When asked for their favourite examples of the genre, one name kept coming up. There’s a kind of grim, lunatic nihilism you need for those situations, and I loved seeing that.” It wasn’t the family attitude: it was more the constraints and the clever plays within terrifyingly close constraints. “I treasured the darkness, as well: the darkness of the void, the tragedy of people in confined spaces, and a terror of the deep that only the deep sea brings me. “What did I like about ? Well, always the sense of wonder that the scale brought me: the feeling that Earth, and all our bickering, was just a tiny speck of dust – what Sagan called ‘the pale blue dot’ – and out there was an entire universe waiting to be explored,” Wijeratne says. Aside from the cultural questions that raises, it opens possibilities for conflict, character bonding, and worldbuilding.” ![]() Yes, these are tales of survival, but they’re also tales of what it means to question the world around you. And on journeys that long, with only the ocean and saltwater (space) around you, things become fraught. “I love to think of them in terms of exploration, analogous to ships navigating the vastness of a sea. “What I enjoy most about space operas is taking contemporary socio-cultural and political issues and exploring them through a different lens,” says May. While the “Seven” duology is very much inspired by this genre of space adventure, it also brings these stories’ underlying political themes to the surface. You have to have your crew’s back, otherwise space or alien plants are too large or dangerous. That isolation can breed really interesting character conflict and deep bonds. ![]() “What’s great and terrible about space is how you are often stuck on a ship with people, for better or worse. The scrappy people trying to make a living or rebel against a higher power, or the slick luxury communism of Star Trek,” says Lam. “So many of these stories are what we grew up with, and they were definitely influences. In Seven Devils, a team of very different women come together aboard a starship stolen from an oppressive, galaxy-spanning empire, clashing with each other as much as the regime they are fighting. That energy was one of the inspirations for Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, the writers behind Seven Devils and its upcoming sequel, Seven Mercies. Over the years the Star Wars franchise has delivered a number of mismatched spaceship crews, from various ensembles to have crewed the Millennium Falcon, to the band of rebels in Rogue One, to the crew of the Ghost in Star Wars: Rebels. And I think the ‘found family’ element is a big part of it, since these characters are always cooped up on a tiny ship together and having to rely on each other.” “These stories have in common a kind of swashbuckling adventure spirit and a love of problem-solving and resourcefulness. “I love how fun this particular strand of space opera is, and how much warmth and humour the characters tend to have,” Anders says. While Commander Sheppard is ostensibly the protagonist of the video game trilogy, few would argue that it’s anything other than the ensemble of the Normandy crew that keeps people coming back.Īs science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders points out, it’s not hard to see the appeal of a family of likeable characters, kept in close quarters by the confines of their ship, and sent into stories of adventure. Most recently Sky’s Intergalactic, and the Korean movie Space Sweepers have been carrying the standard, while last month saw people diving back into the world of Mass Effect with Mass Effect Legendary Edition. It’s a formula that has been repeated over and over for about as long as there has been science fiction on television-starting with the likes of Star Trek and Blake’s 7, through the boom in “ planet of the week” style TV in the 90s and 00s with Farscape and Firefly, to more recent stories like Dark Matter, The Expanse, Killjoys, and the Guardians of the Galaxy films. The most important thing is that they’re all very different people.” These Are the Voyages… ![]() ![]() “They haven’t been recruited, they have relative degrees of distance from the cause, they’ve been flung together. A foundational example for me was Blake’s 7,” says Paul Cornell, who has written stories for the Star Trek: Year Five comic series among his many speculative fiction credits. “Ensemble crews are one of the quickest and most powerful ways to forge a found family. That crew might be a dysfunctional band of space criminals and revolutionaries, or a clean cut team of scientists, diplomats and soldiers serving a galactic Space UN, but there is a core appeal to this set up across the genre. If you’re a sci-fi fan, there are very good odds that this synopsis describes one of your hooks into the genre. A close-knit crew of wildly different people ride around on a spaceship having adventures.
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