Space Opera, Spiral Energy, and the Dark Side of Darwinism

This article will start as an anime review for Gurren Lagann (known in Japan as Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, “Heaven-piercing” Gurren Lagann) and end somewhere very far from the fields we know, perhaps as a philosophical musing, perhaps as a sermon. It is filled with spoilers, and pretty annoying spoilers at that, so do not read further unless you want to find out that “Rosebud” is the name of Luke Skywalker’s true father.

At the welcome recommendation of several people, I sought out Gurren Lagann. Those people, to whom I am grateful, correctly judged that is was the same kind of over-the-top Space Opera that I both read and try to write.

Let us pause to deal with the ever-burning question of what differentiates Space Opera from Military SF or any of the related genres. My answer is simple: when you are done reading E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s SKYLARK OF SPACE or GALACTIC PATROL and their sequels, or done watching STAR WARS and you are still in the mood for a yarn of the same kind, the type of story you seek is what we now call a Space Opera. When you are done reading STARSHIP TROOPERS by Heinlein or FOREVER WAR by Haldeman, and you are in the mood for the same kind of tale, you seek Military SF.

The defining characteristic of Space Opera is gigantism, larger-than-life characters storming across larger-than-life stages blowing up worlds.  Any story where the term “The Battle-Dyson-Sphere opened an aiming aperture wider than the rings of Saturn and ignited all suns in its internal triple star system to Nova-level output” could be inserted without confounding the story, or where the term “Space Pirate” can be used with a straight face, is likely to be  a Space Opera.   Space Opera usually does not deal with an infantryman’s-eye-view of the war: you are reading about the doings of the Gray Lensman, not with the barroom brawls, letters from home, and stoic loneliness of Juan Rico or William Mandella.  The short answer is that Space Opera deals with the Achilles and Ulysses of the future, heroes invulnerable or able to outwit the gods themselves, whereas Military SF deals with G.I.’s.

One trick that E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith perfected was the geometrical increase of scope. In SKYLARK OF SPACE, the duel was between Superscientist Richard Seaton and Evil Superscientist Marc Q. “Blackie” DuQuesne, and both were igniting atomic explosions on planetary surfaces with abandon: but by the fourth book SKYLARK DUQESNE, the climax included a scene where countless millions of stars were teleported from one galaxy into the exact location of home suns of evil star systems in a second galaxy, triggering so many supernovae that the entire second galaxy was one smear of spiral supernova-level radiation while the first galaxy was dimmed, and meanwhile all the good planets of that galaxy were teleported to freedom in carefully selected orbits at the correct distance each one around the star in yet a third galaxy. Space Opera often involves this type of one-upsmanship: the whole planet is at stake, the whole solar system, the whole galaxy, the whole cluster, and so on.

Gurren Lagann has this Skylarkian formula perfected. It starts out gigantic and grows larger from there.

SPOILERS AHEAD! A PLETHORA OF SPOILING SPOILERS!

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