Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith
The problem with that is that those are some vastly different sub-genre's to support.
|
I'd disagree here, actually. I think there's a bit less distance between the genres than is usually perceived.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ericbsmith
They vary drastically on the realism slider, on the power level slider, on the "weird powers" slider, importance of Space Battles, and even on the technology slider. Star Wars dials most of those up to 11, while Star Trek falls somewhere in the middle, and Battlestar Galactica dials them down to 2-3.
|
I'm not as familiar with Battlestar Galactica, having never watched much of it, but I'd argue that Star Trek and Star Wars are actually not that far off on either the "tech level" or "weird powers" fields. Both of them rely quite heavily on what GURPS classifies as "superscience" - technology we either have no way of knowing is possible, or that outright contradicts our knowledge of physics. And both have quite a lot of weird powers - Star Wars has The Force, which seems to fill most or all of the "space magic" niche, but Star Trek has a plethora of aliens with telepathy, energy beings with effective omnipotence, and so on. The difference, I feel, lies in the
presentation of technology and powers - Star Wars very much takes an approach of "it just works, roll with it!" and doesn't bother trying to explain much, whereas Star Trek is all about the technobabble descriptions of how bouncing a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish lets them reconfigure the tachyon stream and thus explode the Borg Cube. But those explanations don't actually
mean anything, typically.
Of course, how a story presents its technology is an important part of genre - the fact that Star Trek tries to present a description and Star Wars doesn't is part of what makes them different sub-genres. But the basic level of science fiction technology and supernatural powers is, I'd argue, pretty similar in both series - which means they're probably not as incompatible in the same broad genre treatment as you might think.
What I'd like to see in a hypothetical Space Opera box set (or worked genre example line, a la Action, Dungeon Fantasy, etc.) would be coverage for three main sub-genres. First, and most central, probably, would be Space Opera proper. This would be fairly high-powered, high-stakes action, with strong passions and such dominating. Second would be "Space Exploration", focusing on bold adventurers going out and scouting frontiers, final or otherwise, exploring strange new worlds, etc. Finally, there's the lower-stakes "Scoundrels in Space", the adventures of lower-income, down-on-their-luck space venturers, trying to keep their ships flying and maybe make enough profit off various activities, legal and otherwise, to someday retire.
I like those three sub-genres in particular because I think the latter two represent very common space adventure stories, and because they frequently feed into more classic space opera stories. Star Trek is pretty much the archetypal Space Exploration narrative, but most of its movies, for example, are Space Opera stories, I'd argue - they're almost all big stories with the fate of worlds (or more!) in the balance, and the characters always seem to become more driven by sweeping emotional motivations than they are in regular episodes. Similarly, Scoundrels in Space characters are frequently drawn into larger stories - against their wills, it's true, and if they do get involved deliberately, it's typically for baser motives. But true heroism seems to come through. This is basically Han Solo's character arc in Star Wars, for example. And Serenity, the Firefly movie, moves its characters from the bottom-feeding low-level criminals they were into a plot that involves exposing government corruption over a whole solar system.
My overall point here is that the sub-genres have a fair bit of overlap in them,
particularly the sort of characters that appear in them a lot, and that makes them well-suited for a collective treatment.