When Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham started to collaborate, turning Franck's long-running role-playing game into a novel called Leviathan Wakes, their friends warned them they were wasting their timebecause space opera was a dying genre.

Still Franck and Abraham persevered, selling Leviathan Wakes to Orbit Books under the pen name James S.A. Corey. When the book was published, the front cover sported a quote from George R.R. Martin: "It's been too long since we've had a really kickass space opera."

Now, of course, Leviathan Wakes has been followed by eight sequels and a TV show, The Expanse, whose fifth season ends tonight. And the shelves at your local bookstore are crammed with kickass space operas by authors like Valerie Valdes, Becky Chambers, Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, Arkady Martine, Kameron Hurley, Nicky Drayden, Karen Lord, Tim Pratt, John Scalzi, Nnedi Okorafor, and Karen Osborne.

The Expanse - Season 5

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A lot of these new space opera books share some of the same DNA as Corey's Expanse series: they feature underdog characters, who are just trying to get paid, or survive, or get justicethey aren't exactly crisp-uniformed explorers like Captain Kirk, or chosen ones like Luke Skywalker. These books also feature somewhat more realistic physics, with way less hand-wavingfor example, faster-than-light travel is usually impossible without some kind of wormhole. And these books often have a touch of weirdness and body horror, along the lines of The Expanse's alien protomolecule.

Meanwhile, media space opera has given us a new wave of shows about down-on-their-luck adventurers, like Killjoys, Vagrant Queen, etc. etc. Star Trek is back, and a little dirtier and messier than it used to be.

In their introduction to the 2007 anthology The New Space Opera, Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan note that space opera was born during the "full flowering of the British Empire... and the settling of the West." The first great space opera novel, Skylark of Space by E.E. "Doc" Smith, was written in 1915, right as one of the genre's pioneers, Jack Williamson, was traveling west in a horse-drawn wagon. Later, in The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Williamson wrote that space opera was the "expression of the mythic theme of human expansion against an unknown and uncommonly hostile frontier."

The New Space Opera

Space opera has always carried a lot of baggage, thanks to its roots in imperialism, colonialism and the myth of the rugged explorer who brings civilization with him. It didn't help that Smith started introducing themes of eugenics into his Lensmen novels, and notoriously racist editor John W. Campbell inserted his ideas of the "superior man" into many of space opera's formative works.

There was no room for ordinary people in a lot of classic space operajust square-jawed heroes and demigods. And when space opera enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was no longer any room for humans at all: these stories were populated entirely by immortal posthumans, all-knowing artificial intelligences, and badass cyborgs. As science learned more about the difficulties of space travel, we could no longer imagine regular people being able to travel among the stars.

So the rise of space opera about ordinary human beings, who are often just trying to get by, is doubly worth celebrating.

Author Nicky Drayden tells me she wrote Escaping Exodus in part because she dreamed of "seeing myself on a spaceship as something other than a side character." As a young Black nerd in the 1980s, she watched shows like V and Buck Rogers, but never felt like their visions of the future included her. With her novel and its sequel, Escaping Exodus: Symbiosis (out this month), she felt free to "explore race, class, and sexuality within an all Black, queer, matriarchal society that happens to live in the belly of a space-breathing, tentacled beast the size of a small moon."

At its best, this new wave of space opera doesn't just offer alternatives to those old themes of manifest destinybut also offers a critique of them. In the fourth James S.A. Corey novel, Cibola Burn, the thuggish Murtry makes a speech in which he says he and his fellow explorers don't bring civilization with them, they build it. "And while we're building it, a whole lot of people die." This speech is presented, almost verbatim, in the television show, and in both cases, Holden responds by taking Murtry down.

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The Expanse combines its cast of blue-collar characters with plausible physicsand the scientific realism makes the heroes' struggles feel that much more believable. "I feel like there should be a connectionthat realism in issues of labor and class are related to issues of realism in science and technologybut I keep coming up with exceptions," co-author Daniel Abraham tells me. The "working class touchstones" for The Expanse, Alien and Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, both "play fast and loose with their scientific rigor."

Also, don't discount the weirdnessThe Expanse, and a lot of other recent space epics, throw in some truly bizarre alien artifacts alongside their plausible space flight. Drayden says writing about space-travelers living amongst a monster's gut flora allowed her to be "as weird and nerdy as I want."

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We love space opera, in part, for its escapism and funso it's a good thing that alongside the grimy social realism of The Expanse and other recent adventures, we've also seen a flowering of colorful, joyfully unrealistic storytelling. Animated shows like Steven Universe and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power have taken over our eyeballs, alongside young adult adventures like Aurora Rising, Once and Future and Bonds of Brass, not to mention Catherynne M. Valente's gloriously campy Eurovision-in-space novel Space Opera.

This is an amazing time for anyone who loves seat-of-your-spacesuit adventures and star-spanning voyages. And it's just getting started. As Drayden tells me, "I look forward to reading the mind-blowing tales that happen when you open the future up to everyone."

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The Space Opera Was Dying. Then 'The Expanse' Transformed the Genre For a New Generation. - Esquire