"Space Opera", science fiction's equivalent of television soap opera, is a sub-genre of sf that deals with, well, "big stuff in space": think Star Wars and Star Trek. The plots are generally melodramatic in nature and feature conflicts between opponents possessing technologically advanced weaponry.
In the middle parts of the twentieth century the term was used to denigrate specific forms of sf, but this has changed over the past twenty years or so with the publication of such fiction as Iain Banks's Culture series and the broadcast of the politically themed recent television version of Battlestar Galatica.
In the middle parts of the twentieth century the term was used to denigrate specific forms of sf, but this has changed over the past twenty years or so with the publication of such fiction as Iain Banks's Culture series and the broadcast of the politically themed recent television version of Battlestar Galatica.
