What Is Space Opera?

I get asked this question a lot.

Unfortunately for my unsuspecting victims, as the author of a popular space opera sci-fi series, I have a lot to say on the subject.

Grins.

So, as a primer for readers who might be new to my favorite subgenre of science fiction—and as a fun exploration for those more familiar—here’s a working definition, where the term “space opera” came from, and a few select highlights from its storied history.

A definition of space opera

Space opera makes the universe feel vast and epic—starships crossing galaxies, civilizations older than time, alien species that make you reconsider humanity’s place in the cosmos. It’s a genre known for its scale and sense of awesome wonder.

More technically: space opera is a subgenre of science fiction characterized by space exploration, galactic empires, alien civilizations, space warfare, and intergalactic politics on a grand scale.

That’s not to say that every space opera novel must hit on every one of those themes—only that they’re commonplace in the form.

Space opera stories generally take place in a universe where space travel has become common—whether via faster-than-light travel, stargates, or other means. Often, the people portrayed are starship captains or galactic explorers or xenoarchaeologists, but space opera is wide enough that the adventure could be, instead, a romance or a comedy, and still qualify as space opera.

Adventure: Starfighter Down by M.G. Herron

Comedy: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Romance: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

If you’re familiar with the SF Venn diagram (see: What Is Speculative Fiction), space opera is one place where science fiction and fantasy overlap.

There are many rabbit holes we could jump down from here, but first let’s address a common objection.

“Isn’t space opera the same thing as military sci-fi?”

No, sir! Although military characters and situations are commonplace in space opera, that isn’t what makes a story military sci-fi.

Military sci-fi tends to be about the people fighting the war—soldiers in combat, leadership under pressure—and stays focused on that action.

“What about hard science fiction?”

Hard science fiction, on the other hand, is tethered to science facts—strict about orbital dynamics, exoplanetary environments, and the so-called limits of physics.

Space opera tends to be more fantastical. That’s not to say that the characters can’t be attached to a military apparatus, or that science facts don’t matter. The characters may be part of a military unit—like Starfleet in Star Trek, or the Solaran Fleet in my Relics of the Ancients series—but a space opera story is always more interested in the relationships between people (or aliens), interstellar exploration, cosmic mysteries, or the settings in which strange events of galactic significance take place.

But it’s not always easy to tell. Star Wars is a popular example of where the lines between sci-fi subgenres blur. Even if we just focus on the original trilogy, Star Wars has space combat, many plausible scientific scenarios, a few notable non-scientific scenarios, a dicey romantic subplot, and a whole bunch of straight up fantasty magic in the Force (despite their attempts to sciencify it with midichlorians).

Add a dash of the Chosen One trope, and you've got something uniquely, gloriously Star Wars—and fully space opera.

From outworn spaceship yarn to a grand tradition

Here’s where the term space opera originates:

In 1941, from the pages of his science fiction fanzine Le Zombie, Wilson Tucker derided space opera as a “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn.”

“Soap operas” of the era were daytime radio serials, primarily sponsored by soap companies, that had acquired a melodramatic feel. Westerns had already picked up the same insult as “horse operas.” Tucker reasoned that if the corny romances were soap operas and the cheesy westerns were horse operas, then the cliched “spaceship yarn” was nothing more than a “space opera.”

The term stuck, but its meaning has been inverted in the way that social movements tend to co-opt certain insults—like “nerd” and “punk”—and wear them as a badge of honor. So, too, space opera.

A short history of space opera in genre SF

Not only did the genre exist long before the low-quality pulp stories Tucker was referring to, but in the decades that followed, short stories and novels in what anthologist Gardner Dozois called the “grand tradition” of space opera went on to win Hugos and Nebulas, and fire the imaginations of generations of readers and writers.

The first appearances of modern space opera in genre science fiction occurred around the turn of the 20th century. Most readers trace the modern form’s root back to either:

“Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison's Conquest of Mars (12 January-10 February 1898 New York Evening Journal as "The Conquest of Mars"; 1947) or Robert W Cole’s The Struggle for Empire (1900), the former including perhaps the first space battle and the latter being a remarkable precursor of the interstellar war epic.” (SF-Encyclopedia)

It really got going in the 1920s, with EE “Doc” Smith’s The Skylark of Space (1928) and Edmond Hamilton’s “Crashing Suns” (August-September 1928 Weird Tales).

From then on, every decade added its own names and landmarks to the tradition. John W. Campbell Jr. and Jack Williamson carried it into the 1930s—Williamson’s Legion of Space (1934) modeled its heroes on the Three Musketeers. C. L. Moore and A. E. van Vogt pushed the form further in the 1940s, the same decade Isaac Asimov folded the galactic empire into something more epic and original with the Foundation series (1942–1950), influencing every serious galactic empire story that came after. Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke established themselves across those same decades.

The 1950s belonged in part to the pulps, with Jack Vance’s The Space Pirate (1953) keeping old-school adventure alive even as “serious” SF moved elsewhere. But one name from this timeframe deserves a special mention: Leigh Brackett. Mentored by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, and then married to Edmond Hamilton, she spent decades writing space opera that critics dismissed as pulp adventure even as it quietly shaped the writers who came after her.

In 1977, George Lucas asked Leigh Brackett to write the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back. She turned it in that February. Sadly, she died of cancer three weeks later. It's hard to find a better symbol of space opera’s arc from disreputable pulp to the beating heart of modern pop culture than that.

Over the decades, popularity in space opera has ebbed and flowed. It almost disappeared under the tidal New Wave movement of science fiction in the 1960s and ‘70s. Many have speculated that as political pressure increased, interest in fictional solar systems fell off—but who knows why tides turn or planets orbit, really?

Carrying the form through that period were many memorable titles: Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai series (1959), Poul Anderson’s Ensign Flandry (1966), H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking (1963), Michael Moorcock’s The Sundered Worlds (1965), and Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968) proved the form could carry real literary weight even while it was out of critical fashion. Then Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970) and Alan Dean Foster’s The Tar-Aiym Krang (1972) kept it going through the 1970s.

After that came a real resurgence: Iain M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas (1987) launched the Culture novels; C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station (1981) and David Brin’s Startide Rising (1983) both won Hugos, and Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead (1986) won both a Hugo and a Nebula back-to-back. Lois McMaster Bujold swept the ‘90s with The Vor Game (1990), Barrayar (1991), and Mirror Dance (1994), and Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) kept the streak going.

The list goes on, straight through the end of the 20th century and blasting like a starship into the 21st—Alastair Reynolds, Ann Leckie, Becky Chambers, John Scalzi, and so many more. New titles from traditional publishers and indies alike continue to be added to the tradition each year.

Why space opera endures

Space opera continues to thrive because of its scale and its sense of wonder.

Part of that durability comes from how much the genre can hold. Space opera can be military SF—Battlefield Earth and Star Wars both include wars and still qualify. It can be hard SF, or comedy, or romance, as wide as Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on one end and as cozy as The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet on the other.

That same elasticity is why space opera keeps thriving well beyond the page. It’s the natural home for blockbuster filmmaking (Dune, Guardians of the Galaxy), long-running television series (The Expanse, Star Trek), and some of the biggest video games ever made (Halo, Mass Effect, No Man’s Sky).

But scale alone doesn’t explain its staying power. What separates the best space opera from spectacle for its own sake is that it never loses the thread of who’s standing inside all that galactic drama. Space warfare and galactic empires give a story its size, but it’s the relationships—between species, between old enemies, between a person and the ruins of a world that no longer exists—that give the size a reason to matter.

Space opera earned its reputation as a grand tradition one epic story at a time—and from pulp insult to Hugo-winning mainstay, it’s just getting started.

If you like space opera novels, I’ve got a deal for you. Check out my series Relics of the Ancients—and save big with the book bundle in all formats.

Curious how space opera fits into the bigger picture of science fiction and fantasy? Read What Is Speculative Fiction? next.

More on space opera history

• The History of Space Opera: From Barsoom to Tatooine — a deep, opinionated dive into the genre's pulp roots and its five founding writers
• How Star Wars Saved Space Opera — traces the surprising throughline from Verdi's opera Don Carlo to Star Wars
• SFE: Space Opera — the academic reference entry cited throughout this piece, tracing the term's coinage and a century of major writers and works decade by decade
• What Is Space Opera? The Complete Guide to Galactic Storytelling — a craft-focused breakdown of the genre's core tropes, modern examples, and tips for writing your own galactic saga