Book Review: Sci Fi vs Space Opera

Will's been arguing that space operas are about humans and human problems and speculative fiction is about post-human problems. The first kind is fairly common (and awesome) but decent examples of the second sort are a lot harder to find, making it a little harder to assent to Will's assertion that

relatively modest technological innovations can change human nature in an effective sense if not in an intrinsic sense

That's why I recently failed (for the second time) to finish Ursula LeGuin's
The Left Hand of Darkness. I know the book's a classic, but it fails as a space opera (and, by contemporary standards, is sort of disappointing as speculative sci fi, too). The hermaphrodite society is interesting, but the political problems aren't really dependent on the sci fi aspects of the world. It comes across as a dull political drama interspersed with mildly interesting encyclopaedic explanations of the structure of the society.

Ian McDonald's River of Gods is a decent speculative epic (and he pulls off hermaphrodites better than LeGuin), and it does succeed in creating a post-human nature world populated with Indian aeai regulated by jacked in Krishna Cops, but the novel's plot doesn't make sense. I'd recommend instead his shorter stories in this work including and "The Little Godess" and "The Djinn's Wife" (excerpted in Asimov's).

Another good blend of speculative and space opera is my usual favorite, Battlestar Galactica. The show was mostly space opera (The West Wing with explosions and robots), but later seasons have focused more on the Cylons, as well, adding speculative elements.

Overall, I'm inclined to agree with Will that small changes can push us into speculative sort of new problems, but my reading leaves me unconvinced that it solves old ones. Is there a qualitative difference between the issues addressed in spec and opera and those that only surface in spec or does technological progress just add to our burden of human woes? I've yet to see fiction to convince me that technology doesn't just give us cooler problems to deal with, without resolving our human issues.



Since this is my first Sunday Book Review post, I might as well finish up with a recommendation from the actual New York Times Book Review. Helen, this one's for you.