SF Tidbits for 10/3/06
By John DeNardo |
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at
1:24 am
- Boomer who? Here are The Women of Star Trek. [via TV Squad, with hat-tip to Texas Best Grok, who was infatuated with Trek babes long before it was cool.
] - SFX interviews Terry Pratchett.
- John Clute reviews Three Days to Never by Tim Powers.
- Borders starts an online book club. [via The Book Standard]
- Karen Traviss talks about Doctor Who at Eos Blog.
- Would you eat this Discworld cake? [via GalleyCat via BoingBoing]
- Ronald Moore talks about Battlestar Galactica Season 3.
- A BlogCritics opinion piece…Battlestar Galactica: In Defense Of The Best Show On Television.
- Torque Control and Entropy pump weigh in on Jonathan Strahan’s recent space opera posts.
- Clarkesworld Magazine issue #1 features “A Light in Troy” by Sarah Monette and “304 Adolph Hitler Strasse” by Lavie Tidhar. [via Paul Jessup]
Related posts:
- SF Tidbits for 3/5/06
- SF Tidbits for 3/27/06
- SF Tidbits Part XXVIII
- SF Tidbits for 6/3/06
- SF Tidbits for 8/31/06
Filed under: Tidbits
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The funny thing is a friend of mine who is much less obsessed about SF than I am turned me on the new Battlestar Galactica. First time I heard about it I remembered the original and never took a second look. My friend watched it, even said “It’s not real SF, it’s more like a drama show”. Naturally I had to set him straigt that this was still SF, which he countered with, “if most SF is not about science then it’s a damn confusing genre name”. Still, I was hooked. Wow, this show is good, I just hope it never jumps the shark. I wish for a decent ending, like the one Babylon 5 got.
This is my responce 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.