Five Space Operas
Nov. 8th, 2004 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentEveryone knows what space opera is. Right? It's the public face of science fiction, for starters: spaceships and space battles, exotic planets and alien peoples. Star Wars and A Fire Upon The Deep. In short, it's one of the most traditional forms the genre can take. In the past couple of years, though, there has been some fuss about something called 'new space opera'.
The idea probably came as close to being codified as it can be in the August 2003 issue of Locus. Essays by authors such as Ken Macleod, Paul McAuley, Gwyneth Jones and M John Harrison cited touchstones such as The Centauri Device, David Pringle and Colin Greenland's 'radical hard sf' editorial in Interzone, Consider Phlebas and Light, as well as other writers such as Charles Stross and Alastair Reynolds, in an attempt to provide definition. Meanwhile, Russell Letson and Gary K Wolfe slugged it out in an attempt to work out to what extent, if any, new space opera is British, or indeed exists at all. At one point Letson opines of the form in general:
Wikipedia offers a similar, if less eloquent, definition: "Space opera is subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes romantic adventure, interstellar travel, and space battles where the main storyline is interstellar conflict and character drama." When it comes to the 'new' aspect, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have pointed out that 'space opera' was originally an inherently derogatary term (shades of Margaret Atwood's definition of 'science fiction' here, perhaps), meaning: "A hack science-fiction story, a dressed-up Western; so called by analogy with 'horse opera' for Western bangbangshootemup movies and 'soap opera' for radio and video yellowdrama." Contrast this with Rick Kleffel's take on space opera, in a column on his website:
Hartwell and Cramer are more direct: modern space opera is 'ambitious in both commercial and literary terms', they say.
I don't disagree with any of this. Space opera is undoubtedly going through something of a revival, and probably the single defining mark of that revival is a new sophistication. I've just been thinking about how it all fits together recently, primarily because until a couple of weeks ago, for no particular reason I hadn't read or watched much space opera this year--Newton's Wake and The Chronicles of Riddick was about it. Suddenly I've consumed a glut; and now you get to listen to me talk about them.
First up is the recent Farscape miniseries, The Peacekeeper War, a rare example of a show being brought back from cancellation to allow closure for the story and characters. It certainly makes no concessions to new viewers--at the best of times Farscape was given to building on its backstory, expecting viewers just to keep up, and here the use of continuity is positively wanton. They never explain why there are so many muppets (in spaaace), and there isn't even a place for the show's one regular concession to virgin viewers, the opening-credits narration:
The enemies in question are the two major powers in the region: the titular, apparently ironically-named Peacekeepers, and the even more aggressive, vaguely reptilian Scarrans. Over the four years of the series first one, then the other, then both pursued Crichton for the knowledge they believed he had: how to make an ultimate weapon using wormholes.
They also edged towards war, and in the miniseries it arrives in full, cinematic, ship-detonating glory. Crichton and companions are caught, as usual, in the middle. They have a chance for peace: restore the psychic talents of an alien race called the Eidelons, talents that in millennia past made them natural negotiators, and maybe the two aggressors can be persuaded to work something out. Oh, and Aeryn is due to have Crichton's child.
Purely on the level of excessive, adrenaline-fuelled (operatic) adventure, Farscape is one of the best there is, and if at times it feels as though every single line is being shouted, well, that's all part of the series' charm. What works less well is the plot. It has a serious, if not exactly new, and not entirely realistic, point to make about the futility of arms races. Unfortunately, it feels too episodic, as though the producers took the major plot points from a planned twenty-two episode season and ran them all together without smoothing over the bumps; and while individual scenes are undeniably powerful, that strength is not sustained for the whole running time.
On the other hand, the characters are in fine form, particularly John Crichton and Aeryn Sun. In many ways, it's Aeryn's show from start to finish; Claudia Black is magnificent. The birth scene itself, in which Aeryn and John crouch in the pool of a fountain while a firefight rages around them, is arguably overdone, almost farcical (give me the melodrama of Angel's 'Lullaby' any day), but everything else is spot-on. Somehow Black manages to give Aeryn tender moments without making her soft; without losing the steel that defines the character.
Crichton, meanwhile, is as brash and unstable as ever. One of the themes of the miniseries is to what extent the ends justify the means, demonstrated by the lengths to which Crichton is prepared to go to save his family. Like many character actions in Farscape, I don't think we're meant to approve of everything Crichton does, for all that he's nominally the hero of the piece; we're just meant to understand him.
And, most importantly, does it succeed as a capstone to the show? Yes. Story threads reach fruition, characters grow and change, and the galaxy shifts into a new alignment. Given a whole season to breathe the story could have been even better; but as it is, it's still very good indeed.
Farscape is about as cutting-edge as media sf gets, in that it has a real awareness of past sf ideas and plays with viewer expectations (the canonical example of this is probably '...Different Destinations', a time travel short story as good as any I've read recently). The cutting edge of prose sf, on the other hand, is sometimes defined as 'wherever Charles Stross is'.
One of Stross' three published novels this year (!) was a space opera: Iron Sunrise, the followup to last year's Hugo-nominated Singularity Sky. A singularity in the relatively near future has given rise to the Eschaton, a strongly godlike AI whose major interaction with humanity involved scattering large chunks of it across various planets, then near-disappearing. It left behind several commandments, of which the most significant is a blunt warning: 'thou shalt not fuck with causality within my historic light cone. Or else.'
The reason the big E is wary of causality violation is that it doesn't want to be edited out of existence. The reason it has come to be wary is that faster than light travel is equiavent to time travel ... and in this future, FTL is ubiquitous. Singularity Sky revealed that the Eschaton has human agents who work covertly to prevent infringement of the Commandment. When those fail, it's not above taking off and nuking the site from orbit; which in this case means total sterilisation, quite possibly of an entire sector, quite possibly by engineering a nova.
So when Iron Sunrise opens with a sun going nova, the reader has certain suspicions about what's going on. Happily, Stross then wrongfoots everyone by establishing that this one is someone else's fault. But who?
A military-espionage-adventure-thriller (in spaaaace) unfolds. UN agent Rachel Mansour reappears, as does her husband Martin, and plenty of new elements are thrown into the mix: Wednesday, a refugee from the titular nova; Frank, the foreign affairs correspondent of the Times (now, of course, an invective-filled blog); and the somewhat creepy ReMastered, a group whose ideology has caught hold of a number of local systems.
In all honesty, I found the book a bit disappointing--much as I did Singularity Sky. The opening, describing the nova as it happens and Wednesday's escape with her family, is tediously lengthy where it should be snappy; there's an excess of technical detail. And the machinations and counter-machinations of the various parties--the games of spy-versus-spy--feel somewhat, well, mechanical.
The good stuff is there, mind. There's humour (I can't think of any other writer likely to use the chapter heading 'someone set us up the bomb') and other distinctively Strossian touches (in the climactic chapter, one of the major problems facing the good guys is a lack of bandwidth) ... but it all seems a bit dilute, particularly compared to something like Accelerando, but even compared to other 'standard' space operas. At times it reads more like a film script than anything else. Further, not all of the wordplay comes off; sometimes you feel that Stross is just a little too proud of the terms he's coined. The description 'McWorld' is a particular offender in this regard, cropping so frequently as to become irritating.
The final problem, for me--although it wouldn't have been a problem if I'd enjoyed the rest of the book more--is that Iron Sunrise doesn't seem complete in itself. Part of the plot is wrapped up (the major part), but loose ends dangle in a much more obvious way than they did at the end of Singularity Sky. This is a book that feels like it needs a sequel, and that's always frustrating if you don't know it's what you're going to get when you start.
Mind you, I'm probably in a minority of readers when I say that I find that most worlds don't support multiple books. Sometimes I think that writers can get a little too caught up in examining their own creation, with each story becoming The Latest Thrilling Adventure Of their heroine. Sometimes I think they can get too comfortable, and turn out easy, average stories when they could be creating something brand-new.
One example that I (of course) think avoids most of these traps is Stephen Baxter's Xeelee cycle, which now includes half a dozen novels and surely four times that many short stories. The future history he's describing is big enough, running as it does on astronomical time scales, to encompass these and many more. Last year's Coalescent, for instance, the first book in a new sequence, Destiny's Children, turned out to only be related to existing Xeelee chronology in the most tangential of ways, being set, as it was, almost entirely in Roman Britain and contemporary Rome. This year's follow-up, Exultant, on the other hand, is set right at the heart of the sequence. 25,000 years from now, humanity is waging war against the Xeelee, at the heart of the galaxy. Indeed, they've been doing so, at the time of the novel, for over twenty millennia.
Like Stross, Baxter incorporates the time-machine potential of FTL into his story. But where Stross uses it as a weaponised plot point, for Baxter it's the jumping-off point for the novel's major human story. Pirius is a pilot flying against the Xeelee; a desperate manoeuvre (with, admittedly, Star Trek overtones) allows him to escape from what had seemed certain death ... but leaves him stranded two years in his own past.
On his return to base, despite bringing with him a new tactic and a captured Xeelee fighter, Pirius is a pariah, not a hero. He's busted down to the infantry for disobeying orders (he ran, when he should have fought). Moreover, his younger self, convicted on the grounds that whatever character flaws his older self has must be present in him too, only escapes the same fate because an eccentric official from Earth's central government, Comissary Nilis, seems to have a use for him.
Thereafter the novel unfolds on two tracks. Pirius the elder finds himself facing the frontline horrors of the war; Pirius the younger becomes caught up in the schemes of Nilis, a typically Baxteresque renaissance iconoclast who believes he can find a way to win the war.
In the grim darkness of this far future, the human race, under the guidance of the Druz doctrines, has become a machine dedicated to warmaking. Families don't exist; soldiers and everyone else are vat-grown, so that the closest relation is that of cadre siblings. Billions die every day, on a battlefront that rings the core of the galaxy. The logistics and atmosphere are those of World War I (in spaaaace). Successful soldiers are allowed to pass on their genes; subsequent generations adapt, change, breed younger. The Xeelee war is fought by child soldiers.
Reviewing the book for Locus, Gary K Wolfe suggested it could be considered as a Stapledonian Forever War. Throw some Orwell into the mix--the departments in the totalitarian Coaltion have names like the Commission for Historical Truth--and you get a reasonable sense of how the novel feels, if less so for what it's about.
And that, for any baffled people who've read Coalescent, is where the book starts to link up with its predecessor--in what it's about. So it's not a narrative link, although a hive (far more advanced than the one under Rome) does put in an appearance, but a thematic one.
Both books ask questions about human social organisation. Coalescent asked about the value of the family; Exultant asks about the value of the military. The two versions of Pirius are brought up sharp against their social and biological conditioning; their society is a dystopian nightmare, but at the same time it's clear that it was the only way for humanity to survive in this galaxy, much less actually beat back the Xeelee.
Exultant is arguably Baxter's first true space opera, in the barnstorming, space-war sense; and cards on the table, I think it's a very strong book in what looks to be a major series. I think it brings together a compelling (if sometimes plot-coupon-led) story, fascinating ideas, and a memorable setting. And though Baxter is aware of the pitfalls of too much scale ('of course,' Nilis knowingly declares at one point, 'cosmic special effects pale into insignificance beside our human dilemmas, don't they?' (p.39)), he's not too worthy to top everything off with a galactic-scale trench run. I haven't had so much simple fun reading a book for months.
One interesting note about the book, when comparing it to its contemporaries, is that it lacks that trope which is fast becoming ubiquitous: a singularity. Or not lacks, entirely; it seems that Baxter is aware of it, something that shows in the novel in two ways. Firstly, it advances the view that the universe is on the downslope from a singularity--the original thermodynamic singularity, the big bang. In the femtoseconds after the start of the universe, we learn, whole civilisations flourished and died; to them, everything that came after, including us, would seem slower than mountains. The universe is on a course of entropic decay, and there's nothing we can do about it.
A second is that there's no AI, at least, not at this point in the Xeelee sequence; it does exist elsewhen, but here it's outlawed. Baxter makes it part of the doctrines that guide the coaltion--this is, we are told more than once, a human war. To win it, humans must rely on their own ingenuity, not that of a machine.
AI is also outlawed at the start of Iain M Banks' latest, The Algebraist, although for somewhat different reasons; here, they are simply judged too dangerous. A crusade known as The Machine Wars took place some centuries previously to eradicate all AI, and strict regulations govern their use now. At first, this appears to be just a historical footnote, a way for Banks to credibly offer an old-style space opera; but of course, it's anything but.
We're not in the Culture. There's a galactic civilisation, of sorts, but it's a hodge-podge of thousands of different races in millions of different systems, stitched together via a network of wormholes (them again). There are no other FTL shortcuts in this novel; if your system doesn't have a wormhole, or if it was unlucky enough to have its wormhole portal destroyed, then interstellar trade and communication go out the window.
Fassin Taak lives in just such an unfortunate, isolated system, although, thankfully, a replacement portal is due in another couple of decades. In the meantime he's trained as a Seer, one of those humans who visit and study the Dwellers. The Dwellers, immensely long-lived aliens who live in gas giants, are the novel's big highlight. Bumptious and opinionated and misanthropic ('there was a saying to the effect that one Dweller constituted an argument-in-waiting, two a conspiracy and three a riot' (p.224)), and certainly not given to straightforward dealings, particularly with those they regard as lesser species, they are hugely entertaining creations. At one point, Fassin embarks on what amounts to a tour of Dweller culture in the local gas giant, Nasqueron; every page is vibrant and imaginative.
Unfortunately for Fassin, he does not live in peaceful times. His system is under threat of invasion from the improbably but aptly named Archimandrite Luseferous ('a psychopathic sadist with a fertile imagination', p11) and his battle fleet. Luseferous is in search of one of the mysteries of the Dwellers; the key that will unlock the secret of the Dweller List, which purports to give the location of the Dwellers' own personal wormhole network. Given the immense old age and vast spread of the Dweller civilisation, and the fragility of the existing network, such information would transform galactic civilisation. Poor Fassin is the one who inadvertently uncovered the information that leads Luseferous to believe that the key is to be found in his system, so he's the one who gets dispatched to find it first.
The information in question was a note in one volume of an epic Dweller poem called The Algebraist ('about mathematics, navigation as a metaphor, duty, longing, honour, long voyages home ... all that stuff' (p.166)), and most of the novel takes a straightforward quest form (in spaaaace), as Fassin searches for the companion volumes. This includes first the aforementioned visit to the Dwellers, and then trips to wonders further afield.
The Algebraist has two big problems. The first is the amount of infodumping in the novel's early chapters. This is entertainingly written, if at times too reminiscent of Hitch-Hiker's:
--but there's too much of it. The problem is that at times it reads like a sourcebook for a roleplaying game, as though Banks has gone to the trouble of creating this complex and detailed world and is damn well going to share it with us, whether we like it or not. As a result, the story gets bogged down almost before it's started.
The second problem, for me, is the macguffin. There's never any real doubt about the reality of the Dweller List; and worse, it's obvious from the first hundred pages exactly where the secret wormholes are kept, and why they're kept there. In fact, it's so absurdly obvious that it blew a big hole in my suspension of disbelief; the idea that nobody else could have come up with the answer, given (a) the nature of the List and (b) the known properties of wormholes in the book seemed ludicrous. I kept hoping that it was a bluff, that there would be a twist, but that we weren't really meant to believe it was a mystery for the six-hundred pages of the hunt ... but we are. And worse, when the answer is first revealed, it's in the form of a weak mathematical joke.
There is much of interest in the book. The debates about attitudes to progress on the part of Slow races like the Dwellers, and Quick races like the humans, are interesting; there are great riffs on politics and religion, and like Baxter's Xeelee timeline this is a universe that feels big enough to sustain many stories. Further, in terms of the simple quality of the writing and the characterisation, this is the best of the three books I'm considering here. Fundamentally, though, I think Justina Robson's review in The Guardian has it right: it's great reading, but it's not a great novel.
I started with one Sci-Fi Channel miniseries, and I'm going to end with another; but where Farscape was closing a door, the Battlestar Galactica remake is opening one. First shown about a year ago, it is a complete story, but for all that is obviously a pilot, setting up stories to be explored in the regular series that is now following on. How it relates to the original, though, I have almost no idea, since I never saw it.
This version opens on a remote diplomatic space station. Years ago, we are told, the Cylons--robots created by man to serve them--rose up and attacked their masters. After a vicious war, they were driven away, and this station was set up as a neutral meeting point. Every year, the twelve colonies send a representative; every year, the Cylons send no-one.
Until, of course, this year, when they send a beautiful blonde in a tight-fitting red dress. She walks in, escorted by two heavy-duty Cylons, walks up to the ambassador, and kisses him on the lips. Cut to an external view, and the station disintegrates in a firey explosion. The Cylons, it seems, are back, and this time they look just like us.
Meanwhile, the Galactica is the oldest remaining Battlestar, and is due to be decommissioned in a few days' time. Our first sight to it is a West Wing-style walk-and-talk around Command and Control. Here's Commander William Adama, due to retire with his ship; there's Lieutenant 'Starbuck' Thrace, on her morning fitness run.
And on one of the colonies, Caprica, the mysterious woman in red has shown up again, apparently unharmed. Here, she's the lover of one Dr Gaius Baltar, a leading expert in robotics and artificial intelligence who argues that the restrictions put in place after the Cylon war (similar, now I think of it, to those in The Algebraist, or Exultant) are too restrictive. He's also, as it turns out, somewhat less than moral; happy to let his lover have access the colony defense mainframe, in what he believes is an information-gathering exercise for a business proposal.
Of course, the proposal is actually invasion, and through this liason (and, one imagines, similar liasons on the other colonies), the Cylons are able to strike without warning, and with devastating force. Too quickly, humans are on the run, outnumbered, outgunned, outmaneouvered. The focus of the surviving fleet is, of course, the Galactica--now not only not decommissioned, but suddenly, thanks to its antiquated, non-networked computer systems, the only battleship able to fight the Cylons on even terms.
Baltar is rescued, and makes it to the Galactica, but not entirely alone. The woman in the red dress has hitched a ride in his mind--that, or she's entirely a delusion, an attempt to rationalise the effects of his actions. It's not clear which is the case, and that's a strength of the story.
In terms of tone and presentation, Battlestar Galactica is a million and one miles from Farscape. Where the latter is organic chaos, this is controlled, sober, and shot in a very natural way. It shares some stylistic tics with Firefly, such as a tendency to use shaky-cam now and then; but more importantly, it shares a sensibility with both:
Many of the elements here are stock conflicts (albeit in spaaaace)--angst between father and sun; the maverick who's nevertheless a genius pilot--but in TV SF, so long dominated by Trek, it's still refreshing to see any human conflict at all. Farscape, Firefly, now this; all offer a more sophisticated, more dramatically ambitious, portrait of humanity among the stars than any of the Trek series, with the possible exception of Deep Space Nine. At times, in fact, Galactica is honest-to-god brutal; the few must be and are abandoned to save the many. At times, it questions why humans are worth saving at all, and that, I think, bodes well for the series.
I sort of feel that after four thousand words I should offer some form of summation, an overview; but I find I don't have much to say along those lines. In the course of the Locus article I quoted from at the start of all this, Gary K Wolfe suggested that 'space opera' as a critical term is 'pretty nearly useless'. I'm not sure I'd go that far, even if only because the term still carries enough associations to have a generally understood meaning, but it's certainly a broad church. Yes, all five of these stories deal with interstellar conflict of some sort, but beyond that there are major differences of tone and theme and scope.
There's an argument that the futures of space opera are orphans; we know that, give or take a singularity or some other equally magical event to provide the necessary gizmos, it's actually not going to be like that. That seems to me irrelevant. I've said this before, but to me one of the best things about the sf writer's toolbox is that although rocket ships and enigmatic artifacts have all sorts of juicy metaphorical and symbolic potential, and despite the fact that creating worlds out of whole cloth allows a unique perspective on our present, when you get down to it these are also all things that are, plain and simple, cool. It's almost more of a toybox than a toolbox; and it's still fun to play with.
Crichton put it best: look upwards, and share the wonders I have seen.
Some people eat ice-cream as displacement activity, you know. Me, I write four and a half thousand words about space opera. Go figure.
The idea probably came as close to being codified as it can be in the August 2003 issue of Locus. Essays by authors such as Ken Macleod, Paul McAuley, Gwyneth Jones and M John Harrison cited touchstones such as The Centauri Device, David Pringle and Colin Greenland's 'radical hard sf' editorial in Interzone, Consider Phlebas and Light, as well as other writers such as Charles Stross and Alastair Reynolds, in an attempt to provide definition. Meanwhile, Russell Letson and Gary K Wolfe slugged it out in an attempt to work out to what extent, if any, new space opera is British, or indeed exists at all. At one point Letson opines of the form in general:
The enduring traits of space opera seem to be those of scale: interplanetary or interstellar space, preferably at least partly settled and governed so it can be a 'world' for human action. But it also needs to be big and mysterious, a place of extremes, and full of hidden treasures and dangers. Then you add action suited to this kind of world, preferably (again) with huge stakes: saving planets (or the empire or civilisation), averting (or committing) genocide, discovering the Meaning of Life or the Centre of the Galaxy. Space opera isn't just any old narrative-containing vessel; it's a vessel for super-sized stories that celebrate the sense that the universe is a supersized kind of place. It cuts Creation down to size at the same time it celebrates how big and scary it is. I think at its best it's about the sublime.
Wikipedia offers a similar, if less eloquent, definition: "Space opera is subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes romantic adventure, interstellar travel, and space battles where the main storyline is interstellar conflict and character drama." When it comes to the 'new' aspect, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have pointed out that 'space opera' was originally an inherently derogatary term (shades of Margaret Atwood's definition of 'science fiction' here, perhaps), meaning: "A hack science-fiction story, a dressed-up Western; so called by analogy with 'horse opera' for Western bangbangshootemup movies and 'soap opera' for radio and video yellowdrama." Contrast this with Rick Kleffel's take on space opera, in a column on his website:
What's interesting to me is that space opera in the end is no different than any other genre or even novels that lack genre. Behind the assembled elements of the prose and the plot, the temperament of the writer reigns. Some space operas full of the elements--interstellar space travel, galaxy-spanning cultures, aliens, space battles, political intrigue--read like comfortable bestsellers. Some, using the same elements read like edgy modern character studies, others exotic experiments that push the boundaries of language
Hartwell and Cramer are more direct: modern space opera is 'ambitious in both commercial and literary terms', they say.
I don't disagree with any of this. Space opera is undoubtedly going through something of a revival, and probably the single defining mark of that revival is a new sophistication. I've just been thinking about how it all fits together recently, primarily because until a couple of weeks ago, for no particular reason I hadn't read or watched much space opera this year--Newton's Wake and The Chronicles of Riddick was about it. Suddenly I've consumed a glut; and now you get to listen to me talk about them.
First up is the recent Farscape miniseries, The Peacekeeper War, a rare example of a show being brought back from cancellation to allow closure for the story and characters. It certainly makes no concessions to new viewers--at the best of times Farscape was given to building on its backstory, expecting viewers just to keep up, and here the use of continuity is positively wanton. They never explain why there are so many muppets (in spaaace), and there isn't even a place for the show's one regular concession to virgin viewers, the opening-credits narration:
"My name is John Crichton. An astronaut. Three years ago, I got shot through a wormhole. I'm in a distant part of the universe, aboard this living ship of escaped prisoners ... my friends. I've made enemies ... powerful, dangerous. Now all I want is to find a way home, to warn Earth. Look upward, and share the wonders I've seen."
The enemies in question are the two major powers in the region: the titular, apparently ironically-named Peacekeepers, and the even more aggressive, vaguely reptilian Scarrans. Over the four years of the series first one, then the other, then both pursued Crichton for the knowledge they believed he had: how to make an ultimate weapon using wormholes.
They also edged towards war, and in the miniseries it arrives in full, cinematic, ship-detonating glory. Crichton and companions are caught, as usual, in the middle. They have a chance for peace: restore the psychic talents of an alien race called the Eidelons, talents that in millennia past made them natural negotiators, and maybe the two aggressors can be persuaded to work something out. Oh, and Aeryn is due to have Crichton's child.
Purely on the level of excessive, adrenaline-fuelled (operatic) adventure, Farscape is one of the best there is, and if at times it feels as though every single line is being shouted, well, that's all part of the series' charm. What works less well is the plot. It has a serious, if not exactly new, and not entirely realistic, point to make about the futility of arms races. Unfortunately, it feels too episodic, as though the producers took the major plot points from a planned twenty-two episode season and ran them all together without smoothing over the bumps; and while individual scenes are undeniably powerful, that strength is not sustained for the whole running time.
On the other hand, the characters are in fine form, particularly John Crichton and Aeryn Sun. In many ways, it's Aeryn's show from start to finish; Claudia Black is magnificent. The birth scene itself, in which Aeryn and John crouch in the pool of a fountain while a firefight rages around them, is arguably overdone, almost farcical (give me the melodrama of Angel's 'Lullaby' any day), but everything else is spot-on. Somehow Black manages to give Aeryn tender moments without making her soft; without losing the steel that defines the character.
Crichton, meanwhile, is as brash and unstable as ever. One of the themes of the miniseries is to what extent the ends justify the means, demonstrated by the lengths to which Crichton is prepared to go to save his family. Like many character actions in Farscape, I don't think we're meant to approve of everything Crichton does, for all that he's nominally the hero of the piece; we're just meant to understand him.
And, most importantly, does it succeed as a capstone to the show? Yes. Story threads reach fruition, characters grow and change, and the galaxy shifts into a new alignment. Given a whole season to breathe the story could have been even better; but as it is, it's still very good indeed.
Farscape is about as cutting-edge as media sf gets, in that it has a real awareness of past sf ideas and plays with viewer expectations (the canonical example of this is probably '...Different Destinations', a time travel short story as good as any I've read recently). The cutting edge of prose sf, on the other hand, is sometimes defined as 'wherever Charles Stross is'.
One of Stross' three published novels this year (!) was a space opera: Iron Sunrise, the followup to last year's Hugo-nominated Singularity Sky. A singularity in the relatively near future has given rise to the Eschaton, a strongly godlike AI whose major interaction with humanity involved scattering large chunks of it across various planets, then near-disappearing. It left behind several commandments, of which the most significant is a blunt warning: 'thou shalt not fuck with causality within my historic light cone. Or else.'
The reason the big E is wary of causality violation is that it doesn't want to be edited out of existence. The reason it has come to be wary is that faster than light travel is equiavent to time travel ... and in this future, FTL is ubiquitous. Singularity Sky revealed that the Eschaton has human agents who work covertly to prevent infringement of the Commandment. When those fail, it's not above taking off and nuking the site from orbit; which in this case means total sterilisation, quite possibly of an entire sector, quite possibly by engineering a nova.
So when Iron Sunrise opens with a sun going nova, the reader has certain suspicions about what's going on. Happily, Stross then wrongfoots everyone by establishing that this one is someone else's fault. But who?
A military-espionage-adventure-thriller (in spaaaace) unfolds. UN agent Rachel Mansour reappears, as does her husband Martin, and plenty of new elements are thrown into the mix: Wednesday, a refugee from the titular nova; Frank, the foreign affairs correspondent of the Times (now, of course, an invective-filled blog); and the somewhat creepy ReMastered, a group whose ideology has caught hold of a number of local systems.
In all honesty, I found the book a bit disappointing--much as I did Singularity Sky. The opening, describing the nova as it happens and Wednesday's escape with her family, is tediously lengthy where it should be snappy; there's an excess of technical detail. And the machinations and counter-machinations of the various parties--the games of spy-versus-spy--feel somewhat, well, mechanical.
The good stuff is there, mind. There's humour (I can't think of any other writer likely to use the chapter heading 'someone set us up the bomb') and other distinctively Strossian touches (in the climactic chapter, one of the major problems facing the good guys is a lack of bandwidth) ... but it all seems a bit dilute, particularly compared to something like Accelerando, but even compared to other 'standard' space operas. At times it reads more like a film script than anything else. Further, not all of the wordplay comes off; sometimes you feel that Stross is just a little too proud of the terms he's coined. The description 'McWorld' is a particular offender in this regard, cropping so frequently as to become irritating.
The final problem, for me--although it wouldn't have been a problem if I'd enjoyed the rest of the book more--is that Iron Sunrise doesn't seem complete in itself. Part of the plot is wrapped up (the major part), but loose ends dangle in a much more obvious way than they did at the end of Singularity Sky. This is a book that feels like it needs a sequel, and that's always frustrating if you don't know it's what you're going to get when you start.
Mind you, I'm probably in a minority of readers when I say that I find that most worlds don't support multiple books. Sometimes I think that writers can get a little too caught up in examining their own creation, with each story becoming The Latest Thrilling Adventure Of their heroine. Sometimes I think they can get too comfortable, and turn out easy, average stories when they could be creating something brand-new.
One example that I (of course) think avoids most of these traps is Stephen Baxter's Xeelee cycle, which now includes half a dozen novels and surely four times that many short stories. The future history he's describing is big enough, running as it does on astronomical time scales, to encompass these and many more. Last year's Coalescent, for instance, the first book in a new sequence, Destiny's Children, turned out to only be related to existing Xeelee chronology in the most tangential of ways, being set, as it was, almost entirely in Roman Britain and contemporary Rome. This year's follow-up, Exultant, on the other hand, is set right at the heart of the sequence. 25,000 years from now, humanity is waging war against the Xeelee, at the heart of the galaxy. Indeed, they've been doing so, at the time of the novel, for over twenty millennia.
Like Stross, Baxter incorporates the time-machine potential of FTL into his story. But where Stross uses it as a weaponised plot point, for Baxter it's the jumping-off point for the novel's major human story. Pirius is a pilot flying against the Xeelee; a desperate manoeuvre (with, admittedly, Star Trek overtones) allows him to escape from what had seemed certain death ... but leaves him stranded two years in his own past.
On his return to base, despite bringing with him a new tactic and a captured Xeelee fighter, Pirius is a pariah, not a hero. He's busted down to the infantry for disobeying orders (he ran, when he should have fought). Moreover, his younger self, convicted on the grounds that whatever character flaws his older self has must be present in him too, only escapes the same fate because an eccentric official from Earth's central government, Comissary Nilis, seems to have a use for him.
Thereafter the novel unfolds on two tracks. Pirius the elder finds himself facing the frontline horrors of the war; Pirius the younger becomes caught up in the schemes of Nilis, a typically Baxteresque renaissance iconoclast who believes he can find a way to win the war.
In the grim darkness of this far future, the human race, under the guidance of the Druz doctrines, has become a machine dedicated to warmaking. Families don't exist; soldiers and everyone else are vat-grown, so that the closest relation is that of cadre siblings. Billions die every day, on a battlefront that rings the core of the galaxy. The logistics and atmosphere are those of World War I (in spaaaace). Successful soldiers are allowed to pass on their genes; subsequent generations adapt, change, breed younger. The Xeelee war is fought by child soldiers.
Reviewing the book for Locus, Gary K Wolfe suggested it could be considered as a Stapledonian Forever War. Throw some Orwell into the mix--the departments in the totalitarian Coaltion have names like the Commission for Historical Truth--and you get a reasonable sense of how the novel feels, if less so for what it's about.
And that, for any baffled people who've read Coalescent, is where the book starts to link up with its predecessor--in what it's about. So it's not a narrative link, although a hive (far more advanced than the one under Rome) does put in an appearance, but a thematic one.
Both books ask questions about human social organisation. Coalescent asked about the value of the family; Exultant asks about the value of the military. The two versions of Pirius are brought up sharp against their social and biological conditioning; their society is a dystopian nightmare, but at the same time it's clear that it was the only way for humanity to survive in this galaxy, much less actually beat back the Xeelee.
Exultant is arguably Baxter's first true space opera, in the barnstorming, space-war sense; and cards on the table, I think it's a very strong book in what looks to be a major series. I think it brings together a compelling (if sometimes plot-coupon-led) story, fascinating ideas, and a memorable setting. And though Baxter is aware of the pitfalls of too much scale ('of course,' Nilis knowingly declares at one point, 'cosmic special effects pale into insignificance beside our human dilemmas, don't they?' (p.39)), he's not too worthy to top everything off with a galactic-scale trench run. I haven't had so much simple fun reading a book for months.
One interesting note about the book, when comparing it to its contemporaries, is that it lacks that trope which is fast becoming ubiquitous: a singularity. Or not lacks, entirely; it seems that Baxter is aware of it, something that shows in the novel in two ways. Firstly, it advances the view that the universe is on the downslope from a singularity--the original thermodynamic singularity, the big bang. In the femtoseconds after the start of the universe, we learn, whole civilisations flourished and died; to them, everything that came after, including us, would seem slower than mountains. The universe is on a course of entropic decay, and there's nothing we can do about it.
A second is that there's no AI, at least, not at this point in the Xeelee sequence; it does exist elsewhen, but here it's outlawed. Baxter makes it part of the doctrines that guide the coaltion--this is, we are told more than once, a human war. To win it, humans must rely on their own ingenuity, not that of a machine.
AI is also outlawed at the start of Iain M Banks' latest, The Algebraist, although for somewhat different reasons; here, they are simply judged too dangerous. A crusade known as The Machine Wars took place some centuries previously to eradicate all AI, and strict regulations govern their use now. At first, this appears to be just a historical footnote, a way for Banks to credibly offer an old-style space opera; but of course, it's anything but.
We're not in the Culture. There's a galactic civilisation, of sorts, but it's a hodge-podge of thousands of different races in millions of different systems, stitched together via a network of wormholes (them again). There are no other FTL shortcuts in this novel; if your system doesn't have a wormhole, or if it was unlucky enough to have its wormhole portal destroyed, then interstellar trade and communication go out the window.
Fassin Taak lives in just such an unfortunate, isolated system, although, thankfully, a replacement portal is due in another couple of decades. In the meantime he's trained as a Seer, one of those humans who visit and study the Dwellers. The Dwellers, immensely long-lived aliens who live in gas giants, are the novel's big highlight. Bumptious and opinionated and misanthropic ('there was a saying to the effect that one Dweller constituted an argument-in-waiting, two a conspiracy and three a riot' (p.224)), and certainly not given to straightforward dealings, particularly with those they regard as lesser species, they are hugely entertaining creations. At one point, Fassin embarks on what amounts to a tour of Dweller culture in the local gas giant, Nasqueron; every page is vibrant and imaginative.
Unfortunately for Fassin, he does not live in peaceful times. His system is under threat of invasion from the improbably but aptly named Archimandrite Luseferous ('a psychopathic sadist with a fertile imagination', p11) and his battle fleet. Luseferous is in search of one of the mysteries of the Dwellers; the key that will unlock the secret of the Dweller List, which purports to give the location of the Dwellers' own personal wormhole network. Given the immense old age and vast spread of the Dweller civilisation, and the fragility of the existing network, such information would transform galactic civilisation. Poor Fassin is the one who inadvertently uncovered the information that leads Luseferous to believe that the key is to be found in his system, so he's the one who gets dispatched to find it first.
The information in question was a note in one volume of an epic Dweller poem called The Algebraist ('about mathematics, navigation as a metaphor, duty, longing, honour, long voyages home ... all that stuff' (p.166)), and most of the novel takes a straightforward quest form (in spaaaace), as Fassin searches for the companion volumes. This includes first the aforementioned visit to the Dwellers, and then trips to wonders further afield.
The Algebraist has two big problems. The first is the amount of infodumping in the novel's early chapters. This is entertainingly written, if at times too reminiscent of Hitch-Hiker's:
The unspeakably omnipotent members of the Complector Council were bound by nothing else save the laws of physics, and were generallyheld to be putting considerable effort into getting round those. (pp109-110)
--but there's too much of it. The problem is that at times it reads like a sourcebook for a roleplaying game, as though Banks has gone to the trouble of creating this complex and detailed world and is damn well going to share it with us, whether we like it or not. As a result, the story gets bogged down almost before it's started.
The second problem, for me, is the macguffin. There's never any real doubt about the reality of the Dweller List; and worse, it's obvious from the first hundred pages exactly where the secret wormholes are kept, and why they're kept there. In fact, it's so absurdly obvious that it blew a big hole in my suspension of disbelief; the idea that nobody else could have come up with the answer, given (a) the nature of the List and (b) the known properties of wormholes in the book seemed ludicrous. I kept hoping that it was a bluff, that there would be a twist, but that we weren't really meant to believe it was a mystery for the six-hundred pages of the hunt ... but we are. And worse, when the answer is first revealed, it's in the form of a weak mathematical joke.
There is much of interest in the book. The debates about attitudes to progress on the part of Slow races like the Dwellers, and Quick races like the humans, are interesting; there are great riffs on politics and religion, and like Baxter's Xeelee timeline this is a universe that feels big enough to sustain many stories. Further, in terms of the simple quality of the writing and the characterisation, this is the best of the three books I'm considering here. Fundamentally, though, I think Justina Robson's review in The Guardian has it right: it's great reading, but it's not a great novel.
I started with one Sci-Fi Channel miniseries, and I'm going to end with another; but where Farscape was closing a door, the Battlestar Galactica remake is opening one. First shown about a year ago, it is a complete story, but for all that is obviously a pilot, setting up stories to be explored in the regular series that is now following on. How it relates to the original, though, I have almost no idea, since I never saw it.
This version opens on a remote diplomatic space station. Years ago, we are told, the Cylons--robots created by man to serve them--rose up and attacked their masters. After a vicious war, they were driven away, and this station was set up as a neutral meeting point. Every year, the twelve colonies send a representative; every year, the Cylons send no-one.
Until, of course, this year, when they send a beautiful blonde in a tight-fitting red dress. She walks in, escorted by two heavy-duty Cylons, walks up to the ambassador, and kisses him on the lips. Cut to an external view, and the station disintegrates in a firey explosion. The Cylons, it seems, are back, and this time they look just like us.
Meanwhile, the Galactica is the oldest remaining Battlestar, and is due to be decommissioned in a few days' time. Our first sight to it is a West Wing-style walk-and-talk around Command and Control. Here's Commander William Adama, due to retire with his ship; there's Lieutenant 'Starbuck' Thrace, on her morning fitness run.
And on one of the colonies, Caprica, the mysterious woman in red has shown up again, apparently unharmed. Here, she's the lover of one Dr Gaius Baltar, a leading expert in robotics and artificial intelligence who argues that the restrictions put in place after the Cylon war (similar, now I think of it, to those in The Algebraist, or Exultant) are too restrictive. He's also, as it turns out, somewhat less than moral; happy to let his lover have access the colony defense mainframe, in what he believes is an information-gathering exercise for a business proposal.
Of course, the proposal is actually invasion, and through this liason (and, one imagines, similar liasons on the other colonies), the Cylons are able to strike without warning, and with devastating force. Too quickly, humans are on the run, outnumbered, outgunned, outmaneouvered. The focus of the surviving fleet is, of course, the Galactica--now not only not decommissioned, but suddenly, thanks to its antiquated, non-networked computer systems, the only battleship able to fight the Cylons on even terms.
Baltar is rescued, and makes it to the Galactica, but not entirely alone. The woman in the red dress has hitched a ride in his mind--that, or she's entirely a delusion, an attempt to rationalise the effects of his actions. It's not clear which is the case, and that's a strength of the story.
In terms of tone and presentation, Battlestar Galactica is a million and one miles from Farscape. Where the latter is organic chaos, this is controlled, sober, and shot in a very natural way. It shares some stylistic tics with Firefly, such as a tendency to use shaky-cam now and then; but more importantly, it shares a sensibility with both:
"The world is coming to an end. The war is over and we lost, they say. The world is coming to an end and all I can think is that I have cancer and I'm going to die. How selfish is that?"
"It's not selfish. It's human."
Many of the elements here are stock conflicts (albeit in spaaaace)--angst between father and sun; the maverick who's nevertheless a genius pilot--but in TV SF, so long dominated by Trek, it's still refreshing to see any human conflict at all. Farscape, Firefly, now this; all offer a more sophisticated, more dramatically ambitious, portrait of humanity among the stars than any of the Trek series, with the possible exception of Deep Space Nine. At times, in fact, Galactica is honest-to-god brutal; the few must be and are abandoned to save the many. At times, it questions why humans are worth saving at all, and that, I think, bodes well for the series.
I sort of feel that after four thousand words I should offer some form of summation, an overview; but I find I don't have much to say along those lines. In the course of the Locus article I quoted from at the start of all this, Gary K Wolfe suggested that 'space opera' as a critical term is 'pretty nearly useless'. I'm not sure I'd go that far, even if only because the term still carries enough associations to have a generally understood meaning, but it's certainly a broad church. Yes, all five of these stories deal with interstellar conflict of some sort, but beyond that there are major differences of tone and theme and scope.
There's an argument that the futures of space opera are orphans; we know that, give or take a singularity or some other equally magical event to provide the necessary gizmos, it's actually not going to be like that. That seems to me irrelevant. I've said this before, but to me one of the best things about the sf writer's toolbox is that although rocket ships and enigmatic artifacts have all sorts of juicy metaphorical and symbolic potential, and despite the fact that creating worlds out of whole cloth allows a unique perspective on our present, when you get down to it these are also all things that are, plain and simple, cool. It's almost more of a toybox than a toolbox; and it's still fun to play with.
Crichton put it best: look upwards, and share the wonders I have seen.
Some people eat ice-cream as displacement activity, you know. Me, I write four and a half thousand words about space opera. Go figure.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 02:13 am (UTC)Obvious if you have some kind of science brain? Or am I just a bit slow?
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Date: 2004-11-08 02:24 am (UTC)1. Jbezubyr tngrf erdhver syng fcnpr-gvzr.
2. Nccebkvzngryl syng fcnpr-gvzr pna or sbhaq bhg va vagrefgryyne fcnpr, be ng yntenatr cbvagf jurer tenivgl vf onynaprq.
3. Ng gur prager bs n jngre onfrq zbba gurer vf cerffher ohg lbh ner va snpg jrvtugyrff.
If you're trying to think of places where wormhole gates owned by the Dwellers might be hidden, I think those three pieces of information are enough, to be honest. And none of them are particularly esoteric pieces of knowledge for the characters.
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Date: 2004-11-08 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 02:37 am (UTC)Well, you could always try eating ice-cream in between writing four and a half thousand words about space opera. :)
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Date: 2004-11-08 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 03:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 03:55 am (UTC)I now finally understand that the world does not end with statistics, lab reports and SPSS. It ends after four and half thousand words of.... I don't know what. I got confused pondering the rhetorical question.
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Date: 2004-11-08 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 04:10 am (UTC)You know what they say about an introduction? Short, precise & witty. To hook the audience and reel them in.
NOT alienate them with talk of .... *spit* science fiction. C'mon man, the humanity!
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Date: 2004-11-08 04:21 am (UTC)Because they are REALLY BIG wars. :-p
C'mon man, the humanity!
No, the aliens. You see?
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Date: 2004-11-08 04:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 05:42 am (UTC)OR
There's the simple option - Pizza Hut / Dominos / etc. All deliver nice, lovely ice-cream (either HD or B&Js). Well; deliver pizzas but ice-cream comes alongside them.
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Date: 2004-11-08 06:03 am (UTC)A pun on Apollo? :P
Yo ugetting the series of BSG? Or, indeed, any of the new TV other than FS:PW?
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Date: 2004-11-08 06:05 am (UTC)Er .. yes! Yes, that's exactly what it is. Well spotted.
You getting the series of BSG? Or, indeed, any of the new TV other than FS:PW?
Nope. My download speed always sucks, for some reason; PW took the best part of a week. I'll make the effort when Carnivale starts, but I can't face coordinating Smallville/Lost/West Wing/24 each week. :-/
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Date: 2004-11-08 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 06:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 07:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 07:58 am (UTC)2. I've finished Exultant, so I'll comment about that bit at some point. I think there's a copy or two of The Algebraist lying around te house too, so I'll have a read through that.
3. Can I have a copy of Peacekeeper Wars, please?
4. If you're going to write about space opera, go and read some Alastair Reynolds, fool! I won't make you read the whole of Pandora's Star.
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Date: 2004-11-08 08:03 am (UTC)Well, my work here is done.
2. I've finished Exultant, so I'll comment about that bit at some point.
Hopefully with less vehement disagreement than we had over The Snow ... ;-)
3. Can I have a copy of Peacekeeper Wars, please?
No. Me = lacking in CD burner.
4. If you're going to write about space opera, go and read some Alastair Reynolds, fool!
I know, I know ... I almost did read Chasm City after The Algebraist, but decided I was too close to overdose and went and read a fantasy novel instead. Now I'm reading Air by Geoff Ryman. My copy of Century Rain is on pre-order from Amazon, though ...
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Date: 2004-11-08 08:05 am (UTC)Once upon a time, Dan promised it to me. He promises many things.
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Date: 2004-11-08 08:06 am (UTC)