Space opera

'' Some critics distinguish between space opera and planetary romance. Both feature adventures in exotic settings, but space opera emphasizes space travel, while planetary romances focus on alien worlds. In this view, the Martian, Venusian, and lunar-setting stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs would be planetary romances (and among the earliest), as would be Leigh Brackett's Burroughs-influenced Eric John Stark stories. The term "space opera" was coined in 1941 by fan writer and author Wilson Tucker as a pejorative term in an article in Le Zombie (a science fiction fanzine). At the time, serial radio dramas in the United States had become popularly known as soap operas because many were sponsored by soap manufacturers. The term "horse opera" had also come into use to describe formulaic Western films. Tucker defined space opera as the science fiction equivalent: A "hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn". During the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the stories were printed in science-fiction magazines, they were often referred to as "super-science epics". ==History==

Early works which preceded the subgenre contained many elements of what would become space opera. They are today referred to as proto-space opera. Early proto-space opera was written by several 19th century French authors, for example, Les Posthumes (1802) by Nicolas-Edme Rétif, ''Star ou Psi de Cassiopée: Histoire Merveilleuse de l'un des Mondes de l'Espace (1854) by C. I. Defontenay and Lumen'' (1872) by Camille Flammarion. Not widely popular, proto-space operas were nevertheless occasionally written during the late Victorian and Edwardian science-fiction era. Examples may be found in the works of Percy Greg, Garrett P. Serviss, George Griffith, and Robert Cromie. Science fiction scholar E. F. Bleiler cites Robert William Cole's The Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 2236 as the first space opera in his 1990 reference work Science-Fiction: The Early Years. Despite this seemingly early beginning, it was not until the late 1920s that the space opera proper began to appear regularly in pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories. Unlike earlier stories of space adventure, which either related the invasion of Earth by extraterrestrials, or concentrated on the invention of a space vehicle by a genius inventor, pure space opera simply took space travel for granted (usually by setting the story in the far future), skipped the preliminaries, and launched straight into tales of derring-do among the stars. Early stories of this type include J. Schlossel's "Invaders from Outside" (Weird Tales, January 1925), According to author Paul J. McAuley, a number of mostly British writers began to reinvent space opera in the 1970s (although most non-British critics tend to dispute the British claim to dominance in the new space opera arena). 'New space opera' proponents claim that the genre centers on character development, fine writing, high literary standards, verisimilitude, and a moral exploration of contemporary social issues. publishing many of the aforementioned authors, who have won Hugo Awards. ==Definitions by contrast==

Several subsets of space opera overlap with military science fiction, concentrating on large-scale space battles with futuristic weapons in an interstellar war. Many series can be considered to belong and fall in two genres or even overlap all like ''Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card or the Honorverse'' by David Weber. At one extreme, the genre is used to speculate about future wars involving space travel, or the effects of such a war on humans; at the other, it consists of the use of military fiction plots with some superficial science-fiction trappings in fictional planets with fictional civilizations and fictional extraterrestrials. The term "military space opera" is occasionally used to denote this subgenre, as used for example by critic Sylvia Kelso when describing Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. Space Western also may emphasize space exploration as “the final frontier”. These Western themes may be explicit, such as cowboys in outer space, or they can be a more subtle influence in space opera. Gene Roddenberry described Star Trek: The Original Series as a space Western (or more poetically, as “Wagon Train to the stars”). Firefly and its cinematic follow-up Serenity literalized the Western aspects of the genre popularized by Star Trek: it used frontier towns, horses, and the styling of classic John Ford Westerns. Worlds that have been terraformed may be depicted as presenting similar challenges as that of a frontier settlement in a classic Western. Six-shooters and horses may be replaced by ray guns and rockets. ==Parodies==

Harry Harrison's novels Bill, the Galactic Hero and Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, as well as the film adaptation of the former, the films Galaxy Quest and Mel Brooks' Spaceballs, and ''Family Guy's Laugh It Up, Fuzzball'' trilogy parody the conventions of classic space opera. ==See also==