Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.

Fray: Oct 22, 2010

Starship Troopers has always really confused me, considering how his other books tend to promote extreme Objectivism and anti-militarism.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2010 00:44

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# ¿ May 20, 2024 12:54

Fray: Oct 22, 2010

systran posted:

Also while it's impressive that he looked so far ahead, some of the stuff just feels so incredibly short-sighted to a modern reader. Nuclear power is portrayed as the apex of human technology. From the 40's it would be easy to imagine that nuclear power was going to change everything, but the book is set so far into the future that humans don't even remember which planet they originated on and nuclear power is still the most advanced thing they have. The average human lifespan also seemed to be about 70 or 80, which just seemed like a really lazy oversight as well.

Now see, this is one of the things I love about Asimov. I love him and 1950's golden age scifi in general because it's a window into that generation's idea of progress and space-age futurism. This was a time when nuclear power and spaceflight were in the forefront of public consciousness, but the transistor hadn't yet reached maturity and we hadn't yet realized the power of genetics. So you end up with these grand visions of humanity's future where we have unlimited energy from nuclear tech and FTL travel, but computers are still rare, the size of a room, and run on punchcards. It's quaint and humorous these days, but it taps you into a simpler, more optimistic era. You're sort of missing out if you turn up your nose at this stuff instead of reveling in it.

Tangent: I think scifi more clearly evokes the collective feelings of the era it was written in than any other literary genre, and that's probably the main reason I read it. In the 40's and 50's you generally saw a rosy picture of our future where ever growing technology solves all of our problems and leads to enlightened societies. In the 60's militarist themes becomes a big thing, you can see influences of the sexual liberation/counterculture movement, and SF authors start to more consciously explore fields like politics and social theory. In the 70's there's a backlash against militarism (see Joe Haldeman and much of Niven's stuff) because of Vietnam. Starting in the 80's and continuing to the present there is growing apprehension and pessimism about the ability of technology to magically fix everything, fear that our new power has hidden costs, and the idea that we are giving ourselves the tools to gently caress things up worse than ever (see cyberpunk, most modern space opera, and anything by Paolo Bacigalupi).

Fray fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Feb 4, 2012

# ¿ Feb 4, 2012 05:53

Fray: Oct 22, 2010

coyo7e posted:

Simon R. Green's "Deathstalker" series fit these requests pretty well.

Deathstalker isn't exactly great literature, but god drat if it wasn't one of the most entertaining scifi series I've read. It was basically written by a guy who decided to throw all hint of literary restraint to the wind and make the most ridiculous, over-the-top, space opera-ey space opera setting he could come up with.

Also, to add yet another recommendation to the list, the Succession series by Scott Westerfeld has all of those things except epic ground battles (although there is a firefight with space marines and orbital drop pods).

Fray fucked around with this message at 01:19 on May 3, 2012

# ¿ May 3, 2012 01:16

Fray: Oct 22, 2010

Hyperion has a fairly similar tone to the RS series.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2013 06:07

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.