ABSTRACT
“Space opera” means different things depending upon when it is said and by whom. Wilson Tucker coined the term in 1941 for the “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn,” but like “soap opera,” it lost its negative implications as fans started to use the term for stories that they liked rather than despised. First attached to such 1930s star-busting pulp epics as Edmond Hamilton’s Interstellar Patrol (1929–30), Jack Williamson’s Legion of Space (1934–9), and E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman (1934–48) series, it seems to have become a term for referring to material the reader has outgrown but still regards with affection. Stereotyped space opera has minimal characterization, and vast settings of interstellar conflicts between clearly defined “good” and “bad” sides (typically human and alien, respectively, although Smith was careful to emphasize that not all aliens are “bad”). Its orchestrated set-piece scenes of massive destruction, as in Hamilton’s “The Universe Wreckers” (1930), are parodied in Harry Harrison’s Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers (1973). Yet an increasingly vivid romanticism brought color and a sense of baroque sophistication to the mode (Stableford 1993), perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Leigh Brackett’s space operas, published in Planet Stories and elsewhere from 1940 to the 1950s. These aspects perhaps culminated in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (Lucas 1977), in which pastiche of space-operatic tropes presented with state-of-the-art special effects brought knowing pleasure to older fans and created a vast new audience for the mode among younger ones. (Significantly, Brackett wrote a draft of the screenplay for its sequel, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner 1980).)
