The Celestial Mythos

We’ve probably all imagined a group of prehistoric humans sitting around a campfire in the night, looking up at the stars and telling stories about them. Some of these stories crop up all over the planet in cultures which seem to have no connection. For instance, the Pleiades are very often called the Seven Sisters all over the world, and there are countless interpretations of Cynthia/the Moon either having a face or some kind of quadrupedal animal with long hind legs and a pair of projections on the head. I personally see a rabbit but many other people say it’s a face, which I can’t see. Given the uneventful nature of the lunar surface, presumably the earliest four-footed beasts crawled out of the water to see the same pattern as we see. The Seven Sisters, on the other hand, are younger than the non-avian dinosaurs and in any case the stars move around too much for them to be visible for more than a short period of time, geologically speaking, in a recognisable form, except for the Sun of course. In any case, it doesn’t stretch credulity particularly far to imagine Palaeolithic humans calling them the Seven Sisters too, or “Septm Swesores” many millennia later.

It seems clear, then, that we’ve long looked up into the night sky and made up stories about what we see there. We’ve put a ship up there in the form of the Argo, now broken down into the Poop Deck, Sails, Pyx and Keel (not sure about the Pyx). There’s a River, various monsters and various heroes, such as Eridanus, Hydra, Hydrus, Draco, Serpens, Ophiuchus, Perseus and Hercules. Stories also connect these to each other, for example with the Crow and the Cup being on opposite sides of the sky so that the former is always thirstily croaking for the contents of the latter. We imagined tales of heroes, rescue missions, voyages and fights with monsters, and we’ve done this for millennia. This is just Western sky lore of course, but you get the idea.

Now, there is a very broad genre referred to as science fiction. I’ve defined it in the past as “fiction whose plot depends non-trivially on the setting”, and another way I look at it is fiction whose characters are ideas rather than protagonists. The reason I used the former was to exclude ‘Star Wars’. When I say ‘Star Wars’, I’m not talking about whatever happened to it after ‘Return Of The Jedi’ but the original trilogy of films, ‘Splinter In The Mind’s Eye’, the various comic strips and radio series, and I suppose the holiday Xmas special or whatever it’s called. I’m like Freddy Mercury in that “I don’t like ‘Star Wars'”. It’s possible, likely in fact, that it’s dramatically changed since I saw ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ in about 1980 CE, and possibly even improved, but the reason I can’t stand it as I conceive of it is that it’s all about the spectacle and possibly a kind of mythic approach set in space, and also in a time and place, if that’s not too focussed a word, not able to be mapped upon our current time and place, meaning that it can be neither a warning nor an aspiration. It’s basically sword and sorcery dressed up in a sci-fi costume, and the whole thing just really winds me up. The heaps of scientific implausibility don’t help, but that kind of thing can occur in a much more engaging way, as for example it does in Brian Aldiss’s ‘Hothouse’. Because it attempts to communicate some kind of “message”, which is potentially a fairly crass thing to do in itself, to do with the idea that certain truths are timeless, and universalism is fine by the way, there’s no need for the setting. It could be in Middle Earth and it would make no difference. But what ‘Star Wars’ undoubtedly is, is space opera.

I’ll come back to slagging it off later, while taking a break to define various opera. The term “space opera” was coined as a pejorative term for a particular genre, or perhaps sub-genre, in about 1940, connected to “soap opera” and further back to “horse opera”, a possibly disparaging term for the Western, i.e. Wild West, genre of cinema. The last of these has long since fallen out of use, probably before Westerns faded from view, but soaps are still going strong as is the term. This is, I suspect widely known, but I’ll say it anyway: soap opera get their name from the fact that they were originally extended commercials for I think washing powder in the 1930s, and as “opera” seems to be a disparaging word, it’s clearly meant to classify these three types of cultural product as intellectually undemanding psychic chewing gum. I’ve followed three soaps in recent years: ‘Casualty’, ‘The Archers’ and ‘Ros na Rún’. Of these, the last is probably the most soapy, and I have to admit very enjoyable for just that reason. I have the RTE Player on this laptop solely so I can watch it, although I haven’t in a while because I’ve lost track of where I left off. ‘Casualty’ I preferred when it was like a kind of detective story of finding out what was going on in someone’s life, so for example an old woman with no medical experience manages to diagnose another patient waiting for treatment with myasthenia gravis or a blind woman is hit by a careless cyclist and finds her sight has been restored. I am, however, still able to enjoy it in differently than how I used to. ‘Casualty’ is a useful case in point here since it’s linked with the defunct ‘Holby City’. I maintain that ‘Holby City’ is science fiction whereas ‘Casualty’ is not, and the whole cluster of elements between the various series involved is quite revealing in this respect. ‘Casualty’ used to be drama whose plot depended on the setting to a greater extent than it does now, and the scientific and technological aspects of the storylines used to be more central to the drama, whereas now they are much more human interest oriented. ‘Holby City’, which, and I have to say this, ought to be an abstract noun, was science fiction because there was actual medical research going on in it such as drug discovery, the use of gold nanoparticles for cardiac therapy and whatever it was Marwood (John Gaskell) was doing before he immersed himself in the loch. So it was literally science fiction some of the time. The characters would pursue fictional scientific endeavours which were based on established real-world theories but had not been undertaken in that direction in real life, and that literally is science fiction. The plot did depend on the setting too, because, well, here’s a case study. Gaskell manages to reverse motor neurone disease for a patient in Portugal through stem cell therapy, then attempts to do the same for a patient with multiple sclerosis by removing a nerve from her ankle and “gluing” it into her spinal column with stem cells. Even though this leads to an infection, he refuses either to remove the graft or admit that he inadvertently caused it. My recollection is that this storyline ends with him drowning himself but I can’t see that on the summary I’ve just read. The Motor Neurone Disease Association complained about this story line as holding out false hope for sufferers, and this is I’m sure accurate but only one possible take on the issue. As I understand it, olfactory nerves have been experimentally implanted in spinal cords to bridge injuries caused by trauma, and this doesn’t seem that dissimilar, although it is dissimilar, and that’s the point: it’s a scientifically-based story which includes elements of the character’s arrogance and medical objectification of his patients, and it’s more likely to be perceived as holding out false hope if the series is seen as a mainstream medical drama. If it’s seen as science fiction, Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” on which so much of that genre is based carries the audience through by framing it as an escapist fantasy: wouldn’t it be nice if my motor neurone disease could be cured? Hence ‘Holby City’ could’ve been better received in various ways if it had been understood as science fiction and not mainstream medical drama.

That willing suspension of disbelief operates elsewhere in story-telling, including of course magical realism and fantasy, but also space opera. It’s something that actually brackets space opera and science fiction together. However, science fiction is not space opera. SF is often seen as originating with Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, although that also has elements of gothic horror. It does, however, date further back than that. Kepler’s ‘Somnium’ is to my mind very clearly science fiction and also very clearly not space opera. The novel was published in 1634, and unsurprisingly recounts a dream whose protagonist travels to the lunar surface and witnesses the Earth seen from space, the captured rotation of a month-long day, the extreme contrast in temperatures experienced on that body between its day and night, describes Lagrangian points, and rather oddly has the location changed to be closer to Earth even though Kepler himself discovered the laws of planetary motion which placed it incontrovertibly where it is. It was written as fiction to avoid unwanted attention from the Church, as I understand it. It actually started as a dissertation and was published posthumously. Obviously the events described are imaginary, but the scientific principles are real and as far as I know there is no earlier example of this kind of literature known. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ dates from 1726, and focusses on satire although it does have some science fictional features.

To someone who knows about the generally reported history of science fiction, my placement of ‘Somnium’ as the first example of the genre might seem to be mistaken, because it looks like I’m ignoring something else which is a lot older and more significant. There’s a reason for this, which is probably quite evident from the distinction I made earlier, but for now I want to return to the idea of space opera.

So: space opera was described by Wilson Tucker in 1941 as a “hacky, grinding, stinking outworn spaceship yarn”. The referent was soon extended and altered from this, as it could easily refer to something on a relatively small scale, and applied to lively adventure stories involving often violent conflict in space. The canvas got a lot larger. The original phrase was meant to be insulting, and from the perspective of the more cerebral science fiction it feels justified. Just to be clear, space opera is a genre apart. It isn’t science fiction and it’s none the worse for not being it. The same, in my opinion, applies to ‘Doctor Who’, although that can occasionally dip into SF territory and it definitely isn’t space opera. It isn’t a bad thing that these are not science fiction, although they can be bad or good and they don’t particularly appeal to me on the whole. Space opera, crucially, has a grand scope, heroic protagonists, action-driven plots, romantic and emotionally evocative themes, melodrama, sharp moral distinctions and spectacular technology. It often also has aliens, but not always. ‘Star Wars’ as I know it is a good example of the genre. It is not, and I can’t emphasise this strongly enough, science fiction, even though many SF fans would disagree.

You may have picked up a note of disdain for the genre in this, and I’m not going to lie: I dislike space opera quite intensely. It thrives on spectacle, portrays conservative values and politics as permanent and is scientifically hugely implausible. These are, though, possible clues as to its nature and here, something interesting is going on. I intend to illustrate this with the question: what was the first space opera? “The answer may surprise you.”

First of all, ‘Star Wars’ is probably the most prominent space opera and shows the influence of predecessors, but it was easy to do that because the genre had already been well-established. The battle scenes are very obviously taken from war films. Other aspects are taken from the Saturday children’s matinée serials, particularly ‘Flash Gordon’ and ‘Buck Rogers’. The melée battles are akin to Robin Hood and Errol Flynn swashbucklers, and are one of the more obviously absurd aspects. As well as all that, there’s a more continuous space opera and sci-fi lineage, whose most obvious work is Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ series. It just brazenly steals huge portions of ‘Dune’ without any hint of shame. The evil empire, a desert planet, the centrality of water management on Tatooine, a Messiah-like figure, a secret fraternity with psychic powers, and apparently ‘Star Wars’ even has Spice! It is of course said that good writers borrow and great writers steal, but because I don’t generally feel well-disposed towards space opera generally and loathe ‘Star Wars’, this bothers me more than it should, because I think George Lucas is an unoriginal writer who managed to pass the franchise off as something groundbreaking because the people it was aimed at didn’t read those sorts of books. And that’s forgivable given the doorstep-like nature of ‘Dune’, which must be offputting to many, but it’s not like even that was the first.

‘Dune’ is a reaction to the Foundation Trilogy. In ‘Dune’, feudalism is portrayed as the default form of human society. It encapsulates my nightmare that progressive politics might be a brief aberration in human history. It’s kind of like the Foundation Trilogy turned upside-down. Whereas the Mule is seen as a threat because he’s an influential individual with psychic powers who can disrupt the Seldon Plan, Muad’Dib is a flawed hero who can save the Galaxy through them. It’s very much about individuals mattering. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Herbert’s approach, even the fact that Asimov was a major influence on him, though as a way of showing how things shouldn’t be done in his view. ‘Dune’ also shares with Asimov the idea of a human-only Galaxy.

Going back to the Foundation Trilogy, this is a bit of an anomaly as the genre goes. A lot of Asimov’s writing consists of people having conversations in rooms far away from the action, and the Trilogy has a lot of this, although it does have space battles. Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning at this point that I’m talking about all of this as if nothing happened after about 1981, so I’m not interested in the TV series, in the ‘Dune’ films, later works in the Foundation series or its later links with the Robot stories, or whatever happened to ‘Star Wars’ after ‘Return Of The Jedi’. This is an historical perspective I’m trying to construct here. The Foundation Trilogy is Gibbon’s ‘Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire’ in space. Asimov admits as much. It differs from Gibbon in that at the start of the whole series, someone develops a branch of mathematics which can predict the broad future of history provided the scale is large enough and the populace as a whole are unaware of the predictions. ‘Dune’ was published in 1965. Asimov started the Foundation Trilogy in 1941. It’s a very dull read, I think, but it contains the essential features of space opera and also other very widespread tropes seen in it: a galactic empire, very large scale, space battles, innumerable settled and habitable planets and, crucially, faster-than-light (FTL) travel. I’m not aware of any space opera written in modern times which doesn’t have FTL starships in it.

Going further back again, there’s what looks like the beginning of the genre in the works of E E ‘Doc’ Smith: the later Lensman series and the earlier Skylark of Space. I’ve noticed that more recent editions of his novels now show them fairly as co-authored by Lee Hawkins Garby. This is a woman Smith went to school with who went uncredited for decades after his death, over to whom he handed all the “squishy, human, emotional bits” of his stories while he got on with the supposèdly meatier parts of the plot with all the starships and rayguns and stuff. I have read a couple of his short stories, but find his novels hard to get anywhere with, in a similar way to how intolerable I find ‘Return Of The Jedi’ which I can watch about ten minutes of with gritted teeth before I succumb to the urge to turn it off and go and do something less boring instead. Consequently, it’s a bit difficult for me to comment meaningfully on either Lensman or Skylark. It’s definitely worthwhile looking at the plot of the Lensman series because of what it reveals about space opera.

The basic idea behind the series is that there are two races of aliens who are manipulating the development of intelligent life in the Galaxy from behind the scenes: the Arisians, peaceful enlightened beings, and Eddorians, slug-like selfish and basically evil blob aliens from another dimension. The Arisians want to guide life towards enlightenment and the Eddorians just want to rule like mafiosi. In a secret breeding program mediated by subtle psychic manipulation, the Arisians gently nudge life on Earth and elsewhere in the direction of wisdom and heroism to counteract the plans of the Eddorians. The breeding program culminates in the emergence of the “Lensmen”, whom I assume to be universally male given the cultural setting of the time and place of writing. These are heroic and morally impeccable men who can bear a crystalline device called the Lens, which can only be worn by people of such character and functions as a telepathy device, universal translator, lie detector, protects against psychic attacks, destroys the minds of the enemy and verifies the status of the Lensman. That all seems highly convenient, I must say. The scope of the series is literally aeons.

The Lensman series began publication in 1934 in serialised form, as was the usual arrangement at the time. Several of its aspects are interesting in view of – well, something I’ll come to in a bit. It was preceded by the ‘Skylark’ series, whose first part was written in 1915, which to my mind makes it quite startlingly old, and the little I’ve read of it comes across as very old-fashioned in style. It begins with a scientist accidentally inventing a space drive, the idea being immediately copied by his enemy and the two of them using the principle to build starships and engage in a cosmic battle involving multiple star systems and planets. It seems to be far more primitive and sketchily written than the later series, but it’s also crucial in setting the pre-conditions for the space opera written afterwards, because of one major aspect: the date it was written. In 1905, Albert Einstein, acting on the Michelson-Morley Experiment, began to wrestle with the issue that the speed of light was constant in all directions regardless of the speed of the observer, and of course the ultimate solution to this problem is special relativity and the conclusion that it’s impossible to travel faster than light. Special relativity was generally accepted by physicists by the 1920s. However, E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s PhD was on bleaching flour with nitrogen oxides and its effect on baking qualities, because he was a food chemist, and at the time it may also have seemed that the speed of light being a hard limit was highly provisional and subject to refutation relatively (groan) easily. Over a century later, it seems very much baked-in. In fact it might even have been that he wasn’t even aware of Einstein’s theory when he started writing the series, and this has the interesting consequence that his version of space travel is kind of Newtonian, except that he also thinks inertia can be cancelled out without too much difficulty.

This one principle, that Smith started writing before special relativity was well-established, constitutes a sine qua non of space opera. Without some means of moving faster than light, or perhaps travelling without moving as with ‘Dune’, it just becomes completely implausible for scientific as well as other reasons. Later writers have had to come up with some kind of workaround for this, but it wouldn’t be there in the first place were it not for the highly specific timing of ‘Skylark Of Space’. It’s quite remarkable.

E E Smith was also writing at a time when H G Wells still had more than three decades ahead of him and even Jules Verne had only died recently. If his writing is to be considered SF, it still shows a remarkably inventive departure and spatial “zooming out” compared to his contemporary and near-contemporary. H G Wells does in fact make, so far as I can tell, a single mention of humans settling on an exoplanet, circling Sirius, but it’s after the Day of Judgement and God does it. There’s no technological method through which this happens and it isn’t part of a concerted, human-led expansion into space by their own devices in any way. This was in 1899. Compared to science fiction, space opera just seemed to have come along and plonked itself down unceremoniously in the middle of everything without any regard for plausibility or even being particularly pensive. It’s a very different beast than sci-fi. Another aspect of this is that Smith was able to write about this unknown realm over all our heads with the possible prospect of humans entering it one day in the very distant future. Olaf Stapledon, writing in 1930, envisaged human spaceflight not beginning for several hundred million years after the twentieth century. It’s hard to cast one’s mind far enough back to realise how completely fantastic the idea of going into space used to be, and yet this is well within living memory. It gives us a different perspective on space opera entirely.

Now for the elephant in the room. People who know the history of science fiction fairly well will have noticed that there’s one particular major work of literature which up until now I’ve completely ignored. There’s a reason for this. Far from disrupting my thesis, it really goes some way towards proving the point I will eventually be making. Before I get to it, though, I should point out that its context surprised me, as I’d always thought of the novel as an invention of something like the fifteenth century with works like ‘Le Mort D’Arthur’ and ‘Tirant lo Blanch’, then eventually ‘Don Quixote’. Apparently not. It seems to be seen as central to the nature of the novel that it’s written in prose rather than verse, which apparently started to happen in the early thirteenth century. Also, apparently it was independently developed in China. It needs a widespread readership, which is helped by literacy and the invention of the printing press, so it’s all the more surprising, to me anyway, that there is actually a total of five novels which survive in complete form from Ancient Greece: ‘Daphnis And Chloe’, ‘Aethiopica’, ‘The Ephesian Tale’, ‘Leucippe and Clitophon’ and ‘Callirhoe’. There are also fragments of others and a further complete novel survives in Persian translation. It’s extended prose fiction with a coherent narrative, plot and characters. I mean, I don’t know what more you want from me: these are novels. I know it seems anachronistic, but they existed and some of them survive. On the whole, they form a genre. They’re usually about two lovers whose love is tested by various difficulties, threats and temptations. Pirates are often involved and they tend to travel around the Mediterranean a lot, can be tempted by riches to break up. They might be compared to Mills And Boon, but with more gods. In fact, the existence of these novels, and the fact that they were written in the Koiné register rather than Katharevousa or whatever passed for it at the time, puts the New Testament into context for me. I feel that the Bible was completed as a text intended to speak to the common person and not the highly-educated. It seems to have the same audience, and in one case even a similar plot line.

Right: here we go then, the moment someone might’ve been waiting for: Lucian of Samosata!

Lucian of Samosata was a second century Syrian satirist writing in Greek who authored a satirical novel called ‘A True Story’. This was, as has been noted on YouTube, basically a space opera! I’m not kidding and this isn’t hyperbole. It’s a parody of travel writing and of the Odyssey. Lucian writes of a ship which, voyaging beyond the Pillars of Hercules, is captured by a whirlwind and blown all the way up to the lunar surface, where the Emperor of the Moon, in a world populated by strange creatures, is happy to meet fellow humans and turns out to be involved in a major space war with the Emperor of the Sun for ownership of Venus. This war is fought by giant vultures and warriors on the backs of giant ants and fleas the size of horses, and there are also spiders involved, spinning webs as part of the defence network. This last detail, incidentally, also crops up in ‘Blake’s 7’ and Brian Aldiss’s ‘Hothouse’. On leaving this conflagration, they go to live in a city inside a whale and travel to the Islands of the Blessèd, where he discusses with Homer whether he really wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. It breaks off abruptly with intimations of a sequel.

First of all, it’s clearly satire. The reason it has a narrative in outer space is to make it seem over-the-top, and it also reminds me of Baron Munchausen. Nevertheless, it does contain many space opera tropes, and the scale is part of that. It has outlandish alien beings, battle in space over another planet as territory, travel to other worlds and a “space ship”. The main difference, apart from being satire, is that it’s interplanetary rather than interstellar or intergalactic, but the scale is still very large. What it definitely isn’t, though, is science fiction. In fact it more or less couldn’t be SF because there wasn’t really any science at the time for it to be fictional about. However, whereas Lucian was writing in a situation where science was basically absent, Smith was also writing without complete information and on the cusp of a moment which would have placed major constraints on what he could convincingly write about. Both could project fanciful tales up into the unknown darkness of the night sky, as it were, and wallow in that freedom from constraint. I also suspect that Smith was entirely ignorant of Lucian’s writing or even existence. Both of them gave the atmosphere a lot of welly. Smith was melodramatic, Lucian comedic.

Taking a different stance again is a third author, Doris Lessing. I am very slightly familiar with Lessing’s writing, having read ‘The Grass Is Singing’. I probably should’ve read ‘The Golden Notebook’ and ‘The Good Terrorist’ but I haven’t. I think of Lessing as a thoroughly literary author and therefore beyond my understanding or ability to empathise with her writing, and also regard her, as I do many other such authors, with some suspicion as an insidious legislator of how one is supposed to be human. Some people with ADHD report the experience of running their eyes along lines of writing with nothing going in. This is not something I get with most writing but I’m pretty sure it would happen if I tried to read her. Also, calling a novel ‘The Good Terrorist’ doesn’t bode well for me as I think the concept of terrorism is only useful to the powerful, so it suggests a conservative outlook. Not to go off on too much of a tangent, this isn’t about the morality of terrorism so much as the idea that violence openly committed by a state is somehow more legitimate. Maybe she meant something else. It might be thought that it was right up my street, and maybe it is, but I doubt I’ll be reading it. I think she might show contempt for people who feel powerless and don’t know what to do to engage with making a difference to the world, which is of course me and many friends through my adult life. Regarding ‘The Golden Notebook’, one thing that might be relevant is an incident early in my relationship with Sarada. I have generally tended to keep at least two different sets of notebooks, one as my diary in a journalling sort of sense and the other for other stuff, for instance if I were doing that right now I’d probably write a lot about graph theory as applied to social media, but also other more personal stuff. Sarada suggested I combine the two, so I did that and it almost immediately gave me writer’s block, which I never experience, in both types of notebook for something like three years. Maybe that could be relevant, I don’t know. I’m almost wilfully ignorant of this kind of writing. I wonder if the separation into different notebooks represents a kind of fragmentation of her identity in a more negative way, probably in connection with the contradictions of women’s roles under patriarchy, but as I say that’s just a guess and I know nothing.

Just as I’m wilfully ignorant of Lessing’s writing, I strongly suspect that she was wilfully ignorant of science fiction and space opera. Nonetheless, she’s called herself a storyteller who feels the same push to write and tell stories as I experience, and going back to that Stone Age camp fire, she would’ve been sitting around it telling stories, perhaps about Canopus and Sirius. And she would’ve been, because it was before the patriarchy even existed. She might have been breastfeeding or kiss-feeding at the same time, but this wouldn’t have interfered with her story-telling urge.

Anyway, as is well-known, Doris Lessing wrote a five-novel series ‘Canopus In Argos’ whose first novel, published in 1979, covers the history of Earth as seen from the perspective of Canopus, an advanced civilisation observing accelerated evolution on this planet, known to them as Shikasta, translated as “stricken”. Earth is initially nurtured by Canopus but a misalignment of the stars leads to an interruption of the flow of the “substance of we-feeling”, and breaks the telepathic lock between Canopus and Shikasta. Consequently, Shammat, the rival empire to Canopus, is then able to seed Earth with discord, environmental destruction, violence and selfishness, hence the name “stricken”, having changed from Rohanda, meaning “fruitful”. Johor, the narrator, whose documents are scattered through the first novel, manifests himself as a human man to guide and enlighten a small group of humans and rescue the planet from turmoil.

The next novel, ‘The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four And Five’, is allegorical and depicts a planet divided into six zones, each at a different stage of spiritual development. Canopus appears to order a marriage between two individuals, the queen of the harmonious, egalitarian and feminine zone three and the king of the militaristic, patriarchy of zone four, to bridge their differences and learn from each other. Later, the king of zone four is ordered to marry the queen of zone five, a chaotic and primitive realm.

Then comes ‘The Sirian Experiments’, which concern a Sirian attempt to guide human development towards technological advancement and bureaucracy which tend to lead to catastrophe on other planets. There are two other novels but I haven’t read any of them and I don’t want to lose focus. But look at the first. Does it not sound to you, broadly speaking because I’m sure the style is very different, like the general idea of Smith’s ‘Lensman’ series? There are two rival cosmic agencies directing the history of humanity, one towards enlightenment, the other with more malign motives, and the more enlightened force leads to a hero being incarnated among the humans. It seems uncannily similar, and the thing is, I don’t think it’s “stolen”. I think Lessing knew practically nothing of space opera. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing she would be well-informed about or value. And yet she apparently reproduced a novel whose general outline, though doubtless not tone or detail, is basically the same as E E Smith’s ‘Triplanetary’ so far as I can tell. Moreover, ‘Triplanetary’ began to be serialised in 1934 whereas ‘Shikasta’ was published forty-five years later in 1979. Smith’s series as a whole was a runner-up in the Hugo awards for all-time best series in 1966, losing out to the Foundation Trilogy, so it was also phenomenally well-known and celebrated. That’s like being a runner-up to the Booker Prize, so Lessing’s ignorance, and probably that of her readers and reviewers, is absolutely breathtaking. Just to get this off my chest, and bearing in mind that I don’t actually care for space opera generally, Smith had done all that four and a half decades previously, it was considered old hat by about 1940, although still admired in a retro kind of way, and then along comes Lessing and apparently it’s all wonderful and ground-breaking rather than a heap of tired old rubbish. This is really galling.

All that said though, I honestly don’t believe Lessing ripped him off. I think she was simply writing in ignorance, and in an environment that was equally ignorant, and apparently even proud of that ignorance, considering that genre fiction could not possibly have anything to teach them. These rather annoying preconditions, though, did create a situation where space opera could once again be reinvented, though doubtless in a very different and rather arcane form rather than as popular culture.

So then, there are three separate instances of the genre being created, each isolated from the others and in different circumstances. Lessing’s background was in politics, and incidentally she ought to be very much one of my kind of people, being active in CND, an ex-communist and so on. I know the kind of person she is and many such people have been my friends. Smith, by contrast, was a food chemist, like Margaret Thatcher in a way, and his work was the most influential as he basically created the genre we now call space opera. Lucian seems to have been primarily a literary person writing in the ancient world. All of them, though, seem to have stumbled upon the same genre, even in very different historical circumstances. To me this suggests that space opera was just “out there” waiting to be discovered, actually did get discovered independently at least three times, by people who had nothing in common with each other apart from all being part of Western civilisation.

How does this happen? Has it happened with anything else? And what are the essential features of the genre which define it? I can see an attempt at grandeur and scope, accompanied by a kind of operatic approach to emotion which maybe Lessing didn’t include. I’m just not sure. But I hope you agree that this is remarkable, and once something happens thrice it’s no longer a coincidence.