“It’s insulting,” the Intelligence drone they’d been assigned to was saying, now. “Yes, we asked you to come here; yes, we asked to join the Federation. But that doesn’t give you the right to treat us like… like…” The drone’s iridescent carapace shuddered slightly, and their speakers gave a remarkably convincing approximation of sputtering with rage. “Like computers!”
From “A Difference of Opinion,” Kaleidotrope, April 2022
The spring 2022 issue of Kaleidotrope includes my story “A Difference of Opinion,” a short space opera in the tradition of Ursula Le Guin’s Hain Cycle and Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. The story features self-aware AI (with AI children!), far-flung federations with an interest in collecting different polities, and a take on the “battle of wits” scene from The Princess Bride. (Yes, that’s right: it’s got AI, space opera, AND poison!)
Although the term space opera started out as a pejorative one for low-quality science fiction, the subgenre is now long established as a force to be reckoned with. Especially in the last five or six years, space opera has been been having “a moment.” Books like Ancillary Justice, Gideon the Ninth and A Memory Called Empire (and their sequels), the Murderbot novellas (and a novel, now!), and all sorts of other great stories have received critical attention in the way of award nominations or wins.
If you’ve read some of those titles and are looking for more, I’ve pulled together a list of some of my favourite space opera settings ranging from classic titles by LeGuin to newer stories by equally amazing authors.
1: Aliette de Bodard’s Universe of Xuya
Aliette de Bodard’s Universe of Xuya is one of my absolute favourite settings regardless of genre and sub-genre. It interrogates
It has the delicious mix of high-stakes interplanetary conflict and intimate personal stakes that’s one of space opera’s most defining elements, all set in “Confucian galactic empires of Vietnamese and Chinese inspiration.”
If you’re interested in Classical Chinese and Vietnamese culture, or—frankly—just like amazing storytelling with memorable characters, lushly and lovingly described, you’ve definitely got to pick up some of Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya books and stories.
The Tea Master and the Detective, the Nebula-award winning novella that de Bodard describes as a “gender-swapped space opera Sherlock Holmes retelling,” is a great place to start your exploration.
2: Macross Seven
Okay, stick with me here. If you’re not into anime, you’ve probably never even seen that word before. But if you like your space opera with a healthy dose of romantic melodrama and “not taking itself entirely seriously,” you’ll likely appreciate this one.
The Macross franchise of anime (and manga, and games, and…) is well-known among anime fans for a few things, including love triangles, the integration of music into space battles, missile barrages that paint the sky with explosions, and fighter planes that transform into giant, humanoid robots. While its subgenre is technically mecha (“giant robot”) rather than space opera as such, the conflicts are often inter-cultural and inter-species as well as personal, so for my purposes I’m just going to go with it.
There are many different Macross series, but my personal favourite is Macross 7—probably also the one that takes itself the least seriously.
Macross 7 follows pacifist rock musician Nekki Basara as he embarks on a one-man quest to stop war and spread love by… flying a giant transforming space fighter jet / robot that seems to be powered by guitar.
Oh, also he fires speaker pods into enemy fighters and sings at them.
It may be goofy, but it’s a lot of fun. Give it a chance, and soon you too will be shouting 「俺の歌を聴けー！」 (listen to my song!)
Sadly, the DVDs are out of production and it’s not available for streaming, so you’ll have to do some work to find copies of this one.
3: Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s Sun Lords of the Principality
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor is a Nebula award finalist whose work always moves me. Their Sun Lords of the Principality story series is no different.
Consisting of five stories published in Lightspeed Magazine, the Sun Lords series follows warriors, poets, heroes, villains, and gods through galaxy-sized conflicts that threaten to consume everything and everyone they touch.
Fair warning, some of these stories are super dark—at times, even unrelentingly brutal. But even at their grimmest, they have an inescapable core of humanity and empathy that gives them a warm place in my library. If you’ve ever asked yourself how you can possibly keep going with the world as messed up as it is, give these a try.
Also, I heartily recommend checking out some of Merc’s other work! Their latest publication, “Hero’s Choice“, is a humorous fantasy novelette that sounds like it’s just crying out for an isekai anime adaptation. Or for a broader taste of their work, try Friends for Robots, a recent short story collection.
4: Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hainish Cycle
Okay, Ursula K. LeGuin probably doesn’t need much of an introduction. With decades of acclaim under her belt at the time of her death in 2018, most people know of her work either from A Wizard of Earthsea or sci-fi novels like The Left Hand of Darkness. It’s the latter we’ll concern ourselves with here.
Le Guin’s science fiction stories usually (but not always) fall into what is referred to as the Hainish Cycle (although the author herself didn’t like the term “cycle”), a series which all deal with a spacefaring civilization called the Ekumen. The Ekumen, and its main planet, Hain, is a kind of Star Trek like galaxy-spanning confederation of planets dedicated to inclusivity and cooperation. Most of the stories and novels in the series deal with members of the Ekumen called mobiles, who go to newly-admitted or isolated planets and observe (while usually also agitating for membership and Hainish values).
A lot of SF fans have read The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, but my favourites set on Hain are The Telling, set on a suddenly-capitalist-consumerist planet where the old way of doing things still lives on under the surface, and “Five Ways to Forgiveness,” five connected stories about slavery and social change. If you want something shorter and more fun, try “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” a short story that does some fun things with FTL travel.
If you can afford it, I recommend splurging on a copy of the Library of America’s Hainish Novels and Stories boxed set, a collection of Ursula K. LeGuin’s space opera. The two books contain all the stories and novels that feature Hain, including “Five Ways to Forgiveness,” which hasn’t previously been published in full. Also, they’re absolutely gorgeous to look at!
Bonus Story: “How They Name the Ships”
So there you have it: four space opera settings I enjoy!
I don’t have a fully-fledged universe of my own that spans dozens of published stories—yet. But if you like “A Difference of Opinion,” it does take place in the same setting as “How They Name the Ships,” published in 2020 in Frozen Wavelets. That one is only about 750 words, so it’s a quick read.
As the title suggests, it’s all about the power of names and naming—a theme that’s particularly important in a lot of LeGuin’s fiction, but one that also shows up a lot in other space operas. If you’re interested in the topic, you can see what I wrote about some of my favourite ship names from other space opera series in an older blog post: “Ship Names, Naming, and Identity in Space Opera.”