SPACE OPERA, n. Last night in my household we had a discussion of what exactly constitutes the subgenre of science fiction called “space opera.” As with all genre definitions, the answer will change depending on who you ask and what works you consider. But whatever boundaries we draw around “space opera,” Star Wars is one: It’s got grand, sweeping adventures that go from planet to planet, fights with fantastical weapons, romance, melodrama. The hardships of life in space caused by microgravity or scarcity are of little concern. The focus is on the fantastical. People in space operas don’t stop to do calculations about whether a voyage will take them seven months and if they have enough air to survive; they turn on their hyperdrive and go. (Please don’t mistake this comparison for a value judgment. I love sci-fi of all kinds.)
Wikipedia says the term “space opera” came about in the 1930s as a play on “soap opera” (a melodrama, so called because the early radio programs were often sponsored by soap, per the OED) or “horse opera” (not a soap opera with ads for horses, but a Western).
The word “opera” itself has remained remarkably untouched by sound change. I love it when a Latin word and an Italian word are the same. “Opera” is a form of Latin “opus” and it means “work.” Later it comes to mean an art form that combines theater, music, and dance—the work, the art form that combines art forms—and that’s when English adopts the Italian word. But you can see the roots of “opera” in our words “operate” and “operation.”
In French, all kinds of delicious sound change happens to Latin “opera” and we end up with “œuvre,” also meaning “work.” This word makes its way into English as a hoity-toity way to talk about an artist’s body of work (as in “their œuvre spans many decades,” with “œuvre” pronounced “uh vruh” by most English speakers) and also as a hoity-toity way to talk about party appetizers (hors d’œuvres, pronounced “or dervs” by most English speakers).
“Hors d’œuvre” means “outside the work,” that is to say, a food that is not part of the main meal. The French preposition “hors” shows up in so many good phrases. In the Tour de France, some climbing stages are described as “hors catégorie”: outside category, beyond categorization. The French word for outlaw is “hors-la-loi,” outside-the-law. You can find many hors-la-loi characters in both space and horse operas; you’re a lot less likely to encounter hors d’œuvres.
The small-r romance I read this week was not at all like a space opera, but was instead very down-to-earth:
You, Me, U.S. (f/f, both cis and bi, contemporary) by Brigitte Bautista. This is an unusual romance novel in that it shows both its main characters having relationships—and sex—with other people during the course of book, something most romances take pains to avoid. But it really works in this book, which is a very convincing, real take on “friends to lovers.” Jo and Liza are best friends and roommates in Manila, but they’re very different: Jo is a live-for-the-moment, sarcastic, unromantic sex worker and Liza is an organized, careful person working a series of hellish retail jobs and dating a series of American men in the hopes that one of them might be The One who will love her and get her a visa to the US so she can send money home to help her family. The depiction of work diverges from what you might usually find in a contemporary romance, where most characters have a fascinating or quirky job that expresses some aspect of their personality or an all-consuming career that makes them rich. Jo and Liza have neither, and work is treated very much like a necessity instead of a passion, something you do so that you can afford the apartment (and bed) you share with your cute roommate who makes you laugh. The book does such a good job showing a portrait of Jo and Liza’s deep friendship, and how their transition from friends to lovers is difficult but worth it. Also, I picked this book up because my friend Charlotte wrote about it at Close Reading Romance, so there’s the link for her post. Content warnings: discussions of the dangers of sex work (police, prison, STIs, pregnancy, abuse, rape, prejudice), main character has been abused by a parent, supporting characters have alcohol and gambling addictions, supporting characters suffer intimate partner violence, sex.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, this week I read:
Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, first novel in the science fiction series The Expanse, which is one of my favorite TV shows. Perhaps it’s just the order in which I consumed them, but my feeling is that the book is good but the show is great. It has such a wonderful cast and they all bring such depth to their own roles and to their relationships. The Expanse, to me, is whatever the opposite of space opera is—in this first book and in the show’s first season, it dallies in space noir and space political thriller. In both the book and the show, concerns about where people in space will get their air and their water are urgent. Gravity or the lack thereof is treated with impressive attention. People don’t bounce from planet to planet because space travel takes a long time. The language of the people who have lived in space for generations is a creole formed from English and many other Earth languages, which is A+ linguistic realism. I like these aspects of the show, but let’s not lie to each other: I am mostly there to see the beautiful characters form, break, and reform alliances and friendships. So I suppose in a sense it’s more soap opera than space opera for me. Content warnings: murder, violence, war, gore, body horror.
Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman, a devastating memoir of the deadliest years of AIDS (1981-1996) in New York City, which I can tell I will be thinking about for a long time. The “gentrification” of the title is both literal—so many people died of AIDS that it changed whole neighborhoods by ending rent control, a ghoulish consequence that has made me wonder what sort of unforeseen economic and cultural scars the Covid-19 pandemic will leave—and figurative, about a homogenization of culture. Content warnings: pandemic, illness, death, grief, homophobia, racism, prejudice against sex workers.
A Picture of Change for a World in Constant Motion, a beautiful interactive feature in the NYT that studies a Hokusai print by zooming in on particular details of the image and then reassembling them into a whole. It’s from August 2020 but I missed it then. I love this kind of interactive feature that guides me through looking at a work of art. There was another wonderful one this week about cubism that I also highly recommend.
One last note: the cutest thing that happened to me this week was that my friends’ kid, who has previously been in the newsletter for inferring the existence of “calm up” as the opposite of “calm down,” wrote (!) to me to ask “WHY IS SUMERSALT CALLD THAT” (answer: it comes from “jump over” in Provençal, the “sault” part of “somersault” means jump, and it’s the same word as when we say “sauté” in English, and the “somer” comes from a word that means “over,” originally Latin “supra”). I explained this and he wrote back, “I LIKE THAT.”
Me too.
See you next Sunday, space cowboys.
