There’s been a lot of cool content for Space Opera Week, and we at the #PulpRevolution created one of the best weeks of content for Science Fiction in a long time. If you missed any of my guest contributions to awesome science fiction sites this week:
Jon Del Arroz’s Definitive Top 5 Space Opera Series
Five CURRENT Space Operas You Should Be Reading
And of course my interview with Darkship series author Sarah Hoyt.
Some of my favorite articles on the topic from other #PulpRevolution writers:
What Space Opera Means To Me – By Jay Barnson
Ordinary, Everyday Lives: Good for Dramas, Not For Epics by Corey McCleerey
Wonder And The Soul’s Desire by Dominika Lien.
Even Tor.com got the memo by the end of the week with a good article. Took the whole week but perhaps we pushed the conversation to some extent:
Is Space Opera Merely Fantasy Set In Space by Emily Asher-Perrin
And of course don’t forget to check out my first space opera book, which certainly won’t be my last, Star Realms: Rescue Run, which hit top-10 in the genre on Amazon and garnered an Alliance Award nomination!
Hopefully, not too off-topic, but I think related: when did comic books (which captured some of the Pulp ethos as Pulp was being denigrated in the 40s/50s) abandon the “Space Opera” elements that made the Silver Age memorable? The flavor of the Lensmen and the Everyman Hero was in much of 1950s/1960s comics’ ethos and storylines.
(Russell Newquist has a great post on the loss of the Everyman Hero in movies.)
Example: Steve Ditko left Marvel and Spider-Man near the peak of his 1960s popularity for a 2nd-string publisher to start a new revolution in comics there — the Action Heroes.
Ditko seemed to carry the Pulp ethos from Marvel and to Charlton, and 1968 has been argued to be “Peak Marvel” — the grand adventure of Pulp flavor and its FUN seemed to bleed out — not just due to Ditko’s departure.
Larger question: What is the comic book “Appendix N”?