The novel begins with all the trappings of classic space opera: a colony ship piloted by an AI transports passengers to an extrasolar planet named Bloodroot, 10 years distant. It is successful because Thompson is a writer skilled enough to casually drop Hannah Arendt quotes and Yoruban expressions into breathless action sequences and make it work.įar from the Light of Heaven has its own unique blend of elements. Clarke Award and the inaugural Nommo Award for African speculative fiction, combined alien invasion, zombies, cyberpunk exploits, and Afrofuturism.
His novel Rosewater (2016), winner of the Arthur C. Tade Thompson is a British Nigerian writer known for his gritty mash-ups of genre tropes. The richest man in the solar system whose drive toward extraction knows no bounds - “If the sun touches it, I own part of it” - eventually determines that he “needs to find new suns.” And while NASA works the solar system through permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars, private companies like Maxwell’s begin building interstellar colonies. In Tade Thompson’s Far from the Light of Heaven, one such tech titan faces the consequences of his own science fictional ambitions: Yan Maxwell, whose greed sets in motion the events of the novel, got his start by funding “the first successful mining of an asteroid, piggybacked on someone else’s pipedream,” as if he simply realized the ambitions of the Robert Heinlein stories he grew up reading. They are invested in the détournement of an ethically compromised narrative apparatus at a time when its fictional tropes have been translated into real-world technologies with goals that range from asteroid mining to species survival. But the most interesting new space opera writers are fully aware of the subgenre’s legacy as a literature of colonial expansion and military conquest. Jeff Bezos took a 90-year-old Captain Kirk. Many space-oriented tech moguls have been directly inspired by the older, colonialist space opera of the golden age: Elon Musk launched a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy into orbit. In the contemporary public imagination, space is less a place explored by governmental science agencies like NASA and the ESA and more a billionaire’s playground (a situation vividly extrapolated in Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath, released earlier this year). Space opera remains the engine of the genre, one of its most prominent forms, the thing many people think of when they hear “science fiction.” Still, there’s something surprising about the vitality of today’s space opera (of all things) among a younger generation of exciting new writers rallying around stories of interplanetary expansion.įor one thing, these new works are being published as real-world spaceflight is overtaken by private companies run by tech moguls fleeing a dying planet for colonies on the Moon and Mars. The subgenre has evolved and thrived for a century with its key elements mostly intact: galactic encyclopedias of knowledge, interstellar politics, heroic journeys, and extraterrestrial encounters. We’ve had a golden age and “the new space opera,” metaphysical allegories and postcolonial critiques. Typically seen as (and often being) the least literary form of SF, space opera hasn’t gone out of style since Buck Rogers began battling galactic evils in the 1920s and ’30s, and the appellation entered usage in the 1940s. Why, then, has a new generation of authors like Nnedi Okorafor, Yoon Ha Lee, Ann Leckie, Hao Jingfang, Charlie Jane Anders, and Maurice Broaddus turned to stories of other worlds, when the fate of ours hangs in the balance? Many vanguard SF and literary authors alike, having finally acknowledged that it’s no longer possible to ignore the climate emergency, are writing influential, near-future works of climate fiction. This revitalization of space opera - stories traditionally set in distant futures when humanity has spread to worlds beyond the solar system - comes at an odd time. While studios hungry for prestige intellectual property are mining a much older space opera paradigm with adaptations like Foundation and Dune, books by a diverse group of writers from around the world are beginning to rework the tropes of speculative fiction’s oldest and pulpiest tradition.
But it’s not streaming on Amazon or any other platform owned by someone trying to escape to Mars.
0 kommentar(er)
