My Life As A Writer: This Is What Epic Space Opera Looks Like

If you want to know what truly epic space opera looks like in action, watch this.

Hundreds of thousands of capital ships, involving millions of men per side, spread across a stellar frontier until culminating in a single system dominated by a giant red star. That is the stage; the admirals are the star players, with a few secondary characters getting attention here and there to emphasize specific themes that recur throughout the story, and theirs are the actions that shape the narrative. By word and deed you can see each character demostrate their qualities and make themselves memorable in manners that too many in OldPub and the Hellmouth cannot execute even if they can comprehend it.

You will not find a Western mainstream in film or televsion that gets close to this. Uncle George's Evil Empire had a "grand fleet" of 25,000 Ships of the Lines for an entire galaxy, and neither its predecessors nor its successors were any better. Only classics like E.E. Smith's Lensman series meet or surpass this grand scale and scope, fully embracing what "epic" means and showing the withered wretches of today how poor they are by comparison.

In Japan, you don't have this problem. While no one's reached the fleet sizes of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, you'll still find Space Battleship Yamato showing scope and scale that makes Western alternatives look tame and various Macross series demonstrating that the Pulp spirit lives on across the Pacific- especially its roots in Romanticism. While this video focuses on fleet action, other clips around YouTube show the Romanticism at the heart of the story- that soundtrack wasn't chosen for nothing.

Compare this against what passes for Space Opera in the West, and you see just how badly we've been screwed by the Futurians and their successors when they murdered the Pulps almost a century ago. No wonder it's such a pain in the ass to get eyeballs back on what was once lost, and is now being rebuilt; generations have hardly any idea what "epic" is, or "space opera" other than what Uncle George accidentally created in 1977.

But it can be done, it is being done, and therefore it is only a matter of time before it is done. We just need to hold out until we breakthrough.