Writing is a fickle mistress. I can recall Allen Wier telling stories in workshop about authors who would distract themselves from the task of immersing oneself in the work of creating characters and plot of thin air and the sheer horror of dangling their fates between one’s fingers. Wier never described it so melodramatically — that is my own embellishment, but essentially the effect is the same: writing fiction is playing god.
In the six months and change since graduation, actual fiction has only come in fits and starts for me, so I decided to exercise my mind in approaching works already set down in print, to work on literary theory for a while in hopes of kickstarting the proverbial creative engine. What is so wonderful about our current cultural and artistic age is that mediums bleed so seamlessly and effectively into one another that if I wanted to cite an excellent work of literary fiction, I could quote a well-written video game and argue its place in the canon. Multimedia has replaced the importance of singular, monomaniacal focus on one particular field of art and has instead bred a generation of auteurs, potential Renaissance people, out of the attention-deficit free zone of the internet.
All of this is to preface my first installment of exploring genres or trends in fiction whose influence has carried across mediums and helped bring together the towering hodgepodge we call modern arts and letters. I cannot think of a better place to start than with perhaps the most profitable, and indeed whole archetypal of genre conceits, the space opera. Most of you have seen “Star Wars” and perhaps fewer but still many have surely have walked Arrakis with Frank Herbert in reading “Dune” (or at least watched its oft-derided 1984 screen adaptation by David Lynch), so you have some basic context for what the space opera is and what it does. A force of absolute evil threatens the entire galaxy/universe/multiverse and usually one person or group must thwart them against impossible odds. This is hardly exclusive to the space opera, but here examples of how theory may be used to rate the perfection of a narrative are virtually innumerable.
While perhaps the first example of the space opera dates back to 1851, E.E. “Doc” Smith’s “The Skylark of Space,” serialized in the legendary golden age pulp magazine Amazing Stories in 1928, is considered by many to be the first modern masterpiece and opening statement from the godfather of the genre. Smith’s “Lensman” series, as well as the “Tales of the Dying Earth” saga by Jack Vance, Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series and Orson Scott Card’s Ender and Bean cycles all paint in broad strokes the many speculative futures of technological and cultural oppression, and the deliverance or lack thereof at the hands of one or a few noble people, all the while offering philosophical treatises on what it means to be a human at the edge of a galaxy, where your context based on some long-lost homeworld means nothing.
But the space opera on the page is but one articulation of the idea. An author’s words can paint a more vivid and deliberate portrait than a frame of celluloid or a computer-rendered, semi-interactive environment, but visualizing in your mind rather than direct stimulation of the optical nerve has a decidedly smaller following these days. “Star Wars” broke the mold with its mix of experimental special effects and the theosophical power struggle between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire, whose underlying cause was the age old battle for spiritual dominance of the Force between Jedi and Sith. “A New Hope” has become the stereotypical explanation of Joseph Campbell’s hero myth (“a wizard gives a young boy a magic sword” ring any bells?), and George Lucas consulted Campbell repeatedly throughout the filming of the original trilogy to ensure the mythic dominion he wrote would carry an almost religious punch when delivered to fans.
While “Star Wars” inspired many imitators, the video game world has long starved for a legitimate contender to place on the Olympian echelon with Smith, Card, Vance, Lucas, et al. Series built in the earlier generations of modern gaming offered a narrative worthy of these progenitors of the genre, and one of the best examples in the last generation came in the form of a Star Wars tie-in, BioWare/Obsidian’s “Knights of the Old Republic,” but not until 2007 did the prophecy fulfill itself when BioWare delivered the first “Mass Effect.” Tasked as the first human Spectre, a galactic peacekeeper and ambassador representative of your entire race, the player character takes on a galaxy of many varied political battles and a menace from a galaxy far, far away.
The experience to bend the narrative to your will within the limitations of the publisher’s script offers the perfect incarnation of this literary idea, because the stereotypical white/black contrast blurs with the weight of a thousand tiny decisions, and of course afew that determine the fate of trillions. While fans have booed and hissed the series’ conclusion with May’s “Mass Effect 3,” not unlike the reaction to the prequel trilogy we try to forget, the promise of Mass Effect as a pioneer in modern space opera storytelling is a foundation on which our children may actually build a stranger, but hopefully brave new world.
To be continued.
— Jake Lane is a graduate in creative writing. He can be reached at [email protected].
