Space Opera and Epic Fantasy: Two Trees Sharing a Root System (and Then Becoming Two Big Nasty Trees That Eat Other Trees, or Something)

Last month, Paul Weimer suggested I write about the connections between epic fantasy and space opera.  Initially, I didn't know how to approach the topic.  Paul, you see, is far better read than myself, particularly in the literary history of science fiction and fantasy.  What could I say about the topic that Paul couldn't say better?  Well, I'm going to take a stab at it!

There was also another problem:  which period of these two genres are we talking about?  If we're looking at the early years of space opera and epic fantasy, then the connection is apparent, but diffuse.  Both epic fantasy (what might have been better termed as heroic fantasy in its "root" period) and space opera in the first half of the 20th century shared roots with the adventure fictions that preceded them.  Space opera arose, more or less, out of the planetary romances of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, proto-space opera writers like E.E. "Doc" Smith (though some might disagree with that assessment) and late-19th century "future war fiction" (see I.F. Clarke; I would argue that space opera gets its political undercurrents from this movement).[1]  Both forms (space opera and planetary romance) are hard to distinguish,[2] since they often share in the same melodrama, with "space opera" typically playing within a much wider canvas (though not always), and both forms share a common root in the late 19th century adventure stories and the pulps that followed.

Literary Explorations: Gender Normativity, Genre Fiction, and Other Such Nonsense

In a past episode of The Skiffy and Fanty Show, we (Paul, Liz Bourke, and myself) discussed, however briefly, the paucity of women among published science fiction authors in the UK.  Specifically, we were talking about their minority status in the present while acknowledging the existence of a long string of incredible female SF writers in UK SF history.  Though I am not an expert on the UK SF scene, my impression as an American peeking in has confirmed the notion that there is a great deal of sexism within the broader fanbase, and a systemic gender-bias problem in the publishing sphere.  The latter has been attributed to sexism (today); I am not convinced that this is necessarily true -- at least, not in the sense of a deliberate action.  The former is probably a reflection of who speaks as opposed to a true assessment of UK fandom as a whole, and it is certainly true that this perception is changing.  Perception, of course, is not everything.

I say all of this not because I want to talk specifically about the UK scene, but rather because the recent discussions surrounding the Clarke Award's all-male finalist list offers one of many

Literary Explorations: What the hell is a "strong female character"?

(This is a ramble.  Expect ramble-ness.  Note:  there aren't many comments on this blog (you can fix that if you like), but some of my Google+ followers opened the flood gates here.)

No joke.  We hear about them all the time.  But what do we mean when we say "strong female character"?  I ask this because I've read so many different definitions, and none of them seem to offer a valid justification for inventing a special category to describe characters.  When you think about it, we almost never say "strong male character" -- granted, there are so many male characters anyway, and I suspect I'm right when I attribute "strong female character" (SFC) to a community response against the relative shortage of, well, SFCs.  Implicitly, this is a binary.  There are "weak female characters" (WFC) too, but their weakness derives from their portrayal -- a frequently sexist one -- rather than any assessment of their "strength" (broadly defined).  Identifying a WFC means exposing the ways in which writers fall prey to gender stereotypes in a way that doesn't challenge those stereotypes (or, in other words, at least exploring what it means to be a woman in a more powerless position)(I'm not convinced this is actually a good definition, though).

Personally, I find the term SFC slightly offensive -- and I'm not the only one.  In 2009, Anna at Genre Reviews opened her critique with the following:

Literary Explorations: When to Re-read?

Today, I had a strange moment of contemplation:  since I don't re-read books all that often, I wondered about the criteria for re-reading and what re-reading does to our perception of the work.  Do we re-read books we simply love, or are there certain elements that compel re-reading?  And what happens to a book when we re-read it (or to ourselves, for that matter)?

But as I thought about this subject, it occurred to me that re-reading is a personal affair.  After all, my reasons for re-reading a book may not coincide with yours, in part because we're not the same person, but also because there are probably thousands of reasons why people re-read (and no two reasons are necessarily the same).  For example, most of my re-reading falls into the following categories:

Literary Explorations: Jack London's The Iron Heel and the Political Dystopia

In a recent discussion on The Skiffy and Fanty Show (it's here), Andrew Liptak, James Decker, Paul Weimer, and I discussed the prevalence of dystopian narratives in science fiction.  At one point, Andrew suggested that dystopias are, in large part, responses to the political climate of the author's present.  I agree with this assessment in principle, but I think the idea collapses when applied to works of the popular dystopia tradition -- the "dystopia is hip" crowd, if you will.  The Iron Heel, however, is the most obvious example of a literary response to a particular political climate -- in this case, the U.S. boom-and-bust economy at the turn-of-the-century.*

Told through the memoirs of Avis Everhard, The Iron Heel employs a number of literary devices to explore its political climate.  First, London frames Avis' narrative with Anthony Meredith, a