The term “Space Opera”, used to define a certain branch of Science Fiction, was coined by Wilson Tucker in 1941. It was not meant to be a compliment. The term “Soap Opera” has found its way into the larger public domain of common phrases, but it too came from this sort of labeling as did the “Horse Opera” for Western. The Soap Opera was a romantic radio melodrama in which the sponsor was stereotypically a soap company or other product that would appeal to housewives. The Horse Opera was also considered the lowest form of the Western, filled with romantic interludes and other non-purist devices, just as the Space Opera was supposedly the lowest common denominator SF piece.
The Space Opera has its roots in the early magazine serials at the beginning of the last century. Not everyone was trying to change society in the Wellsian manner. One such writer was George Griffith, who outsold H. G. Wells in England but is sadly forgotten today except by historians. Griffith wrote his share of political SF too (much of which was anti-American in flavor, a bad idea since America was destined to be the birthplace of the SF magazine) but one serial in Pearson’s Magazine called “Stories of Other Worlds” (collected in 1901 as A Honeymoon in Space) was the prototype for the Space Opera in the decades to follow. The series follows two newly-weds as they tour the Solar System in a spaceship called the Astronef, as couples used to travel the Continent in the 18th and 19th Century.
Lord Redgrave and his new wife, Zaidie, travel first to the Moon, where they find a dead city and the last of the Lunarians devolved into weird fish people, then onto Venus and its winged inhabitants, the inspiration for stories about angels. (These winged aliens are the first of a long line of flying men that runs from the stories of Edmond Hamilton…
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 3:From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly