Month of Joy: Space Opera and Me by Cora Buhlert

When I got the invitation to take part in this year’s Month of Joy project at the Skiffy and Fanty Show, I wondered what to write about. So I jotted down a list of things that bring me joy. One item immediately jumped out at me and that was space opera.

I sometimes describe myself as a lifelong science fiction fan. Though technically, a lifelong space opera fan would be more correct, because all of my early science fiction influences, which ignited my love of the genre, were space opera.

My favourite book as a young child was Mecki auf dem Mond (Mecki on the Moon) by Eduard Rhein, a picture book which followed the adventures of Mecki the hedgehog and his friends, as they travelled to the moon, where they met such fascinating beings as moon calves, the man in the moon and Frau Luna, the moon queen, all gorgeously illustrated by Wilhelm Petersen. Though never marketed as such, it was clearly space opera of sorts. And I certainly recreated the fantastic space adventures of Mecki the hedgehog many times with my Mecki toys. Occasionally, the Mecki family would even get attacked by space pirates en route, something that never happened in the original book.

The three-channel landscape of German television before the advent of private television in the 1980s offered slim pickings, but nonetheless there were reruns of the original Star Trek and the short-lived German science fiction series Raumpatrouille Orion as well as the first runs of the original Battlestar Galactica, Space 1999 and the Captain Future anime series. On the newsstand, there was the Perry Rhodan pulp magazine series, which I read in spite of the fervent disapproval of my teachers. And the original Star Wars trilogy pretty much permeated the culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly if you were a kid, even though I didn’t get to see the actual films until several years later.

When I was a teenager, I figured out that there were books just like those TV series and movies I loved so much – books other than Mecki on the Moon and Perry Rhodan, that was. By that time, Cyberpunk was having its moment in the cultural spotlight, but I largely ignored it in favour of the golden age offerings of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Leigh Brackett and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Poul Anderson’s and Harry Harrison’s space adventures from the 1960s and 1970s and the then current space operas by writers like Lois McMaster Bujold, C.J. Cherryh, Susan Shwartz and others, whatever the spinner rack of overpriced English language mass market paperbacks at the local import bookstore had to offer. Of course, I read other flavours of speculative fiction as well: the big fantasy tomes of the 1980s, reprints of vintage sword and sorcery, the occasional early urban fantasy book, a handful of alien invasion novels and of course, dystopian fiction, the only type of speculative fiction deemed acceptable by my teachers. But space opera always remained my first love.

I started writing around the same time and my first attempts at writing were part of a sprawling space opera epic called the Femla Saga, now thankfully lost to the mists of time. As far as I recall, it was very much a Star Wars copycat, with bits of anything else I liked at the time thrown in.

When I started university, I read less space opera, partly because assigned class reading took up much of my time and partly because there was suddenly less space opera to be found on the shelves due to the mass market distribution collapse of the early 1990s. So I turned to TV to get my regular space opera fix and luckily, 1990s television was only too happy to oblige. The various Star Trek series were in constant rotation, broadcast every weekday, and I usually watched or recorded them. As a result, I’ve watched every Star Trek episode at least once, often more than once. Coincidentally, I’ve also seen an inordinate amount of Baywatch, because it was broadcast directly before Star Trek. And if that wasn’t enough, Babylon 5, Farscape, Lexx – The Dark Zone, Stargate, Andromeda, Space: Above and Beyond and other long forgotten TV shows of the time such as Space Rangers, a very bad show whose only saving grace was Linda Hunt as a space station commander, provided yet more space opera joy.

At the time, a friend asked me why I always watched Star Trek, even though I’d seen much of it before and it was all the same anyway. “You watch soap operas, don’t you?” I asked her. She nodded and said, “Yes, to relax.” – “Well, Star Trek is my soap opera,” I told her.

I was on to something there, because there are similarities between space operas and soap operas beyond the fact that both started out as derogatory terms including the word “opera”. Both soap operas and space operas (and actual operas for that matter) offer larger-than-life drama with a huge cast of characters. Both offer the grand spectrum of emotion, love and hate, birth and death, weddings and funerals. However, space opera has aliens, ray guns, starships and space battles to go with the melodrama.

Another thing that unites space operas and soap operas is that no matter how fascinating the settings, how shocking the twists, how grand the melodrama, what makes us come back for more are the characters. The best space and soap operas feature people (in the loosest sense of the term) we want to spend time with, whether it’s in the mundane surroundings of Coronation Street or Lindenstraße or on the deck of a starship or the surface of an alien planet.

Space opera on television became rare in the early 2000s – Firefly was in many ways the genre’s last hurray until recently. The bookstore shelves offered slim pickings as well, for the early 2000s were the heyday of mundane science fiction, singularity fiction and the New British space opera, all of which did not appeal to me at all. The fact that I’d read several substandard Iain M. Banks wannabes before finally finding Banks himself didn’t much help either. By then, I had access to the Internet and fell in with a group of opinionated speculative fiction readers and writers, who had plenty of recommendations to offer for books I inevitably disliked and were just as quick to condemn the books I liked.

My reaction to this should have been, “My new friends and I have very different tastes. Maybe I should look for book recommendations somewhere else.” Instead it was, “I don’t like any of the highly acclaimed science fiction books people are recommending. Clearly, my taste is horrid and I was never a real science fiction fan in the first place.”

So I walked away from the genre I loved for a couple of years and turned to mystery, crime fiction and romance, all of which were much more welcoming than science fiction. I found urban fantasy and paranormal romance, both of which were exploding in popularity around the time. I found the near future police procedurals of J.D. Robb and science fiction romance and a whole universe of great speculative fiction, mostly by women writers, that the wider science fiction community didn’t even know existed. In many ways, these books gave me the same joy space opera had once given me. But fun as it was running with werewolves and vampires and solving crimes in near future New York City with Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke, sometimes I just wanted to blast off into outer space again.

Luckily, space opera itself was undergoing a shift of its own and gradually moved away from the male-dominated New British space opera towards a more female, more diverse and more exciting subgenre. Writers like Ann Aguirre, Linnea Sinclair and Sara Creasy were early harbingers of this shift – still mostly ignored by the genre at large. A bit later, Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey, the first book what would eventually become known as The Expanse, came out. Though adhering to the restrictions of mundane science fiction, it was still very much space opera. Then in 2013, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie came out and won every award imaginable, much to the chagrin of various naysayers. It was the kick-off for a new type of space opera – more diverse, more inclusive and more exciting than the genre had been in years with writers like Becky Chambers, Yoon Ha Lee, Rachel Bach, K.B. Wagers, Aliette de Bodard, Kameron Hurley and others. And suddenly, I had plenty of space opera to enjoy again.

My temporary estrangement from the genre had also affected my writing. By then I had a couple of stories and poems published in the university magazine – all realist fare, ’cause they wouldn’t take speculative fiction. I’d written the first three stories of what would eventually become The Silencer series and sold several historical adventure stories to a magazine that took pretty much everything I wrote along those lines until they folded. I’d also started self-publishing, beginning with previously published stories.

But what I really wanted to write was science fiction, specifically space opera. Alas, the same niggling voices that told me I wasn’t a real fan, because I liked the wrong kind of books, also told me that I could never be a real science fiction writer, because I didn’t plot out orbits and the economics of galactic civilisations beforehand. All I wanted was to tell stories about people and the occasional alien fighting injustice and having adventures in space.

What helped me to break through that paralysis was reading – no, not Ancillary Justice – but Simon R. Green’s Deathstalker series, which I’d picked up, because I enjoyed his urban fantasy, after missing it the first time around. The Deathstalker books hit all my space opera buttons – the fight against an oppressive regime, romance, betrayal, adventure, all the good stuff. The series is also completely bonkers with everything and the kitchen sink thrown in. There are sword fights, castles turned spaceships, genetically engineered werewolves and vampires, superpowers, gladiator fights and even a planet full of homicidal toys. It should have been absolutely ridiculous, but somehow Green found a way to make it work.

“If Simon R. Green can put everything he likes into his space opera with little regard to scientific accuracy,” I thought, “then why can’t I do the same?” And so I started writing space opera again, focusing on the elements I liked most about the genre. I’d always loved stories about a ragtag group of rebels fighting against an all-powerful regime and so the Shattered Empire series was born.

A bit later, I was frustrated by a story about two people who couldn’t be together, because they had to win an intergalactic war first, and found myself wondering, not for the first time, why they didn’t just run off together and became space pirates or mercenaries or opened a restaurant or something, the space war be damned. However, no one was going to write that story, because fiction tends to frown on characters running away from the plot. So I decided to write my own and the In Love and War series was born.

Both series are set against a backdrop of galaxy-wide war, but the stories themselves are character-driven and relatively small in scale. I call them cozy space opera as an analogue to cozy mystery. Oh, there are space battles, desperate fights and chases across hostile territory, but there are also quiet moments, gardening, food (with recipes, even), families, both biological and found, and people falling in love against all odds.

Because that’s the truly great thing about space opera. You can use it to tell any story you want.

Cora Buhlert was born and bred in Bremen, North Germany, where she still lives today – after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. Cora holds an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen and is currently working towards her PhD.

Cora has been writing since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines. She is the author of the Silencer series of pulp style thrillers, the Shattered Empire space opera series, the In Love and War science fiction romance series, the Helen Shepherd Mysteries and plenty of other stories in multiple genres. When Cora is not writing, she works as a translator and teacher.

Visit her on the web at www.corabuhlert.com or follow her on Twitter under @CoraBuhlert.