Back in the late 1980s, a new kind of space opera appeared in the UK, generally attributed to the publication of Consider Phlebas (1987, UK) by Iain M Banks, his first science fiction novel and the first of his loose series of novels about the Culture. Personally, I’ve always wanted to date New British Space Opera, also known at the time as Radical Hard SF, from Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty (1990, UK), which I think did more interesting, more knowing, things with traditional space opera tropes, but Banks’s influence on UK space opera was plain to see; Take Back Plenty spawned two sequels, but no imitators.
Anyway: New British Space Opera, renamed New Space Opera when US authors began appropriating the style — much as US authors had done with the New Wave back in the 1960s. In 2006, David G Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer published The Space Opera Renaissance, which claimed the New Space Opera was neither British nor, indeed, new. The stories they collected did not prove this claim. The one thing that can’t be denied is that space opera began to be taken seriously as a subgenre of science fiction in the late 1980s. Which is a bit of a shame, as there were much earlier space operas that deserved to be much better known, such as CL Moore’s excellent Judgment Night (1943, USA).
By the start of the twenty-first century, space opera in the US had moved on. UK writers were still churning out warmed-over Banksian space operas, with varying levels of success (and, it has to be said, this did not make their output bad space opera, bad science fiction, or even bad fiction). But in the US, it had darkened in tone, and taken onboard so many tropes from military sf it was often indistinguishable from it. New Space Opera was dead.
During the late 1990s, however, an American midlist SF author had been quietly churning out space opera novels very different in tone to those New Space Opera clones. Her novels were highly political, featured different (invented) human races, and had a torturer as a protagonist. I forget why I bought Susan R Matthews’s first novel, An Exchange of Hostages (1997, USA), but it impressed me enough I purchased every subsequent novel by Matthews — even Warring States (2006) in the Meisha Merlin hardback edition, which was published shortly before Meisha Merlin folded.
I can’t recommend Matthews’s Jurisdiction novels enough. Perhaps some of the sensibilities on display in the earlier novels don’t play so well in 2024, but that’s true of most twentieth-century science fiction, even science fiction from the 1990s.
It seems to me that much US space opera of the last few years seems to owe a lot, either consciously or unconsciously, to Matthews’s series. Such as These Burning Stars (2023, USA) by Bethany Jacobs, who is, according to her biography, a lecturer in science fiction, and so one would assume aware of Susan R Matthews’s Jurisdiction novels.
Some sixteen hundred years previously, a fleet of generation starships settled three planetary systems a handful of light years apart. These are called the Treble. They’re ruled by the Kindom, which comprises three arms, a clergy, an army of assassins, and a secretariat. Esek Nightfoot is a Hand, a senior cleric, and the Nightfoot Family heir. Her family controls the manufacture and trade of sevite, an artificial fuel used to power the jump gates between the three systems.
The novel opens with a prologue set some years before the main narrative. Esek is visiting a cleric school, and a demonstration is laid on for her benefit: six young students fighting each other. One of the students, Six, impresses Esek with their skill. (Students are put in groups of six and numbered, not named; they are also ungendered.) Rather than take on Six as an acolyte, as expected, Esek tells them to do something that will impress her.
They do. They run away and spend the next decade or so stealing from Esek and foiling her plans. So Esek is determined to catch Six. As the main narrative begins, Esek has just recruited Chono, a stolid and much-loved cleric, who was Four in Six’s student group, and later Esek’s acolyte…
The Kindom is a brutal regime, and rebellions and massacres are not uncommon. Central to the plot is the genocide of the Jeveni, miners on the moon of Jeve, several generations before. The surviving Jeveni, who are also an ethno-religious group, now work for the Nightfoots and have been given special status.
The story jumps back and forth in time, detailing Esek’s hunt for Six, and for a missing memory coin which allegedly proves Nightfoot complicity in the Jeveni Genocide. Meanwhile, the Jeveni are gathering on one of the mothballed generation starships for a religious festival commemorating the genocide.
Jacobs has clearly put a lot of work into her world-building. There’s a lot that’s reminiscent of Matthews’s Jurisdiction series, and even the odd hint of Banks’s Culture in places. Each world in the Treble is named for its patron god, and each god’s character has affected the culture of the world. Perhaps the existence of pirates in such a repressive and rigorously-controlled regime is a little hard to swallow, and the technology occasionally seems a little too magical to convince… Not to mention one of the major characters being a Magical Hacker, able to crack any and all computer systems in the Kindom with ease.
Unfortunately, all of the characters are complete sociopaths, if not psychopaths, especially Esek. And that is one element of twenty-first century space opera I find it hard to like. Andrej Kosciusko may have been a state torturer, but he was nonetheless a moral person. The same can’t be said of any major character in These Burning Stars. Including Chono, who is clearly intended to be the sympathetic character. True, Esek is flamboyant and domineering, and kind of fun, in a sort of Maleficent way; but a lot of the cast, particularly those in the higher echelons of the Kindom, are really horrible people, which renders the entire Kindom, the book’s universe, a pretty horrible place. Not the sort of place you really want to explore in a science fiction novel — especially when there’s little or no commentary about it.
The plot, despite its leaps back and forth in time, is chiefly a MacGuffin hunt, and runs on well-oiled, and well-travelled, rails. As the novel progresses, the numerous plot-threads, past and present, begin to converge. At which point, These Burning Stars pulls a couple of surprises, which I must confess were very neat.
I once saw science fiction defined as “ordinary people in extraordinary situations”, and fantasy as “extraordinary people in extraordinary situations”, which as a definition has many problems, not least of which it erases several subgenres of fantasy and a whole raft of popular science fiction heroes… But there’s certainly a trend in recent US space opera for the heroes to be extraordinary even within their own universe, either as a result of privilege (birth or wealth) or innate talent (but never learned skill). These Burning Stars suffers from this, although to a lesser extent than other recent US space operas I’ve read, and, it has to be admitted, its characters are very much products of the setting.
There are, however, two potentially problematic elements to the novel. There’s an obvious real-world analogue to the Jeveni, an ethno-religious group that has suffered an historical genocide. I’m not sure how to respond to this — it works, in the novel; but is it a fit topic for use in a science fiction novel? I think it needs commentary to be treated fairly.
I mentioned earlier that children in the Kindom are ungendered. Note the use of the word “gender”. At a certain age, people in the Kindom choose their gender and wear “gender markers” — one character changes gender during the novel. Pronouns are indicated by these gender markers. But the point of pronouns as they’re used now is that they’ve been decoupled from appearance, from secondary sexual characteristics even, and coupling them to an obvious visible marker feels like it undermines that. Because a pronoun is more than just a word.
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how to respond. I enjoyed These Burning Stars, and thought it better than I’d expected. I’m actually looking forward to the next book in the series. Some might find the issues mentioned above deal-breakers, but I took Jacobs’s treatment as well-intentioned.
I’m not a fan of grimdark, or indeed any genre novels with psychopathic characters, but Jacobs’s world-building is good, I loved the plot twists, and any novel which seems to have Susan R Matthews’s Jurisdiction series as an inspiration can’t be all that bad.
