SF Tidbits for 10/2/06
By John DeNardo |
Monday, October 2nd, 2006 at
12:09 am
- There is some cool art over at ConceptArt.org. [via Quantum Storytelling]
- Need a Halloween costume? Check out How to build a Giant Robot Costume. [via Make]
- Jonathan Strahan wonders if there’s no such thing as the “new space opera”. He is also asking everyone for their definition of “space opera”.
- On Spec magazine is promoting a course on The ABC’s of How NOT to Write Speculative Fiction.
- Monday Fun: What do you get when you combine Asteroids with Missile Command? You get Red! [via Digg]
- Serialized Priest anyone? Subterranean Press is serializing a novella from Cherie Priest’s upcoming collection Dreadful Skin. The novella is called “The Wreck of the Mary Byrd” and it will be available through the month of October. [via John Scalzi]
Related posts:
- SF Tidbits for 8/28/06
- SF Tidbits for 4/6/06
- What is Space Opera?
- SF Tidbits Part XXXVI
- SF Tidbits for 6/23/06
Filed under: Tidbits
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Thanks for posting this. I live in Edmonton and this sounds like a great workshop
Jim
This was the answer I gave to Strahan’s question asking for a definition of Space Opera:
Any story where a space-pirate wielding a space-axe could chop through a ray-shielded space-airlock, kidnap a beautiful space-princess and escape in a space-superdreadnought over a mile long, destroying at least one or perhaps two planets during the resulting space-battle, without this seeming in any particular out of place with the scale, scope, drive or moral code portrayed in the rest of the story, then the story is a Space Opera.
If you can add scene where the hero wrestles a dinosaur in the radio-active radium mine which is being flooded during a slave-revolt without breaking the established mood of the piece, then the story is a Space Opera.
Likewise, if the word “inconceivably” or “unimaginably” or “staggeringly” could be added as an adjective to describe the scale of the engineering, the temperature of beam-weapons, the speed of the vessels, the hardness of the space-armor, or the size of explosions and the resulting volume of destruction, or the beauty of the faultless heroine or the sex appeal of the evil space-emperor’s willful daughter, without seeming particularly out of place in the sentence, the story is a Space Opera.
Any lighthearted and straightforward space-adventure story which relies for its primary appeal on that sense of awe and wonder which comes of the contemplation of astronomical magnitudes both in the setting and the props, as well as the larger-than-life heroes and villains, you have a Space Opera.