#Space opera tv tropes full#

Unless you do it in animated form, like dozens of Anime series. The genre is useful for long story- and character- arcs but also expensive to film. (Indeed, The Empire Strikes Back was an important moment in changing 'space opera' from an insult to a more neutral genre descriptor, due to the involvement of writer Leigh Brackett.) In Star Wars, technology is either magic (the Force) or slightly faster versions of today's gadgets ( blaster rifles, hovercars, space ships) and the characters would be right at home in a fantasy novel ( evil emperor, Farm Boy, princess). Star Wars is probably the most famous modern example of space opera. While works such as John Carter of Mars and various fantasy novels set on a planet are Planetary Romance, characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon essentially codified the Space Opera concept in the popular imagination by the late 1930s. Planetary Romance is an older variant, which is basically Heroic Fantasy In Space - or on a Dying Earth of some sort. Assisted by writers who regarded all tales of action and adventure in space as bad, and so tried to label it all 'space opera' in a pejorative sense they succeeded with the label, but not with keeping it pejorative. As more authors and writers came to embrace the space opera style, the term has largely lost its negative connotations. (It's said that before 1975 or so, the only author who ever intentionally set out to write a space opera was Jack Vance, who wrote a novel about an opera company in space.) Weirdly, this means that today many works which were originally touted as examples of 'serious' science fiction, such as the Lensman series, are today held up as prime examples of Space Opera. The phrase was coined in 1941 by Wilson Tucker to describe what he called 'the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn'.

It was a variant in a long line of terms for substandard genre fiction: 'horse opera' was bad Western fiction, whereas a 'soap opera' (so named because they began as hour-long ads for soap) was a hackneyed drama.

Note that this is quite different from the original definition of space opera, which was a derogatory term.

#Space opera tv tropes full#

Space opera has a lot of romantic elements: big love stories, epic space battles, oversized heroes and villains, awe-inspiring places, and insanely gorgeous women.Įxpect to see a dashing hero cavorting around in sleek, cigar-shaped Retro Rockets, Green Skinned Space Babes, Crystal Spires and Togas civilizations full of Space Elves, Wave Motion Guns capable of dealing an Earthshattering Kaboom on a daily basis, and an evil Galactic Empire with a Standard Sci-Fi Fleet, including an entire universe full of beat-up mechanical objects capable of being resurrected with Percussive Maintenance. In perspective, it is a development of the Planetary Romance that looks beyond the exotic locations that were imagined for the local solar system in early science fiction ( which the hard light of science revealed to be barren and lifeless) out into an infinite universe of imagined exotic locations. Frequently it takes place in the Standard Sci Fi Setting.

It has an epic character to it: The universe is big, there are lots of sprawling civilizations and empires, there are political conflicts and intrigues galore. Please don't suggest any cartoons/anime/etc.A space Opera is a work set in a far future space faring civilization, where the technology is ubiquitous and entirely secondary to the story. I'll watch Firefly eventually since I've heard only good things about it, but currently I'm looking for longer series, like upwards of 40 episodes. I watched the first episode of Earth: Final Conflict, and while I may pick it up again in the future it's not what I'm looking for right now. I didn't care much for any of the characters, either. I watched 4 or 5 episodes of Babylon 5 because the premise seemed interesting and I thought it would improve any minute now, but it never did. I watched 2 episodes and it was just dull. The main character is this typical bland American guy with no sense of humour, and none of the other characters stood out in a good way, either. I didn't like Farscape at all (I watched like 3 episodes). Harper may be my favourite TV character of all time.īSG (the new one) is another good example, although here it's more the story and the politics rather than the characters that drew me in. I liked the humour (especially the sarcasm), I liked the gender balance (3 girls out of 7 main characters), and I liked the chemistry between the individual characters and the unique relationships that developed between them.