These were editorial jokes to be shared with the fans). Dick got the assignment to write a book called The Zap Gun. To say it flatly, before the mid-1970s, no one in the history of science fiction ever consciously and intentionally set out to write something called space opera (except Jack Vance, who accepted the assignment from Berkley Books in the late 1960s to write a novel to fit the title, Space Opera - at the same time Philip K. Perfectly intelligent but ignorant people are writing revisionist history, inventing an elaborate age of space opera based on wholesale redefinitions of the term made up in the sixties and seventies to justify literary political agendas. Space opera used to be a pejorative locution designating not a subgenre or mode at all, but the worst form of formulaic hackwork: really bad SF.Ī lot of people don't remember this and that distorts our understanding of both our present and our past in SF. (The shorter fiction awards have been distributed much more widely over the range of SF and fantasy styles and possibilities.) One might go so far as to say that the Hugo award for best novel has always gone primarily to space opera, as currently defined, though many of the earlier winners, up to the end of the 1970s, would have been mortally offended to have their books so-labelled. Cherryh, and Orson Scott Card to Lois Bujold, Dan Simmons, and Vernor Vinge. (I didn’t.) Astounding went for the cerebrum, Planet for the gut, and it always seemed to me that one target was as valid as the other.ĭefinition and Redefinition of Space Operaįor the past twenty years (1982-2002), the Hugo Award for best novel has generally been given to space opera - from David Brin, C.J. we who wrote for Planet tended to be more interested in wonders than we were in differential calculus or the theory and practice of the hydraulic ram, even if we knew all about such things. Campbell, Jr., had been the sole and only market for our wares. Of course Planet wasn’t Astounding it never pretended to be Astounding, and that was a mercy for a lot of us who would have starved to death if John W. They hated the magazine, apparently, because it was not Astounding Stories. “It was fashionable for a while, among certain elements of science-fiction fandom, to hate Planet Stories. Transition: in 1976 Leigh Brackett edited a Del Rey anthology, The Best of Planet Stories, #1
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