Over on Pornokitsch they’re doing V Days of Rome, and some excellent content has been posted so far. I was invited to contribute and wrote one of my customary rants on the over-use, and mis-use, of the Roman Empire as inspiration in space operas. It’s all Isaac Asimov’s fault, of course. See my piece here.

While reading Marianne de Pierries’ Dark Space last week (see here), it struck me that sf writers are all too keen to extrapolate or invent science and technology in their fictions – FTL, AI, anti-gravity, etc. – but they then insist on imagining socially regressive societies. The world of Araldis in Dark Space is markedly sexist – the women are either wives or mistresses, and have no say in Araldisian society. Why would a writer do that? After the decades of struggle for gender equality, to then write about a society in which women are once again second-class citizens just seems stupid. It’s not even a failure of the imagination because it was plainly a deliberate artistic choice.

But this is not unusual in space opera. Writers invent galaxy-spanning empires with magical technology… and then populate them with tyrants, slave traders, mass-murderers, pirates and all manner of scum and villainy, design them with systemic inequality, inequity, injustice and unfairness. True, scum and villainy exists in modern-day society, and even the twenty-first century has its share of inequality and inequity. But they don’t define it.

Space opera is an inherently right-wing subgenre. As is military science fiction. There are exceptions but, as a general trend, both subgenres tend to the right of centre. It is, I suspect, a consequence of the form, since not all writers of space opera or military sf cleave to the political right. But the vast majority of those writers – Anglophone ones, as that’s the bulk of my reading, and the area about which I know most – live in developed nations, where slavery is illegal, where everyone has the vote, where fairness in many areas of life is either legally or constitutionally protected. And yet these same authors can happily invent a future universe in which sentient beings are treated worse than animals, the first solution to any problem is unregulated violence, and inequality is institutionalised… And that inequality is all too often ignored by the protagonists, because typically they’re among the privileged. (This latter is especially true of secondary-world fantasy, with its penchant for adventuring princes; but that’s an argument for another day.)

There are, I noted above, exceptions. Iain M Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, for example. These exceptions are usually British. Having said that, while Banks’s Culture is famously a post-scarcity utopia, he still populates his novels with plutocratic shits (possibly a tautology) and the like – if only to give Special Circumstances something to do…

I’ve been wondering why space opera / mil sf needs to be so socially regressive / right wing. Is it a consequence of science fiction’s history? Military science fiction often appears to be little more than fancied-up Horatio Hornblower in Space, and so copies 17th Century British society – in all respects but the technology. It could be that Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, famously based on Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, led to the Roman Empire as a model for galactic empires in space operas. Personally, I suspect US science fiction owes an unconscious debt to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. The similarities are striking.

And why are the exceptions mostly from the UK? Is it just a consequence of domestic politics? I’d like to think British sf owes an equal debt to HG Wells, but it was plainly dominated by the US mode – at least until the advent of the New Wave. Admittedly, the last couple of decades has seen more Wellsian sf creeping into British sf, though his influence continues to be ignored by US science fiction. Which is odd, historically, as HG Wells – and Jules Verne – were both extensively reprinted in magazines during the early days of the genre in the USA.

Some have argued that space opera and military sf require conflict, that without it there’d be no story. But conflict is not the only delivery mechanism for drama. There are others – exploration and puzzle-solving are two alternatives, for example. Literary fiction does not require rapes, murders, slavery, genocide or global wars to provide drama. Further, science fiction is, above all else, about the present. And present-day society – for the majority of those who read and write Anglophone sf – is mostly fair, and has become increasingly so over the centuries. (Bar current Tory policies designed to profit the few at the expense of the many.) That fairness is not universal, true; but even those who do not currently experience it are generally better off than they would have been in earlier decades and centuries.

Perhaps it’s simply that space opera / mil sf are predominantly escapist subgenres. Perhaps they can’t aspire to anything higher. If they were to comment on unfairness, if they were to justify their regressive societies as story qua story, you’d expect to see some discussion of those it effects most in the real world. But the Other is also noticeably absent from both subgenres. Both are still characterised by the privileged expressing their privilege – mostly using awesome weaponry.

The history of space opera and military science fiction, from EE ‘Doc’ Smith through Poul Anderson and John Brunner to CJ Cherryh and now Peter F Hamilton, is almost entirely populated with examples which demonstrate the above. It has become axiomatic. That needs to be questioned. A regressive society is not, in and of itself, implicit in space opera, and should not be treated as such. Space opera need not primarily be escapist; and escapist fiction need not be defined by unfairness in its invented universe.

It’s time to think a little more intelligently about the universes we create for our fictions. It’s time our fictions reflected our ambitions and didn’t simply parrot the assumptions of past decades.

It’s time we dragged space opera, and military science fiction, into the twenty-first century.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/CIW

I look at the above photograph and I feel the sense of wonder I should be getting from science fiction. That picture is the surface of Mercury, as taken by MESSENGER, a space probe. That’s about ninety-two million kilometres from Earth (averaging out the distance between the two). A robotic spacecraft slightly smaller than a Mini, and weighing less than half a tonne, has spent the last six and a half years travelling from Earth to Mercury, and on 18 March will go into orbit about the planet nearest to the Sun.

Too much sf seems to treat the universe like a giant backyard. Characters hop into spaceships and zip off to some other star. But those distances are vast. MESSENGER took six and a half years to reach Mercury (admittedly it didn’t take a direct route). Even less than a century ago, other parts of this world were great distances away. In the 1930s, flying to Australia would take a fortnight. In the decades since, the world, as they say, has grown smaller. And science fiction has, in a manner of speaking, applied the same transformation to the universe – but more perhaps in terms of time and history rather than distance. Early space operas had starships flitting about the galaxy, without giving any real indication of scale. But it’s only with the advent of new space opera (it’s not worth capitalising it anymore, I think) that history has been folded into this shortening – near-immortal characters, or alien races who first came to prominence billions of years ago… Perhaps in the genre’s early days the distances involved were mostly unknown, and so unimaginable, that the minds of writers and readers simply skipped across their surface. Now we have a better understanding and so have compressed the lightyears and megaparsecs into something conceptually manageable, and have in turn colonised the millions and billions of years stretching back to the Big Bang and forward to the heat death of the universe…

And yet there’s little need to. There are wonders a-plenty in the universe, some of them so mind-boggling your mind ends up doing that skipping-across-the-surface thing. This morning, for example, I learnt that the red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris “could swallow our sun eight billion times over”. That’s absolutely enormous. Then there are the galactic filaments, which are simply so huge your mind core-dumps at the numbers concerned. But. Scale is not sense of wonder, and a lot of sf confuses the two. VY Canis Major may be enormously huge – but it’s also a star. Like the one up in the sky. Just much bigger. Or, to choose an example from a seventy-year-old space opera (see here): using planets as mobile fortresses is sense of wonder; a fleet of over a million starships is not. A photograph of the surface of Mercury, a planet in our Solar system, is sense of wonder; a galactic empire where planets are no more than a day or two of travel apart is not.

You might well think from what I’ve written in the past on this blog – and from the fact that I also have a blog dedicated to books about space – that my subgenre of choice is hard sf. But it isn’t. Chiefly because most hard sf is appallingly written. By “hard sf”, I don’t mean science fiction that is true to known science, but rather sf that features the “hard” sciences – physics, chemistry, cosmology, etc. Unfortunately, it’s a subgenre mostly written by scientists. And it shows. For instance, I really like the idea of Ben Bova’s Grand Tour novels – a series of novels set during the exploration and colonisation the Solar system – but I find them unreadable. Which is not to say all hard sf exhibits clanking prose, cardboard characters and an anal-retentive focus on science and technology. There are a number of hard sf writers whose stories and novels I appreciate and enjoy: Stephen Baxter, Paul J McAuley, Geoffrey A Landis, G David Nordley, immediately spring to mind. I also have David G Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s The Hard SF Renaissance on the TBR, but I’m expecting it to infuriate more than it entertains.

Of all the subgenres of sf, I probably read space opera more than any other. Some of my favourite sf authors write new space opera, and as a mode of genre writing I suspect it offers the largest canvas and has the biggest toolbox. But it also occupies a well-worn rut, and few books or authors seem capable of breaking, or willing to break, out of it. Its politics are often juvenile, its psychology rudimentary, and its plots little more than privilege wet dreams or revenge fantasies. Science and technology is replaced with toys festooned with flashing lights. It makes few concessions to reality and less to plausibility. It has confused scale with sense of wonder. The universe has become merely a backdrop of stars and not a source of wonder. It tells thrilling wonder tales, but they might as well take place anywhere – in Fantasyland, or some period from human history, or some corner of the world hidden from progress… What’s the point in making the stories space opera? What’s the point in using the universe and all its wonders as a setting? That’s confusing the furniture with the genre’s characteristics.

Perhaps space opera needs to take a long hard look at Mercury.