If you have ever enjoyed Star Wars or Star Trek, you have enjoyed Space Opera, whether you knew it or not. But is all Science Fiction the same as Space Opera? No, there are dividing lines, though authors sometimes like to blur those lines when they can. But there are a few defining characteristics that will help identify a work as Space Opera. First, the setting is primarily in space. You may land on planets, but the action doesn’t tend to stay on any one planet. Second, the setting is big. An astronaut going into orbit around the Earth might be science fiction, but it wouldn’t be Space Opera. For this we are talking about multiple star systems, if not galaxies. In the early days, it meant purple prose, and female characters, if any, were closer to cardboard. But like all literary genres, it has evolved over time. The Culture novels of Iain Banks and the Revelation Space stories of Alastair Reynolds are excellent current examples of Space Opera. And Alastair Reynolds’ work also tend to be hard science fiction, showing how categories can overlap. But the generally recognized father of Space Opera is Edward Elmer Smith, Ph. D.

That is not to say no one did before he did, but that he created a body of work whose roots lie in the pulps, and which set the expectations that subsequent authors had to meet to write good Space Opera. And Smith started early, preceding the Big Three of the Golden Age by several decades. And where he went, others followed. John W. Campbell wrote his Arcot, Morey and Wade series in a way similar to Smith, but not as well written, in my view. for example, Sirius is often called The Dog Star because it is the brightest start in the constellation Canis Major (Greater Dog). And Campbell has aliens from Sirius and makes them canine in appearance. Smith never does anything like that. And in fact his aliens are some of his best creations, imaginative and plausible. Most of them do not in any way resemble any creatures we know, and are truly alien, particularly in the Lensman series.

While Smith was legitimately a Ph.D., with a Doctorate in Chemical Enigineering, his career was in food chemistry, particularly the manufacture of donuts and pastries. But his early career gave him material to use in his writing. After college, he moved to Washington, D.C. to be a Junior Chemist at the National Bureau of Standards (while getting his Masters in Food Chemistry at George Washington University). This particular episode becomes part of the background for Richard Seaton, the hero of Skylark. Then, for his Ph.D. at George Washington University he studied under Doctor Charles E. Munroe, who he described as “probably the greatest high-explosives man yet to live”. This forms the background for one the stories in Triplanetary.

Skylark

Smith’s first work was the novel Skylark. He began working on it in 1915 while in Washington. It started with a discussion with some friends when he was expounding on his ideas of how the future in space might play out. His friends were Dr. Carl Garby, a former classmate, and his wife Lee, and when they suggested he should write a novel with his ideas, Smith hesitated because he felt a novel would have to have some romance in it, he did not feel comfortable doing it. So Lee Garby offered to help write that part. By the end of 1916 they were about one-third of the way done when they ran out of steam. Then in 1919, Smith, who had moved to Michigan, resumed work on it, and finished it in the spring of 1920. He started submitting the work to various publishers, without success, until in 1927 he submitted it to Amazing Stories (launched by Hugo Gernsback the previous year), where it ran as a three-part serial. It was so successful that they asked for a sequel before the second installment had run.

The novel starts with the protagonist, Richard Seaton, working as a chemist in the Rare Metals Lab in Washington D.C. In this Smith was clearly using his own life as a basis. But for Seaton, something very strange happened, He was plating some copper with an unknown metal when his apparatus suddenly takes off, leaving a wreckage of broken glass behind. The metal is simply called X because no one knows what it is. He has a colleague in the Rare Metals Lab named Marc “Blackie” Duquesne who was working on some apparatus of his own in a nearby lab, and that apparatus turns out to be a key part in this event. Seaton is also engaged to a Washington socialite named Dorothy Vaneman, and has a best friend Martin Crane who happens to be a millionaire, which is handy because money will be needed. Seaton and Crane decide to build a spaceship that uses Se4aton’s discovery as a method of propulsion, but DuQuesne gets wind of it and kidnaps Dorothy Vaneman to get it for himself. And he has another kidnapped hostage, Peg Spencer, and that completes the main characters for the series.

Duquesne’s space ship runs out of fuel and is captured by that is called a “cold dead star”, but Seaton catches up and rescues everyone. Seaton is low on fuel, though, so they go looking for more of X, and then for more copper, which brings them to a green system, where Seaton resolves some conflicts and is recognized as the Overlord of the system. While they are there, Dick Seaton and Dorothy Vaneman are married, as are Martin Crane and Peg Spencer. The people of this system have scientific discoveries not known on Earth, and rebuild the Skylark to make it better. Finally they return to Earth, but as they are landing DuQuesne sneaks out with a parachute, but don’t worry, he will be back.

This novel had a major impact on the developing field of Science Fiction. It was not the first story to be written in this genre, in fact we can find examples as far back as 2,000 years ago, such as Lucian of Samasota, who had a story involving space travel in the 2nd century. But most stories before Smith were flat-out fantasies, while Smith brought in at least a veneer of science to his story, making his hero a chemist, and starting with something that was at least plausible as the key invention. As the story goes on subsequent developments themselves become more fantastical, which is typical of early Space Opera. But Smith can be fairly credited with inventing what we know as Space Opera. And he had a great influence on other writers. For instance, I know of a picture of Robert A Heinlein’s bookshelf containing a copy of The Skylark of Space, and it is clear that John W. Campbell’s own books resemble Smith’s in many respects. Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel Islands in the Sky, has a spaceship named Skylark of Space in obvious homage.

But while it was influential, it has obvious flaws. The characters are not well developed, in fact calling them cardboard would not be out-of-place. Smith himself felt he could not do convincing “romance”, and this novel seems to prove that he was correct in this judgement. As R.D. Mullen wrote in the November 1975 issue of Science Fiction Studies

The great success of the stories was surely due first of all to the skill with which Smith mixed elements of the spy thriller and the western story (our hero is the fastest gun in space, our villain the second fastest) with those of the traditional cosmic voyage. It is not only that Dick Seaton discovers anti-gravity, builds the Skylark, flies it through various dangers, and explores strange worlds (the principal one being very much like the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs); it is also that he is relentlessly pursued by Blackie DuQuesne, a scientist backed by all the resources of World Steel, determined to take over Seaton’s inventions so that with them he may rule the world, and casually killing everyone who gets in his way.

And he gives us a clue here with the reference to Westerns. Western stories were very popular in the United States for a long time, and were known as “Horse Operas”. And that is the background to what was intended to be a pejorative description of the new type of space story, the Space Opera. These early stories are important to the history of Science Fiction and are worth reading for that reason, but as literature they fall flat. But to an eleven-year-old boy who was in love with the idea of space travel, it was fantastic. Space Opera would get better, and indeed Smith would get better. But this set the template for those who came later.