[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by ericthered

The problem with counting space opera proper is a fourth genre is you haven't described what the characters will actually do. Yes, they battle for high stakes in exotic places for honorable and yet personal reasons, but what do these "battles" actually look like? I submit that any answer to that question will fit into the three options above.

I actually agree, yes. Space Opera, to me, is more of an "overlay" over another sub-genre. It informs and modifies other genre conventions and tropes, more than injecting a bunch of new ones of its own.

Originally Posted by ericthered

I agree with these, but with some important caveats:

a) This isn't satisfied by a single generation ship that never leaves space, or setting things in a floating city.

Agreed. The element of travel in space is pretty crucial to the feel. You've got to visit different places.

Originally Posted by ericthered

b) Ultra tech is not specific enough. Space opera generally implies FTL, artificial gravity, psionics, and force-fields.

This, though, I'd disagree on. All of these are certainly common to stories I'd categorize as "Space Opera", but they aren't universal. Even FTL isn't necessary - the TV show "Firefly", and particularly its movie, "Serenity", is pretty firmly Space Opera to me, but that setting doesn't seem to have FTL travel, it's all confined to a single (implausibly huge and crowded with habitable planets) solar system.

Which is not to say that I don't think the Space Opera boxed set shouldn't have rules for all these common techs - I think it definitely should! But I'd be cautious about listing a set of techs and saying "only stories with these are Space Opera".

Originally Posted by ericthered

It also requires a setting where modern culture humans are normal. You can have cyborgs, AI's, Virtual Reality, and cloning tanks, but most people came from their mother's womb and were raised in meat-space. These things can be raised to make aliens exotic or to make Characters special, but the reference society doesn't rely on having them.

Agreed on this, at least mostly. I would put it as "technology can rarely improve an individual human". You don't cybernetically enhance your pilots, you don't genetically engineer individuals, producing a bunch of identically-trained clones doesn't win against a diverse force of regular humans, and so on.

Technology can have some broad societal-level impacts, though. Genetically engineering whole planetary populations (your Heavy/Light Worlders, aquatic humans, etc.) has a place in space opera, I'd say, and there are things like the holodecks of Star Trek that certainly have a cultural impact.