.
It’s a little more difficult to imagine what a reader who isn’t a Niven fan would make of Stars and Gods. By its nature, the book is somewhat disjointed and may seem a bit unsatisfactory.
Zendegi
Greg Egan
Night Shade, 279 pages, $24.95 (hardcover)
ISBN:978--59780-174-4
Genre: Man & Machine, Near Future,
Psychological/Sociological SF |
Another hard SF writer of note is Greg Egan, and in Zendegi he’s given us a fascinating and exciting near-future thriller set in a real but exotic locale.
As the book opens, Australian journalist Martin Seymour is stationed in Iran, covering the 2012 parliamentary elections. It turns out that the elections are anticlimactic; all the opposition candidates are disqualified so the current theocrats stay in power. Only a few weeks later, however, a sex scandal among government officials leads to widespread unrest that eventually topples the government.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., an Iranian exile scientist named Nasim works on the Human Connectome Project: an attempt to map the wiring of the human brain. When funding vanishes and the project is cancelled, Nasim heads back to her homeland to be part of the new revolution.
Fifteen years later, in 2027, Nasim heads a company that provides access to a virtual world called Zendegi. Zendegi is a source of entertainment and a place of business for millions of people . . . but the competition is advancing, and Zendegi is in trouble.
Nasim uses the knowledge and skills she gained from the Human Connectome Project to engineer something new for Zendegi: avatars (called proxies) that are so lifelike that some believe they are actual living beings. For a time proxies put Zendegi far ahead of the competition. Controversy rages over whether proxies deserve human rights and whether Nasim and her company are enslaving living beings.
Into this mess comes Martin, who’s been living in Iran with his wife and young son Javeed. It seems that Martin may very likely die soon, and he is troubled at the thought of abandoning his son. He asks Nasim to create a proxy, based on himself, that could carry on after his death. But will Zendegi itself survive long enough to fulfill Martin’s wishes?
The story is gripping, the details of Iranian society and politics are fascinating, and the characters are well drawn and captivating. As if that’s not enough, the philosophical questions of identity and humanity, which stay with the reader long after the story is done, are most rewarding. Definitely not to be missed.
Shades of Gray
Jackie Kessler & Caitlin Kittredge
Spectra, 414 pages, $16.00 (trade paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-553-38632-5
Series: Icarus Project 2
Genre: Superheroes |
In Black and White, Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge introduced us to young superheroes Jet (Joan Green) and Iridium (Callie Bradford), who wield powers of darkness and light, respectively. Jet and Iridium started as best friends but became bitter enemies; in Black and White they had to co-operate to take down the dastardly villain Taser.
In Jet and Iridium’s superhero world, there are hundreds of super-powered extrahumans, most in and around the city of New Chicago. For decades, the global corporation Corp-Co has controlled the extrahumans by means of a high-tech system called Ops. At the end of Black and White, Jet and Iridium have taken down Ops—and for the first time, hundreds of extrahumans are free of Corp-Cos control. The heroes realize that they’ve been enslaved all this time . . . and they’re not happy about it.
Shades of Gray picks up where the first book left off. New Chicago is in chaos. Angry extrahumans are ransacking the city; anti-superhero groups are stoking the fires of suspicion and prejudice against the extrahumans. Jet, along with a small group of still-lawful heroes, attempts to quell the chaos . . . a job that seems helpless.
Meanwhile, Iridium is having her own problems dealing with Corp-Co, which is still very much in the fight.
Into the middle of this anarchy steps the sociopath Doctor Hypnotic, bent on his own nefarious schemes. Once again, Jet and Iridium must put aside their differences and work together to save everyone.
Jet and Iridium are engaging characters and their world is intriguing. If you’re looking for a light superhero adventure that touches on some fairly weighty questions of morality, Shades of Gray is your book.
