This post is brought to you by Ships of Steel edited by G. W. Thomas. This anthology of Space Opera and SF Adventure tales features four novellas, each with its own illustration by M. D. Jackson. If you enjoy your Science Fiction with more action this is the book for you. Manhunts across a giant spaceship, a quest for stolen space pirate treasure with killer androids, a lost child that is the key to a mystery and a planet with a deadly secret that will cause a galactic war. These are stories that move but will also move you.
You may think this piece is about Westerns but it’s. Not really.
The day the Western died was May 25, 1977. According to John Jakes in his introduction to A Century of Great Western Stories (2000):
Around 4:30, after the curtains parted and the John Williams fanfare blared, there went sliding up the screen the kind of lettering I remembered from Saturday afternoon serials…
The Western died in a movie theater?
Once the slanted text concluded, a deep, almost intestinal rumbling began. And from the top of the frame, against a sea of stars, there appeared the prow of this spaceship descending into the picture, steadily revealed as ever bigger, ever longer…
May 25, 1977…
Though we didn’t know it then, Star Wars would change many things…
Star Wars killed the Western?
For years, devoted moviegoers had thrilled to Technicolor vistas of Western scenery; suddenly we could thrill to Technicolor vistas of starry galaxies and fantastic rocketry. It seemed a completely new game…
So new, right?
But it wasn’t.
Jakes is completely right. Star Wars wasn’t new. In fact, there was nothing new about it. Except no one had seen such a thing for twenty years. Some how between the 1950s and the 1970s, we forgot about Space Opera.
In a previous post I quoted Brian W. Aldiss describing Space Opera as the glitter-covered sister to serious Science Fiction. Even the established SF community had pretty much written off the Space Opera epic and was about to regret its re-emergence. Lester Del Rey in The World of Science Fiction: 1926-1976 (1979) devotes an entire chapter to Star Wars called “After Star Wars“. I think this final chapter was added later after the book was finished because the popularity of the film simply could not be ignored. (The book was written at least two years earlier in 1976-1977, but hit shelves in 1979. Books take a while to get produce.) He reluctantly hopes the new popularity will bring new readers to Science Fiction in general. What he wisely did was read the room. Star Wars would be huge–published traditional SF would shrink.
Because those crowds of Star Wars fans wanted to read Star Wars, not depressing diatribes on politics or the environment or what have you. As Space Opera fans of old could have told you, Star Wars fans just wanna have fun. Like the readers of Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett (who wrote some famous Western films), E. E. “Doc” Smith, Jack Williamson (in the old days) and a host of forgotten writers could tell you: Space Opera is fun to read. And as it turned out, to watch.
I was fourteen when Star Wars premiered, the perfect age to be lulled by its siren song. Would I have become a Western writer if it hadn’t been released? I doubt it. I was pretty much addicted to The Fantastic by fourteen. My fate was decided ten years earlier when the Ballantine Books (and later ACE Books) brought Edgar Rice Burroughs back in paperback. That was my gateway drug. From there, Robert E. Howard and comic books. But Star Wars gave me (and millions of others) the Space Opera again. It was so closely related to Burroughs’ Interplanetary Romances that it wasn’t hard.
I wonder why the Space Opera disappeared for twenty years? (It did but it didn’t, of course.) In the SF publishing world, this may have been fueled by the coming of the New Wave in the 1960s. Old SF, even the non-Space Opera stuff, was poo-pooed as old-fashioned. Space Opera was even older and so even more old-fashioned. By the 1970s, the New Wave had calmed down some, finding its place amongst the older style SF. Think of how you could buy a Michael Moorcock-Brian W. Aldiss-J. G. Ballard paperbacks on the same rack as Jack Williamson-Frederik Pohl-Isaac Asimov. SF publishers made room for both. All these books were about to be shoved over for the Star Wars franchise paperbacks. Starting with Alan Dean Foster’s novelization (which was credited to George Lucas) of Star Wars. That book sold millions. Unlike genuine masterworks like Frank Herbert’s Dune (which is secretly a Space Opera) or Robert A. Heinlein’s A Stranger in a Strange Land, both bestsellers, this book wasn’t filled with mind-warping SF but Flash Gordon level silver underwear zap-zap-pew-pew. It wasn’t even originally fiction but a screenplay.
As the decades went on, I saw the book racks (now replaced with book shelves) crammed with franchise books. Not just Star Wars but Star Trek and every other film and TV show that followed 1977. (Star Trek‘s regeneration was directly tied to the success of Star Wars.) New, original, traditional or even experimental SF was crowded out of the book store as franchise books took over. The publishers didn’t care. They wanted to print what sold well, nothing more. They were never saints, but business people.
I thought this was about Westerns? Or is it? Well, the future of the paperback Western was even grimmer than that of traditional SF. With the exception of Louis L’Amour, Western novels shrank too, but never disappeared. Jakes was right that my generation, what I call the Star Wars generation, never really twigged to the tale of the Frontier. (I finally did in my forties.) I laugh when I watch new Star Wars product like The Book of Boba Fett, which leans particularly hard on the Western (films more than literature). I have written elsewhere about how the gunslinger, the space captain, the private detective and the barbarian warrior all came from the same tree. Public taste for all of these styles of Pulp-descended entertainment cycle through every so often. Was the Western dead? Why did Larry McMurty get credit for inventing the Western in 1985 with Lonesome Dove? (Sound familiar? We forget easily. You’d think J. K. Rowling invented Fantasy in 1997.) Why did Clint Eastwood win Oscars for The Unforgiven in 1992?
The Western never really died. It cooled. Fiction types come and go. Remember Zombie fiction? Sparkly vampire romance? I could name several other short-term flare-ups. Even Space Opera fiction has had a boost in the last two decades. Watchers and readers of The Expanse may think, wow, this is so new…but Edmond Hamilton did it all in the 1920s, Jack Williamson in the 1930s, Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury in the 1940s (yes, Bradbury! The Martian Chronicles began in a Pulp devoted to Space Opera, Planet Stories. Why did his publisher never point that out?).
As trends cool, publishers jettison their previous darlings. Leisure Books, who published both Westerns and Horror novels since 1957, folded up in 2010. The new changes to publishing (including self-publishing, POD, etc.) made this steadfast publisher of genre paperbacks fail. The company packed up rather than face huge losses. And perhaps they were reading the writing on the wall. Last year the paperback book as a format was given the last rites. (You can argue that companies like Leisure bailing may have fueled that but I think not. Readers have their preferences (mostly ebook and trade paper these days). Just as the Pulp magazine died in and around 1954, killed off in favor of the paperback, tastes change. The trade paperback is closer in size to a Pulp, so take that paperbacks!
Conclusion
Some day, someone is going to declare the death of the Space Opera again. Maybe they already have. Like the Western, the beat goes on for those who love that particular vehicle of fun. James Reasoner is over seventy now and still writing Westerns. (Good ones I might add.) The field is much smaller than when he started but it hasn’t disappeared. The Space Opera likewise is on a high but still is a niche form of SF. The number of Star Wars related books increases every year with hundreds of novels (some even bestsellers) filling in the universe George Lucas cobbled together from old Flash Gordon serials and the Samurai films of Akurosawa. I have used the term “Star Wars” throughout this post to represent what some would call “Star Wars: A New Hope“. I, of course, mean what would become the fourth movie of the nine. I stood in line for Star Wars (I was first, waiting hours to be first in the theater.) I can remember a world without Star Wars. Once a spark is lit, the world is never the same again. Some may say that fire has gone out, but they are usually wrong.
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