“…One has little difficulty tracing the evolution of that basic plot from those late Victorian jingoistic narratives-emulated both on the Continent and in America-through the narratives of the “space operas” of writers like “Doc” Smith and Edmond Hamilton to the contemporary treatments of the motif, ranging from Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974) to such films as Star Wars and Return of the Jedi.
Tymn and Mike Ashley in The SF Magazines (1985) trace the future war story back to Sir George Tomkyns Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking” in Blackwood’s Magazine (Spring 1871). Edgar Rice Burroughs and his brand of interplanetary romance was a big influence on Ed Hamilton, who read him in the original “Soft Magazines” like Argosy. Even as early as 1901, George Griffiths’ A Honeymoon in Space shows signs of what is to follow.
This isn’t to say there weren’t precursors, because there were. Edmond Hamilton wrote about an empire of stars in the “Interstellar Patrol” series for Weird Tales in the twenties…” Edmond Hamilton Lester Del Rey’s The World of Science Fiction (1976) says : “Asimov didn’t invent this idea. No Buck Rogers, no John Hanson, no Flash Gordon, no E. But what we miss is that in 1928, there was no actual Space Opera until Edmond Hamilton invented it with “Crashing Suns”. With franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek, who needs to worry about Space Opera. Art by Leo Moreyįor people living in our days, ninety plus years removed from the Pulps of 1928, this seems the norm. Today they are known as “The Soaps” and Proctor & Gamble is still a sponsor. Romantic radio programs were usually sponsored by soap companies. But the term is a pejorative, equating tales of spaceships and thundering stars to pedestrian fare such as the over-worked Western, a “horse opera” or the common Romance, or “soap opera”, the first to bear that title. Space Opera rolls off the tongue much better.
Before this time the sub-genre was usually called “Interplanetary Romance”. Obviously old “Bob” was not a fan of Space Opera. The term “Space Opera” was coined in 1941 by Wilson “Bob” Tucker, SF fan and writer.
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