How to Write a Space Opera That's Not Quite So Messed Up

Space opera is just over a century old — it grew out of the Western, with all of its themes of the frontier and wagon trains and Manifest Destiny. Space opera was also heavily shaped by notorious racist John W. Campbell, who infused it with his ideas of the "superior man."

Soooo... how do you write a space opera that's not kind of messed up?

I feel like people have found different answers to this question at different times.

In the early 2000s, there was a vogue for post-scarcity AI-fueled space utopias (partly inspired by Iain M. Banks) which solved the problem of the frontier by creating a universe where nobody wants for anything and there are enlightened, if problematic, saviors in the stars.

More recently, there's been a ton of blue-collar space operas, influenced by Alien and The Stars My Destination, including The Expanse, Becky Chambers' Wayfarer series, and books by Valerie Valdez, Karen Osborne, Tim Pratt, and a bunch of others. The blue collar thing means that instead of an intrepid explorer or colonizer, who ventures boldly into the unknown, you have working stiffs, who are just trying to get by and get swept up in some cosmic bullshit.

But when I set out to write Victories Greater Than Death, I really wanted to pay tribute to the space operas of my youth, especially Star Trek. Which means uniforms, exploration, boldly going, etc.

So I tried to find ways to gently subvert some of the assumptions of the genre.

In doing this, I was heavily influenced by Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books, which subvert as Asimov's ideas of a galactic empire and various other things in a clever fashion. Also Tobias Buckell, John Scalzi, Karen Lord, and many others.

Before I explain further... when I say "subvert," I don't mean that I replicate bad tropes with an ironic veneer. Or that you need a PhD in space opera to understand what I'm doing. I tried to keep it pretty easy to follow and not annoying for neophytes.

One big trope in space opera is that everyone is humanoid. And I decided early on that the crew of my alien starship would be humanoid — because it would be easier for my characters from Earth to adjust to. And I just wanted to celebrate the classic space offers that I love.

But why are there so many humanoid aliens? The usual explanation is something along the lines of Prometheus, or the TNG episode "The Chase". Long-ago aliens have seeded the galaxy with humanoid DNA, and that's why everybody looks like us.

The other usual explanation for humanoid life arising elsewhere in the galaxy is bilateral symmetry: there is a distinct advantage to having creatures with two arms and two legs and one head, for reasons.

In Victories Greater Than Death, I decided on a different explanation: a huge awful eugenics program, created by mysterious ancient aliens for their own bizarre and terrifying reasons. This isn't really a spoiler, because we find this out pretty early in the book.

This way, instead of humanoids being the bold, inquisitive explorers of a galaxy that's not ready for our pluck and determination, it puts us in a somewhat more complicated position.

Another space upper trope that I tried to mess with is faster-than-light travel. I wanted to allow it, because it's a mainstay of most space opera, but I didn't want it to be quite as cut-and-dried as it usually is.

So I came up with the spaceweave, which weaves two points in space together (as its name suggests.) There's just one problem: The spaceweave only really works at top speed for smaller vessels — because the energy requirements go up exponentially for a larger starship. (Again, I promise this is not something that becomes a boring lecture in the book. It's just touched on very briefly and obliquely.)

This size limitation on ships going top speed means the ship in the book, the Indomitable, cannot rely on the larger and more powerful ships in the fleet for rescue every time they're in trouble. It also gives an advantage to the bad guys, whose ships are all small and nimble.

I also decided to do away with traditional military ranks, other than Captain, on board my alien starship. That way, I could have a looser and more ambiguous chain of command, and thus a more collaborative and less authoritarian atmosphere.

Different alien species have very divergent ideas of authority and hierarchy and leadership, so it wouldn't work to impose top-down rule on people. In the book, there's one civilization that believes that only pregnant people (who can be any gender) should be in charge.

In addition to the captain, there's also the alternate captain — who can countermand any of the captain's orders. The alternate captain can also can take over as captain at a moment's notice, if they deem the captain is making errors. This isn't a mutiny. Or a "you're relieved of command" situation. It's just the ship really has two captains, and either one can be in charge at any given time.

I also drop plenty of hints, in the first book, that the Royal Fleet (the good guys) have a lot of problems and are somewhat morally compromised, especially after their long war against the Compassion. In the second book, we see a lot more of this. By the end of the third book, I'm guessing (planning) that we'll move towards something more radically inclusive and small-d democratic. This is definitely not a spoiler, bc I'm keeping it super vague.

Bottom line: I love space opera, and I love to play with tropes in general. And I think right now, there's lots of scope to take the old-school explorers-in-uniforms space opera in some really new and interesting directions.