What challenges do you have launching a big space opera after being known for a big space opera?
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Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente Space Opera was one of our picks for the books we were most looking forward to this year.
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A good chunk of the Marvel movies are basically space opera.
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Halo 2 was the quintessential space opera moment of the saga.
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It's a personal epic as well as a space-opera epic.
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His next is a space opera in his Sibyl's War series.
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You won't find any superhero costumes or exotic space opera designs.
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It's a fascinating space opera we're living in these days, no?
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But Catherynne M. Valente accomplished that and more with her novel Space Opera.
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It's space opera, in other words, but more General Hospital than Madame Butterfly.
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They're a fantastic start to a new space opera series that I really enjoyed.
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Left to my own devices, I'd read only space-opera novels or military histories.
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You literally couldn't write that dialogue unless you were scripting a 1970s space opera.
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Today's Terraform is something a little different—today, we're doing space opera, our way.
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The series therefore broke cleanly with the space opera roots of giant robot fiction.
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Director James Gray's lush new space opera Ad Astra is essentially two parallel films.
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It may be as good a corporate space opera prequel as could possibly be.
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Arkwright is world-famous for writing space opera bestsellers and movies called Galaxy Patrol.
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A "big gory political space opera" wasn't something flying off the shelves at the time.
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He's almost drawing a sleek space opera of sorts, since Wakanda's technology is so advanced.
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He's almost drawing a sleek space opera of sorts, since Wakandan technology is so advanced.
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Dark Matter: The last series that pulled me in hard enough to demand the binge approach was Dark Matter, a Canadian science fiction series that hits the sweet spot between the space opera swagger of Firefly and the dramatic space opera sprawl of The Expanse.
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That's nothing new for Star Wars, which has always been a space opera about a family.
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This smallness leans into the "wagon train to the stars" conceit of the space opera genre.
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This is a fast-paced space opera with some great characters and an even better world.
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It's typical space opera stuff, and ensures there's always some pressing issue in need of your attention.
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This news is bittersweet: it won't be joined by the network's other space opera show, Dark Matter.
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It's eerily reminiscent of the time that Syfy abruptly canceled his other space opera show, Stargate Universe.
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I adore the Mass Effect series, generally, for its heart, grand space opera trappings, and lovable characters.
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He's all those writers rolled into one figure, a personification of all the creators of space opera.
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You would be hard-pressed to find a space opera classic beyond C.J. Cherryh's fantastic Downbelow Station.
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There's also lesser-known fare, like Anne McCaffrey's Dinosaur Planet series, and the space opera Captain Raptor.
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It's pure joy for thousands of fans of both running and the famous myth-steeped space opera.
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Then again, how could anyone have predicted the earth-shattering aftermath of George Lucas' sumptuous space opera?
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This is space-opera adventure and sweeping romance in equal parts, an enthralling and eminently satisfying book.
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And Empress, which was released this year, is a hopeful space opera that's not unlike Star Wars.
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But along came "Star S'mores," a Sesame space opera, which set Cookie as "roguishly handsome" Flan Solo.
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Larger publishers have tended to shun the genre, especially when it comes to particular subgenres like space opera.
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It's a wonderfully exuberant space opera, and it's something of an experiment: it's only available as an audiobook.
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So it's obviously rooted in that larger space opera, and the trailer establishes that in some superficial ways.
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And now Millar has partnered with artist Stuart Immonen to create a zippy, winsome space opera called Empress.
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For generations, millions of Star Wars fans have thought they were watching a good ol' fashioned space opera.
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The 2014 space opera miniseries Ascension was a costly dud, and a variety of Syfy's other programs struggled.
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The Walt Disney Company is killing it thanks to a little space opera franchise that maybe you've heard of.
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For all of its polish and cleverness and suspense, "For All Mankind" ultimately puts the soap in space opera.
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The contrast between the space opera setting and the desert setting makes 2049 into a physical and metaphysical odyssey.
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George Lucas' space opera is a cornerstone of the modern film industry and a cultural phenomenon around the globe.
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These are your Blackhats, your Jupiter Ascendings — the Wachowski sisters' space opera being a perfect exemplar of this phenomenon.
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Borderlands launched in 2009, and it's known for its mashup of post-apocalyptic tropes, space opera, and dark humor.
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The 2012 epic space opera, written by Brian K. Vaughan and drawn by Fiona Staples, has become a cultural fixture.
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It's pure space-opera rock that deserves a place in the nerd cannon right alongside Queen's soundtrack for Flash Gordon.
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At times the space opera sequel gets a little too big and a little too complicated for its own good.
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Lee's take on space opera and military science fiction was intriguingly different, and this new book looks just as exciting.
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Maureen Ryan, Variety: The first three hours of "Star Trek: Discovery" provide serviceable space opera and reasonably exciting interstellar battles.
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Destiny is an accessible space opera with the moral stakes of a fairytale, making it a thrilling escape from reality.
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I wouldn't be writing optimistic space opera if I hadn't been brought up with my head full of said same.
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But the light-hearted space opera cemented Marvel's reputation as a hit-maker, eventually earning $773 million at the box office.
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Mass Effect: Andromeda, like its three predecessors in the sci-fi roleplaying game franchise, loves two things: space opera, and errands.
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The way the Nobel Committee tells it, the story of this year's physics prize begins like a certain 1970s space opera.
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He says his first book out of the gate is a space opera because his audience is familiar with that genre.
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And Disney, now owners of Lucasfilm, has big plans for the beloved space opera franchise in the world's most populous country.
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He was 7 when the movie came out and just the right age to be swept up in the space opera.
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If you thought even space opera scenery would get humdrum after seeing it all day, every day for months, think again.
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After two decades of anxious anticipation, fans of the space opera were rewarded by Lucas' grand vision for his greatest villain's roots.
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Rumors, and theories about the next generation of star warriors abound, as does speculation about future installments in everyone's favorite space opera.
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That brings the space opera sequel's stateside haul to $812 million, making it the first film to ever cross $800 million domestically.
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Maybe it's a personal thing, but this has always felt a little unsatisfying to me, as far as space opera fantasies go.
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Earlier this year, she published Martians Abroad, a YA space opera, and with Bannerless, she's looking into what happens after society collapses.
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This series has been a solid space opera in the vein of some of the genre's classics, such as Clarke and Heinlein.
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In Space Opera, humanity is living blissfully unaware of alien life, until extraterrestrials appear and invite them into an advanced intergalactic civilization.
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Like Lucas' blockbuster, Zulawski's film was a space opera that was both technically and thematically unprecedented, but that's where the similarities end.
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The fantasy story of a female-led insurgency against a domineering Empire seemed like space opera escapism only a few days ago.
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On Saturday, the space opera became only the third film in history along with "Avatar" and "Titanic" to cross $2 billion globally.
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They remain the masters, ostensibly, of this interactive space opera; but are far removed from the movers that matter most within it.
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The eighth episode of Syfy's space opera The Expanse features one of the most thrilling moments I've seen on TV this year.
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This book is full of stories that's all about space opera adventures along the lines of Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars.
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It's plagiarized from Wikipedia: Star Wars is an American epic space opera media franchise, centered on a film series created by George Lucas.
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It's a visually stunning space opera that brings the classic French graphic novel Valérian and Laureline to life with Besson's usual stylistic flair.
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It's a huge space opera that follows the adventures of two salvage workers and their AI as they discover a fantastical alien ship.
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The space opera slid to third place with $25.1 million for the three days and roughly $30 million for the four-day period.
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At the same time, the network canceled its other space opera show, Dark Matter, which just wrapped up its third season last week.
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Other authors, like Mike Brooks in his Keiko trilogy and R.E. Stearns in her space opera Barbary Station, similarly depict non-binary characters.
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"Might," directed by Emil Sallinen, is a space opera in 9 minutes, full of sweeping CGI landscapes supported by mysterious and intriguing characters.
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Outside of George Lucas's iconic space opera, he boasts about 300 credits, most famously the spine-chilling Joker in Batman: The Animated Series.
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This unlikely fusion of fluids and performers, of light and shadow, coalesce into a surreal dark science fiction space opera of Wagnerian scale.
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If David Bowie's 10-minute video for "★" was an epic space opera, his new video for "Lazarus" is a tumultous bottle episode.
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The space opera slid to third place with $2411 million for the three days and roughly $28.8 million for the four-day period.
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And then there's Poul Anderson who, even in what might be considered his more "traditional" version of space opera, wrote continually surprising books.
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Scalzi is best known for his Old Man's War series, and a new space opera novel from him is a very welcome thing indeed.
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Valerian conjures a universe no less dazzling than that of James Cameron's colossally successful space opera, but it pushes its creative limits even further.
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It's part of the game's weird, slightly silly sci-fi milieu, along with things like the pulpy space opera novels scattered around crew quarters.
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For years, the Syfy Channel was home to a range of space-opera TV serials like Andromeda, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Stargate SG-1.
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This show, like Killjoys, fits in everything that makes a space-opera series fun: lots of action, fantastic worlds, interpersonal drama, and interstellar drama.
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A while ago, I called The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet one of the most delightful space opera novels I'd ever read.
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Readers willing to invest in a steep learning curve will be rewarded with a tight-woven, complicated but not convoluted, breathtakingly original space opera.
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Kirkus Reviews says that the book is a "meticulously plotted, edge-of-your-seat space opera with a soul; a highly promising science-fiction debut."
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Back in 2015, she announced that she would be returning for a new novel set in the world, as well as an unrelated space opera.
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That is, most science fiction franchises either go the "post-apocalyptic Dieselpunk desert road warrior gang" route or the "high-tech space opera dystopia" route.
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Old Man's War and its sequels are his take on military science fiction, while last year's Collapsing Empire was a new foray into space opera.
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"The thing is, space opera is just dramatic adventure set in space, and I don't think people will ever get tired of adventure," he said.
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Gene Roddenberry's beloved space opera, like any long-running franchise, has its ups and downs, but once you're a Trekkie, you're a Trekkie for yIn.
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Throughout space opera, music and sound have served as consistent creative outlets that breathe life into the Star Wars universe and fill it with authenticity.
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Unlike much space opera, this story centers on Chinese and Vietnamese customs instead of Western military conventions, and is all the more welcome for it.
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This space opera had a casting coup — Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence as the beautiful couple Jim and Aurora — but fell flat, critically and commercially.
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But where Twilight Zone raised thorny issues, Trek became part of the national conversation about racism and the Vietnam War, all while reinventing the space opera.
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I'm a big fan of Star Wars, and my love for that series and world helped me find the courage to write my own space opera.
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Dark Matter and Killjoys promised a return to traditional space opera: a drama following a small cast of characters as they travel from world to world.
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Guardians of the Galaxy was proof that Marvel could make a crowd-pleasing blockbuster out of lesser-known comic book characters and the space opera genre.
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And while I love the three's previous work (particularly their magnum opus space opera Wolf 359), Zero Hours is my favorite thing they've done to date.
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The start to a new space opera follows ambassador Mahit Dzmare as she's summoned to the Teixcalaanli Empire after the death of her home's previous ambassador.
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The coffee table book begins its coverage in 1973 with a feature about George Lucas, which revealed that he was working on a space opera film.
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" Abraham says that "It's big spectacle far future space opera, while never losing our focus on the complexity of human nature in these strange new settings.
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The sequel, however, looks to broaden the scope of the series dramatically — from a third-person action-adventure game to a massive, galaxy-trotting space opera.
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Notable episodes that stand out for me are the Islamic connections in Frank Herbert's space opera novel Dune, and how science fiction authors imagined the internet.
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Forsaken Skies by D. Nolan Clark This new space opera novel has been described as Star Wars meets The Seven Samurai, set far in the future.
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Disney unveiled a poster for its upcoming "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" movie, which will be the final film in the latest space opera trilogy.
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Still, the novel stands well as a sort of thematic coda to the Radch trilogy, and should please those who like tea with their space opera.
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His writing combines space opera with neo-slave narrative, memoir, sword-and-sorcery fantasy and an elegy for the sexual freedoms of pre-Giuliani Times Square.
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His writing combines space opera with neo-slave narrative, memoir, sword-and-sorcery fantasy and an elegy for the sexual freedoms of pre-Giuliani Times Square.
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But that's less a problem inherent to Rey, and more a symptom of director J.J. Abrams' whiz-bang storytelling, and the space opera genre he's channeling here.
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Convergence by C.J. Cherryh C.J. Cherryh has been plugging away at her space opera Foreigner series for nearly two decades now, and the next installment is Convergence.
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It's a combination of blockbuster space opera without the soulless glossiness, retro-futurism without the kitsch, and a gritty used future that still feels vibrant and fantastical.
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The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi John Scalzi's new space-opera novel isn't connected to his Old Man's War universe — it's set in a fantastic new world.
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Space opera (defined by the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as "colorful action-adventure stories of interplanetary or interstellar conflict") is experiencing a bit of a boom lately.
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But Catherynne M. Valente's new novel Space Opera might give it a run for its money, because it's one of the funniest books that I've ever read.
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In The Cold Between, Elizabeth Bonesteel creates a compelling space opera that brings together a deep-seated conspiracy within the interstellar Central Gov and a murder mystery.
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The Culture series falls into the space opera genre and features many standbys of the form such as giant spaceships, planet-smashing weapons, and galaxy-spanning adventures.
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Inaugurating a new trilogy, this space opera tried to recapture the pop energy of the original three films, while finding more room for women and nonwhite characters.
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Last month, when the Syfy Channel cancelled its pulpy space-opera show, Dark Matter, the show's creator, Joseph Mallozzi, immediately began working on a way to save it.
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The next "Star Wars" movie, the eighth installment in the sprawling, decades-long space opera started by George Lucas back in the 1970s, doesn't have a name yet.
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Long before sci-fi allegories like Battlestar Galactica, the show was combining 1930s pulp space opera with the rising tide of social criticism in 1960s sci-fi novels.
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Kloos' next book isn't a continuation of the series that defined his career, but is instead the start of a new space opera trilogy called The Palladium Wars.
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Andrew Liptak, weekend editor: I recently re-read Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem series, a space opera about humanity's first contact with aliens, and how it goes badly.
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At Ubisoft's E22 22 showcase on Monday, the publisher announced a fun celebrity partnership for the next installment of its beloved space opera game, Beyond Good & Evil 250.
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Now, The Hollywood Reporter reports that Amazon has acquired the rights to another huge book: Consider Phlebas, the first installment of Iain M. Banks's space opera Culture series.
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Carter saw an opportunity for a new sort of war game while watching the opening scenes of George Lucas' classic space opera in a theater in Las Vegas.
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At the same time Lucas was being showered with accolades for his "weirdo" space opera, another cinematic revolution was underway on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
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The epic space opera follows the maneuverings of different powerful families as they struggle to control the planet Arrakis and the essential "spice" resource that only exists there.
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After releasing a stunning Le Creuset collection, "Star Wars" is back in the kitchen with a line of pressure cookers modeled after characters from the iconic space opera.
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Walt Disney Productions had a humble goal for this (then) big-budget production: Two years after "Star Wars," the company wanted a blockbuster space opera of its own.
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At times the space opera sequel gets a little too big, and some moments feel like Marvel is trying too hard to recreate the magic of the first film.
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This year, he's shifting gears, setting aside Frontlines to start a brand new series called The Palladium Wars, a space opera set in the aftermath of a devastating war.
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"Space opera" is the catch-all term for the type of science fiction novels set in big galactic empires or following starships as they work their way across space.
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It's almost impossible to imagine that Apple overlooked the resemblance between this view of the HomePod and the murderous AI from Stanley Kubrick's space opera, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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Please. Fun had hibernated, but it never went away, and with the coming of "Star Wars" in 1977, the space opera — once again a western in space — came back.
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Fortunately, this space opera is so legendary it's still able to attract some of Hollywood's most talented players to keep telling stories, and Rogue One is a prime example.
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Here are 11 great space adventures that we recommend if you need a quick escape: Elizabeth Bonesteel's debut novel is a fun mashup of space opera and mystery tale.
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But we can't say we were shocked that songifying the final debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump revealed a terrifying space opera about bad hombres and nasty women.
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Otherworldly Ann Leckie's latest space romp, PROVENANCE (Orbit, $26), isn't really a space opera in the same way as the award-winning Imperial Radch trilogy that made her famous.
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Listen: A fictitious Kevin Bacon (played by the real one), an improvised space opera and a Midwestern gothic horror story are among the highlights of our new podcast recommendations.
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Each timeline pushes Jane to make a different umbrella — one that represents Aunt Magnolia's eyes in the spy thriller, and a deceptively simple plain black umbrella in the space opera.
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But that's still not fast enough for some players of BioWare's latest space opera, who have complained that the animation that takes your ship between Andromeda's worlds is interminably slow.
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In the Company of Others This isn't exactly the happiest of books, but Kameron Hurley's standalone space opera is a bold, engrossing read that made our 2017 best novels list.
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Oh, and I just started Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente, (which Andrew recently reviewed), and it looks like the sci-fi, Hitchhiker's Guide-esque Eurotrip novel of my dreams.
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The book is a conspicuous tip-of-the-hat to George Lucas' space opera franchise, and it'll appeal to fans of Ernie Cline's easter egg-laden novel Ready Player One.
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Gunpowder and Sky The indie science fiction film Prospect, directed by Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell, shows that you don't need $100 million to make a first-rate space opera.
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Banks felt strongly that the colonial empires of traditional space opera were outdated, and that advanced technologies such as FTL drives and superhuman AIs would create entirely new social structures.
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Space opera is typically best left to the page and screen, but the Berlin-based electronic duo OY throw caution to the wind with their new concept album, Space Diaspora.
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Now the universe George Lucas created could spin out in new and interesting ways that wouldn't have to hew to the space opera conventions of the main Star Wars series.
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"Battlestar Galactica," after 9/11, turned a breezy 1970s space opera into an ambitious story about politics, religion and the ethics of survival in the face of an existential threat.
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There's no shortage of space opera novels being published now, but these two anthologies are fantastic playlists curated by two of the genre's leading editors, Neil Clarke and John Joseph Adams.
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And I've just picked up Leviathan Wakes, the first book in James S.A. Corey's epic space opera series The Expanse, which is already a successful TV show on the SyFy network.
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Space Opera Timothy Zahn is best known for his Star Wars novels — he's got a new one coming out next summer — but he's released a number of original novels as well.
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Welsh has risen to that challenge by abandoning the serialized monster-of-the-week structure of DC's other live-action TV shows, in favor of turning Krypton into a space opera.
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Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone Max Gladstone is best known for his fantastic Craft Sequence urban fantasy series, and with Empress of Forever, he turns his attention to space opera.
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Jonah and the bots' constant callouts to this film's status as a blatant Star Wars rip-off are almost a detraction from how kooky this space opera is on its own.
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Genre TV is relying on increasingly gender-balanced, multicultural casts to populate its far-flung worlds There's something's visibly missing in the first season of Syfy's space-opera series The Expanse.
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The space opera gets an incredibly colorful and hallucinatory accompaniment with 3D artist Moritz Reichartz's video for the title track, which shows the first stage of this interstellar journey in action.
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Cult favorites, rom-com classics, teen movie standards, trendsetting horror, wildly successful sci-fi, transgressive melodrama, and the most anticipated (and possibly the most reviled) space opera prequel of all time.
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It's a very utilitarian space opera novel, one that's fun to sink into, but it isn't quite as serious as books like Ann Leckie's Ancillary novels or Iain M. Banks' Culture series.
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Syfy released its trailer for the new season of Dark Matter last month, and now, it has released a trailer for the third season of its other pulpy space opera show, Killjoys.
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There's always a certain amount of badass appeal in space opera derring-do, but we're particularly impressed with the leads in Jupiter Ascending for just rolling with this weird, weird, weird movie.
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Dark Sky by Mike Brooks — July 11th Mike Brooks introduced us to the crew of the Keiko in his debut space opera Dark Run, and they're back in his sequel, Dark Sky.
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The show joins the ranks of other series that Syfy has cut: the network cancelled Dark Matter last year, while it ordered two final seasons for its other space opera show, Killjoys.
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So we owe a huge debt to Steven Universe for showing that you can have a cast of majority women, a bigger mythology, a space-opera epic feel, and explicit LGBT themes.
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The trailer showcases a slick-looking space opera from Syfy — which recently canceled The Expanse and Dark Matter — and it reminds us more than a little of another science fiction classic, Alien.
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I don't think I've ever read a book like Kameron Hurley's The Stars are Legion — a bold, unapologetic space opera set on a series of dying world-ships populated entirely by women.
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"Alec Guinness introduced the role of Ben "Obi-Wan" Kenobi in 1977 in "Star Wars," the original installment in George Lucas' space opera, which was later renamed "Star Wars: A New Hope.
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Event Horizon is sorta the opposite, starting as a space opera on a grand scale, and then making a left turn into horror movie territory, with demons, torture, and glimpses of hell.
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It's a space opera set in a future where Mars has been colonized into a militant, technologically powerful state, and the asteroids have been converted into a working class series of ports.
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For example, Rice's (now removed) article about the George Lucas death hoax included this passage: Star Wars is an American epic space opera media franchise, centered on a film series created by Lucas.
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Director Luc Besson on designing his wild space opera Valerian, and why he's tired of superhero movies Besson's exuberant, overflowing imagination is the decisive factor that separates Valerian from its automated digital brethren.
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Some of it was, but it was all undeniably fun, often scary, and usually engaging, and space opera — even if it was just westerns transferred to space — was the most fun of all.
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Gorbut is the brains behind Cosmobandits, a space opera/Thelma and Louise combination; Vicious Circle, an occult horror comic; and Maha, a comic about a dysfunctional relationship in which a dinosaur suddenly appears.
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Where Altered Carbon was a neo-noir cyberpunk story that focused on the consequences of wealth inequality, Broken Angels is a very different book that moves toward military science fiction and space opera.
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When Banks started writing Culture in the early '70s, space opera was widely derided as tired and juvenile, which made it the perfect Trojan horse for Banks' brand of radical left-wing politics.
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Add to that a cameo by Daft Punk, who are even nerdier than Tesfaye for having made the incredible anime space opera musical Interstella 5555, and the weeb is strong with this video.
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In Knives Out, writer-director Rian Johnson follows up Star Wars: The Last Jedi with a film that returns to his pre-space opera groove: reviving classic genre cinema with clever modern twists.
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While its sequel has moved more in the direction of space opera, the original had a foot firmly planted in retro-futurist space exploration aesthetics and the broad optimism that comes with them.
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Killing Gravity by Corey J. White In his debut space opera novella, Corey J. White tells the story of Mariam Xi, who was trained to become a voidwitch, giving her a host of abilities.
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Director Luc Besson on designing his wild space opera Valerian, and why he's tired of superhero movies Tasha: Honestly, given the vanishing American mall problem, we could just turn existing malls into virtual malls.
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As we noted back in February, Dune is a solid opportunity for a huge space-opera universe, because a ton of ancillary works have been published, spanning centuries around Frank Herbert's original 1965 novel.
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Now, he's trying his hand at space opera, following inventor Vivian Liao who is catapulted into the distant future, where the world is ruled under the iron fist of an ancient and powerful Empress.
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The fantasy space opera was a pinnacle of technical innovation in American cinema that would go on to win ten academy awards and quickly become the highest grossing film ever up to that point.
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Books are an amazing portal to leave everything behind for a few (let's face it, more than a few) hours at a time, and a space opera will get you off this planet altogether.
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The last chapter of the space opera, 2015's "The Force Awakens," shot scenes in the sand dunes of Abu Dhabi and grossed over $6 million in the Emirates according to Box Office Mojo.
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Each timeline becomes a new genre, either space opera or gothic horror or spy thriller or something else entirely; each timeline is utterly bewildering and unfamiliar, because each of them lacks Jane's beloved guardian.
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Ancillary Sword (2014) and Ancillary Mercy (2015) duly followed Ancillary Justice, completing Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy and carving Leckie's category-defining concepts into the pages of the Space Opera genre for aeons to come.
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The phrase "under-the-radar question mark" was designed to talk about this space opera, which is the most expensive film in European history and the latest from Fifth Element and Lucy director Luc Besson.
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Solomon is part of the writing team for Serial Box's upcoming space opera series The Vela (coming out in March) and their next novel is an adaptation of "The Deep," an Afrofuturist song by Clipping.
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That setup is the start to a stunning story that impressively blends together Martine's fantastic and immersive world, a combination political thriller, cyberpunk yarn, and epic space opera that together make up a gripping read.
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And I'm sure it's going to be the best space-opera you'll be able to see in theaters until Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and Star Wars: The Last Jedi roll around.
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These included early versions of books like the aforementioned Fahrenheit 451 and The Demolished Man, but also Alfred Bester's space opera The Stars My Destination and Isaac Asimov's robot mystery novel The Caves of Steel.
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The show takes place about five years after the events of "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi," and uses the tone of classic Western tales to bring a new take on the space opera universe.
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For all its faults, Phantom is admirably not the Star Wars of old, Lucas turning his throwaway space western into a space opera that's self-serious, fun, dull, exhilarating, embarrassing, and heartfelt all at once.
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The sequel arrives in theaters on May 5, three years after Guardians of the Galaxy — a lighthearted space opera with a great ensemble full of strange characters — became one of Marvel Studios' biggest surprise successes.
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" To him, the first "Guardians" presented a chance to reinvigorate the drab, dreary space-opera genre with the buoyancy of favorite films like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the gaudy colors of "Flash Gordon.
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Take, for example, Samuel R. Delany's influential space opera, Nova (presented here in a newly corrected, author-approved text), which takes the concept of the "cybernetic" fusion of human and machine and runs with it.
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RS: As always, in almost any space opera, life and death, but more specifically, the fate of a doomed solar system and the people without access to the resources and social status to procure an out.
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Ant-Man is a heist movie, Captain America: Winter Soldier is a '70s-style political thriller, Guardians of the Galaxy is an '80s space opera, Jessica Jones is feminist neo-noir, so on and so forth.
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A decade and three follow-ups later, it's still one of the most beloved series in the world of gaming, and arguably the most successful original space opera of the past 10 years in any form.
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For one, science fiction comedy is hard to do, and while there are certainly funny books and films out there (Galaxy Quest, John Scalzi's Redshirts, Catherynne Valente's Space Opera), the 2005 film largely underwhelmed critics and fans.
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In John Scalzi's space opera novel The Collapsing Empire, he introduced a world where a vast, planetary empire grew throughout the galaxy by way of the Flow, a faster-than-light network that allows for interstellar trade.
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I enjoyed every minute I spent reading Space Opera — first for the story of Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros and their performance to save Earth, and then for the fantastic worlds that Valente put to paper.
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The agent, who represents a number of Coachella headliner-level artists, asked whether I'd be interested in profiling one of his clients, The Armed, as they prepared their third album, the pop-hardcore space-opera ONLY LOVE.
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"The song is the beginning of this space opera and tells the story of the departure and transformation of planet Earth in and onto Space Diaspora," the duo Joy Frempong and Lleluja-Ha tell The Creators Project.
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My train journey to London was to be no space opera (or so I hoped) like "Star Wars," but I hoped there would be that same sense of possibility, that same sense of wonder, as the films.
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Alongside the mock up spaceship deck and sleeping chamber, there are film costumes on view, like Jane Fonda's Barbarella costume from 1968 and a millennium falcon costume from the 1977 space opera, Star Wars: A New Hope.
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Cosplay fanatics — the kind who turn dressing as movie and book characters into performance art — design, construct and then model their creations in this new "Project Runway"-like competition series, which begins with a "space opera" challenge.
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"Black Panther" did top the "The Force Awakens" in one respect: the superhero film edged out the blockbuster space opera — $40.67 million versus $40.11 million — for the the best Monday ticket sales of all time, Disney reports.
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The third entry in the science-fiction video game trilogy made by BioWare between 2007 and 2012—there is a fourth game on its way—marries the aesthetics of space opera to the cinematic beats of action films.
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He also compiled dozens of anthologies, many with Ms. Cramer, including "The Space Opera Renaissance" (2006) and "Spirits of Christmas: Twenty Other-Worldly Tales" (1989), and he wrote "Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction" (1984).
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While the next game in the space opera RPG series, Mass Effect: Andromeda, was originally scheduled to launch some time during the holiday 2016 window, according to EA CFO Blake Jorgensen it won't be coming until next year.
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But just as FTL got to the heart of space opera—the experimental ship, the camaraderie of a ragtag crew, the spiraling of crises—Subset Games has found the core of the mech fantasy with Into the Breach.
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Takei, for example, described Beyond as "a rip-snorting soap opera, I mean space opera," while also acknowledging that he disagreed with the writers' decision to reveal that his character Sulu (now played by Jon Cho) is gay.
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The space opera is set in the interstellar Teixcalaanli Empire, and follows Mahit Dzmare as she's called to the capitol to serve as the ambassador for her home station, Lsel, and replace a predecessor who died under mysterious circumstances.
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Although the book is a traditional space opera, a hallmark of "classic" sci-fi in many respects, it was a flashpoint for conservative SFF community members who felt it was an attempt to shoehorn identity politics into the genre.
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Mixing a surprisingly earnest story with its whackadoo space-opera sensibilities, Guardians felt like a rebooted Star Wars before Star Wars had even rebooted itself, and I couldn't wait to see how the second installment would surprise and delight.
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But in its print form, at least, Foundation is far from your typical space opera, focusing more on debate and political intrigue than action, and taking place over hundreds of years, with often interchangeable characters swapped out between stories.
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The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard Set in the Scattered Pearls Belt, Aliette de Bodard's new space opera adventure follows The Shadow's Child, a sentient transport ship discharged from the military after a traumatic injury.
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Once you're stocked up, though, you do something that not a lot of space opera bothers to depict—you hang out with your crew, on a dusty old couch you brought along from the Milky Way, and watch a movie.
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For example, if I search for Star Wars: A New Hope, sitting in a bubble right above George Lucas' classic space opera is The Hidden Fortress, Akira Kurosawa's samurai adventure that is widely cited as the primary influence on the film.
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What follows is a fantastic, lightning-fast space opera that serves as both a fantastic thriller with a cast of well-drawn characters, and a wonderful sandbox of a world that I can't wait to revisit over and over again.
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These are my favorite books by my favorite author, so I'm more excited about this than any of the other original shows that Apple's planning (even the company's other space opera, which is being developed by Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore).
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So I think the biggest lesson for us from space opera flops is that it's not enough to put together a bunch of cool toys and pretty concept designs—you still have to use them to tell a compelling story.
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" In 1940, Isip illustrated a key scene from "Martian Quest," a space western that marked the debut of Leigh Brackett, the Queen of Space Opera, who achieved even greater fame decades later for her work on "The Empire Strikes Back.
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Adda and Iridian are a pair of engineers who hijack a colony ship to join a pirate crew, only to discover that Barbary Station is controlled by an insane AI. This looks like it could be a really exciting space opera adventure.
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And Lucas, who was struggling to find financing for his projects in the mid-1970s, believed a slam-bang retro space opera with quasi-philosophical undertones was just as cheeky a dare as anything else his peers were putting in the multiplexes.
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And The Spy Who Loved Me is also interesting to note in the context of its time: It came out in 1977, 40 years ago, during a summer that also boasted the first installment of a little space opera called Star Wars.
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The formula for Marvel Comics evolved helter-skelter as Lee and Kirby poured out many monthly titles: flawed heroes, stories that mixed folklore with space opera, open-ended plots, and allegorical allusions to contemporary politics (frequently touching on the evil of discrimination).
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In Mass Effect, developer Bioware's space opera RPG, the players and their cast of friends faced annihilation at the hands of The Reapers—an ancient machine race that rises once every few millennia to wipe out all organic matter and reset the universe.
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During the filming, which was frenetic but completed on time and under budget, Mr. Kurtz and Mr. Lucas talked about oneday making a very different kind of movie: a space opera that would break from the trend of post-apocalyptic science fiction movies.
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"One of the things I've always wanted to see from the Star Wars universe is them tackling other genres, so not just space opera, but Westerns, thrillers, spy stuff, whatever," Khanna says in Episode 395 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
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A veteran of multiple Star Trek series and creator of numerous other shows, including the beloved mid-'00s space opera Battlestar Galactica, Moore is known for paradigm-busting genre television, creating worlds that are meticulously designed and populated by fully realized characters.
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The Last Jedi didn't inspire any powerful emotions in the Star Wars fanboy in me, one way or the other—I thought it was a fun, tonally on-point, and satisfyingly produced chapter in the space opera that constitutes our greatest shared commercial mythology.
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Kelly sets up an intriguing, durable space opera world for the story, one that feels a bit like James S.A. Corey's Expanse series or a classic Robert Heinlein juvenile novel, with a bit of Andy Weir's The Martian (and his upcoming novel Artemis) thrown in.
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While they aren't full audiobooks, Audible has produced some intriguing original projects; James Patrick Kelly's Mother Go was a fun science fiction adventure, and I'm currently listening to Dennis E. Taylor's space opera The Singularity Trap, which is a fun throwback to classic sci-fi.
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That these films are so different in tone speak to how many things the franchise has become since Alien's release nearly 40 years ago: an action series, an epic space opera, a deep study in dystopian science fiction, and a staunchly feminist pro-choice narrative.
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After working on the ultimately aborted Dune adaptation, for which he produced over 3,000 visionary drawings, Moebius launched the French science fiction and horror comics anthology Métal hurlant (Heavy Metal), and collaborated with Jodorowsky on the highly influential proto-cyberpunk space opera comic The Incal.
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If they do, it's because of his Star Wars connections: Hamilton was the husband of Leigh Brackett, space opera queen and author of the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back; he also happened to be the first guy to use a "laser sword" anywhere in fiction.
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The first episode, released this week, has an endearingly harried, performed-in-your-bedroom feel that works surprisingly well with the series' space opera setting, in which a hapless space ambassador named Blast Hardcheese Pleck Decksetter attempts to win over the hostile nations in the Zyxx Quadrant.
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I've picked up similar space opera-type novels in recent years that I've largely bounced off of because their characters feel like they're being used by their authors to sit in rooms and talk at one another, playing out political thought experiments while not much happens.
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Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, July 24th If I had to pick my favorite space opera published in the last couple of years, it would be Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, or its followup, A Closed and Common Orbit.
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Syfy's fantasy show The Magicians was given a fourth season order earlier this year, and it will have another big space opera show coming: Nightflyers, based off of a novella by George R.R. Martin, is currently in production and is expected to hit sometime this fall.
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"The Force Awakens" may have been a barnstorming space opera, but it was also a shameless retread of the 1977 "Star Wars"—yes, it even ended with the rebels blowing up another bloody Death Star—and this lack of novelty undermined the validity of the whole enterprise.
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The studio and writer-director J.J. Abrams announced Friday that footage of Fisher shot for 2015&aposs "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" will be used in the ninth film in the space opera&aposs core trilogies about the Skywalker family that includes Fisher&aposs character, Leia.
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Icelandic developer CCP's long-running space-opera MMO, in which players zip about a massive galaxy in spaceships, trading and building and fighting and destroying, has been turned into a warzone on numerous occasions—and these eruptions of violence bear stark resemblance to actual historical conflicts.
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While the worldbuilding shows off a surprisingly well-thought-out take on the space opera genre that belies its deployment of some well-worn tropes, the main plot itself is convoluted and jagged, with too few reasons to get invested in the events of the story.
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"It's the multiplicity of creators that give it that organic quality," Markus says, pointing to the diverging tones of the various franchises, from the far-out space opera of Guardians of the Galaxy to the comic clashes of the old and new worlds in the Thor films.
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It's also why you get effusive praise for some genuinely good properties, like calling Guardians of the Galaxy a redefining "space opera" or Captain America: The Winter Soldier a "political thriller" when you could easily argue that they're slight just deviations from the Marvel movie-making formula.
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Not content with landing an Amazing Stories reboot from Steven Spielberg, multiple series from Reese Witherspoon, a space opera from Ron Moore and much more for its upcoming original TV initiative (which might launch next March), Apple is also developing a series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation books.
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Most of all, both editors noted in their introductions that one of the primary goals of their respective books was to channel a sense of nostalgia for the authors like Isaac Asimov, E.E. "Doc" Smith, or Frank Herbert, who helped make space opera a thing back in the day.
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When you study the history of the SF genre, one subtle thing that stands out is that, although space opera has always been central to the field, there's no one single author who was responsible for space-op and therefore became an outstanding figure like the Big Three were.
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No word on any sort of follow-up promotion for Rogue One (though the Moto Z would lend itself well to a little space opera cosplay), but SoftBank customers in Japan will be able to get their hands on a pair of pretty solid tie-ins early next month.
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We've reached the point where it's considered daring innovation to simply incorporate a mildly different tone (Ant-Man) or a sarcastic, space-opera vibe (Guardians of the Galaxy), but given the amount of cultural momentum that Marvel's world has, that's largely been enough to keep audiences coming back.
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This first weekend features a fantastical space opera by Jeepneys, White Boy Scream, and video artist Miko Revereza; Forest, a kinetic musical installation by Rebecca Bruno and Mak Kern; and Emily Mast's The Cage is a Stage, a living sculpture that likens the art gallery to a zoo.
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Part of the appeal of Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War was that they were a space opera set in our local neighborhood, dealing with issues that are relevant to the world we now live in: war, racism, justice, all accompanied by power armored-marines, spaceship battles, and a menacing alien threat.
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While the channel some heavy-hitting shows like The Expanse and The Magicians, Dark Matter is a fun, pulpy space opera that hails back to the days when shows like Farscape and Stargate SG-1 ruled the airwaves, and this latest trailer looks like we have a fun season before us.
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Over the years, author John Scalzi has made a name for himself with his military science fiction Old Man's War series, but when he kicked off a decade-long, multimillion-dollar contract with his publisher, he decided to start with a space opera novel set in a brand-new world.
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Since then, it's added to that slate: a show set in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth (and maybe Peter Jackson's franchise), Iain M. Banks' space opera Consider Phlebas (which is incidentally being adapted by the writer of the original Utopia series, David Kelly), and William Gibson's science fiction novel The Peripheral.
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David Wellington is known for his wide-ranging catalog of stories, such as his Monsters, Vampires, Werewolves, and Plague novels, and branched into space opera a couple of years ago with his The Silence trilogy (Forsaken Skies, Forgotten Worlds, and Forbidden Suns), which he wrote under the name D. Nolan Clark.
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But what really separates this space opera sequel from the rest of Marvel's films is Gunn and his cast's willingness to abandon the Marvel cinematic universe's more polished and formulaic veneer and drill into the heart of what makes this movie and the Guardians franchise so impossibly irresistible: pure fun.
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Though the record at times flirts with space opera-like motifs—"The Tracers" tells of an evolved version of humans who've come to rescue Earthlings, for example— Call the Comet is less a fantasyland or sci-fi backdrop than Marr's own magic realism—the happy place he's created inside his head.
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They recently announced that they're nearing completion on their eighth album, The Other Shore, which, as they describe it, is a Western space opera, which is fitting for a band that's written concept records about the Devil waging war on Mexican villages or the themes of sin in Dante's Inferno.
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Kelly Lawler, USA Today The series is more of an intimate space Western than the grand space opera style of the films, leaning into the dusty streets of the unnamed planets the Mandalorian stalks and images of him bursting through mechanical doors whether or not they want to open for him.
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Coming off of this morning's news that the Syfy channel was not going to renew The Expanse for a fourth season, there is some positive news for fans of the series: Orbit Books has announced that it has signed Expanse author James S.A. Corey for three books of a new space opera series.
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But even after Miller (the detective) discovered the girl and found that she had been killed (or, rather, remade) by a strange alien molecule (dubbed the protomolecule), even after the show had turned into more straightforward space opera, it kept returning to the idea of a central, season-long mystery holding everything together.
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Variety: "Rogue One" is loaded with allusions to other films in the franchise, and though that's fun for the faithful, it also makes this the "Battlefield Earth" of the series: an elaborate, complex-to-the-point-of-confusing space opera that will earn few converts, while appealing primarily to the already-converted.
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The circus of 2017 was a murky collection of hashtag jokes tethered to dopey musical numbers with zero melody and an undercooked space opera subplot, where the ringmaster rides a hunk of fiberglass through a light show in an attempt to rescue the performers, who have been kidnapped by a space witch.
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It made me realize that if you want to use reading or writing to understand who you are, and understand the human condition, you're going to have to put away some of the formulaic genres like space opera and focus on the ultimate question of all great writing, which is, 'Who are we?
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Jeff Kaplan, who oversees all things overwatch at Blizzard, says that when developers began work on the game in 2013, they felt the need to create a world wholly apart from the trio of worlds that the company already offered: the high fantasy of Warcraft, the space opera of Starcraft, the gothic horror of Diablo.
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Episode VIII of Lucasfilm and Disney's enduring space opera is on track to gross an estimated $2220 million in 4,232 theaters in the U.S. and Canada this weekend, marking the second-highest domestic opening of all time (not adjusted for inflation), behind only its predecessor Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which debuted to $248 million in 2015.
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Since it launched, the company has released a number of interesting stories such as Witch Who Came In From The Cold, a Cold War-set espionage thriller about two magical factions; The Vela, a recently released space opera about a mercenary tracking down a refugee ship; and Ninth Step Station, a murder mystery set in a near-future Tokyo.
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Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky One of the best books I read last year was Adrian Tchaikovsky's 2015 novel Children of Time, a brilliant space opera about the rise of a sentient race of spiders on a distant, terraformed world, and humanity's descent into feudalism as it escapes from a broken Earth, meeting up in a spectacular clash.
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Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear In her latest, Elizabeth Bear returns to space opera with a story (the first of a series) set in the distant future, following a pair of salvage workers, Halmey Dz and Connla Kurucz, and their AI, Singer, who endure a meager existence, hoping to strike it rich with a big haul.
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In the months since, the studio has greenlit or otherwise developed ambitious adaptations of a slew of well-known science fiction and fantasy novels: J.R.R. Tolkien's world of Middle-earth (which may align with the version adapted by Peter Jackson), Iain M. Banks' space opera Culture series, William Gibson's The Peripheral, and the conspiracy thriller Utopia.
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The Wachowski siblings said they wanted to put together a bunch of genres — a sci-fi film mixed with a thriller, an "action epic," and a "love story" — but in doing so, it was a very overstuffed space opera with terrifying-looking creatures, a love story between Tatum and Kunis that wasn't believable, and bad dialogue.
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So the network green-lit a full series, and Moore articulated his vision in the show's 49-page bible: We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera, with its stock characters, techno double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics, and empty heroics has run its course and a new approach is required.
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She's released a number of collections in the last couple of years, but one recent one is a reissue of The Unreal and the Real, which contains nearly 40 stories, broken into stories that are set in a realistic world, while others are set in more fantastic locations, like her world of Earthsea, or in her larger expanded Hanish space opera universe.
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Empire is the better film, no doubt, but for me Return of the Jedi is the film that perhaps embodies the spirit of Star Wars the best—a big, bright space opera where good triumphs over evil using laser swords, X-Wings are the most badass ships in the galaxy, and carnivorous teddy bears feed on the flesh of their vanquished enemies.
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Carol's amnesia plot is told through the lens of a space opera, a buddy cop comedy, a coming-of-age flick, and a '90s lesbian romance (she even has a beloved leather jacket) that, just like many movies from the '90s (think Fried Green Tomatoes or A League of Their Own), is full of lesbian subtext but stops short of actually pulling the trigger.
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And it's worth mentioning that if you are a Marvel aficionado, you may have noticed that when their films borrow from different genres, whether that's political thriller (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), space opera (the Guardians of the Galaxy films) or heist (Ant-Man), they usually end up in the same place, namely a finale filled with CGI explosions and punching that will decide the fate of the world and/or universe.
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"I think that Star Trek emerged from a unique convergence of very special talents, and it is very possible that in their absence, nothing of a similar quality would have appeared," says science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl, author of The Mechanics of Wonder, adding that it's easy to imitate the pulp 19703s space-opera of E.E. "Doc" Smith (as George Lucas and others later did), but vastly harder to imitate the more mature space adventures of Robert A. Heinlein (the way Roddenberry did).
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Larson's stories are quite a bit of fun to read, and cover a lot of territory: cyberpunk adventures about an orphaned albino girl who discovers a mech in the midst of a garbage dump in "Ghost Girl," or about a basketball scout who discovers that a prospect, Oxford Diallo, isn't quite what he appears in "Meshed", to space opera like "The Ghost Ship Anastasia," about a starship repair crew that runs into all sorts of problems on one difficult mission.
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The series, published from 1967 to 2010, is considered a cornerstone of French comics, though it's less well-known in the US. (This has shades of the much more popular Tintin, also finally turned into a big-budget movie in the 2010s.) In creating the scenario for the film, Besson was able to simply riff on many of the comics' core ideas, one of which is the difficult intersection of bang-bang, pew-pew space opera fun and larger questions of ethical behavior.
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And here's what I liked reading best: "The Truth Behind the Lie," a marvelous strange Swedish mystery novel by Sara Lovestam; "Stone Cold Heart," Caz Frear's second novel about the London detective constable Cat Kinsella; "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet," a debut space opera by Becky Chambers; "Stronghold," by Tucker Malarkey, about Guido Rahr's amazing quest to save the wild Pacific salmon; "A Prayer for Owen Meany," by John Irving, which maybe you read a long time ago and ought to again; "Six of Crows," by Leigh Bardugo, fantasy fiction that someone ought to make into a film; the novel "Sourdough," by Robin Sloan, which should never be a film because it wouldn't ever be as beautiful as Sloan's words; and the internet memoir "Uncanny Valley," by Anna Wiener, which is funny and dark and sad, and among other things introduced me to an online game about long-haul trucking.
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