Out of This World
BOTTUM, JOSEPH
Out of This World An interplanetary opera with a nod to the past. BY JOSEPH BOTTUM It was science fi ction—science and fi ction, at the same time! Bad science and bad fi ction, as it...
...The ordinary citizens he plans to sell for slaves...
...The beautiful Cali he intends to claim as his mistress...
...Indeed, Myers was the youngest bishop in the United States when he was ordained in 1987 at age 46, which you’d think would give him enough to remember...
...Captain Corsaire...
...Justice and truth must triumph, else what’s a melodrama for...
...Of course they can...
...sets out to bring culture to the deprived citizens of the galaxy’s distant planets...
...They outgrew it, of course...
...Happily—or, perhaps, sadly—a pair of boy readers from Earlville, Illinois, remember all too well the day they discovered space opera...
...Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Space Vulture is a fun, quick read...
...Gary K. Wolf went on to be a writer, most famous for creating Roger Rabbit, the basis for Who Framed Roger Rabbit...
...But they aren’t exactly like their predecessors, for readers these days demand a little better science, a little better writing, and a melodrama that’s a little better hidden...
...Can the boys Eliot and Regin fi nd a way to convince the ignoble Gil to act nobly and help rescue their mother...
...Bad science and bad fi ction, as it happens, when the whole thing was starting out...
...Victor Corsaire...
...In the case of Space Vulture the mild parody weakens the book’s homage to space opera, and the homage gets in the way of the parody...
...And why not...
...There’s something a little off about the parodic elements of Space Vulture...
...Space Opera,” it came to be called, and it appeared in pulp magazines with titles like Galaxy and Amazing Adventures from the 1930s through the 1950s, the now-faded newsprint covers once bright with girls in glassbubble helmets, shrieking as the space monster’s green tentacles stretched toward their shapely forms...
...Why, the Skylark Three, of course, or Doc Smith’s Lensmen, or the Legion of Space...
...Can Captain Corsaire escape his chains...
...The beautiful Cali...
...Can Cali avoid the vile embrace of that intergalactic monster, Space Vulture...
...Who will save them...
...No, probably not...
...And all that’s just Act One, the fi rst installment of the space opera...
...Yes, it was one of the grandfathers of the better science fi ction that came along in the 1950s and ’60s...
...From that moment of discovery way back when in Earlville all the way down to the present, Gary Wolf and Archbishop Myers have kept alive the memory of Space Hawk and Captain Future and Flash Gordon...
...With a few exceptions, it was simply old-fashioned melodrama—and lowrent melodrama at that: The Perils of Pauline, set sloppily in outer space...
...End of story, you’d think—but melodrama never really ends, for unbeknownst to them all, Space Vulture is swooping down on the planet...
...Space Vulture...
...Cali Russell...
...Of course, that may owe something to John Myers’s day job...
...Space Opera” isn’t really the right term for the genre...
...We don’t get Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein or even Kurt Vonnegut without those melodramatic pulps...
...science fi ction-writing archbishops don’t grow on trees...
...His friend, John J. Myers, took a different path, most famous now for being the Roman Catholic archbishop of Newark...
...The dust jacket carries praise from both Guy Consolmagno, the chief astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, and the Catholic novelist Gene Wolfe, probably the most respected sciencefi ction writer alive...
...The result is Space Vulture—halfhomage and half-parody, a tale of good and evil, square-chinned heroes and superhuman villains, running loose between the stars...
...As the curtain rises on Act Two, we discover that the thief Gil and Cali’s family have somehow avoided capture...
...But it was, in truth, the idiot grandfather, the one who spends Thanksgiving dinner telling impossible stories while the grandchildren roll their eyes...
...It’s not really fair to do parody of a genre that nobody does seriously anymore...
...Who could save them...
...Oh, there are plenty of modern science-fi ction stories that owe a debt to the old Buck Rogers space opera: Larry Niven’s Ringworld, for instance, and Lois McMaster Bujold’s endless Miles Vorkosigan saga...
...The “scourge of outer space,” the “curse of the universe...
...Unfortunately for Gil, Captain Victor Corsaire is hot on his trail...
...The best may be Jack Vance’s 1965 Space Opera, which even involves actual opera as an eccentric heiress hires an opera company and Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things...
...But neither he nor Wolf ever quite forgot the pulps that led them to science fi ction, and over the last few years, they’ve worked whenever they could on an attempt to recreate the genre...
...But some of the praise is due...
...Big Little Books” like Flash Gordon on the Planet Mongo, Captain Future, Space Hawk, Outside the Universe, or Buck Rogers and the Planetoid Plot...
...of course they will...
...Unless you’re old enough to have read it at the time—just at the moment that it was new and you were a reader at exactly the right impressionable age—there’s no reason to remember the glory days of the genre...
...As the book opens, a thief named Gil Terry has just reprogrammed the harvest robots to steal a mushroom crop from a remote planet called Verlinap...
...Does anyone still read this yellowed old stuff...
...A diabolical villain with a “ruthless army of injustice” who promptly captures the entire population of Verlinap...
...Talented, too, and with her two genius children, Eliot and Regin, she prepares to welcome Captain Corsaire and his dismal captive Gil...
...The most famous galactic marshal in the universe, and he swings down in his spaceship just in time to capture Gil and turn him over to Cali Russell, the planet’s chief administrator...
...In fact, pure space opera exists today only as parody, from Harry Harrison’s Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy...
...And the broad-chested Corsaire he fi endishly decides to offer for torture to the galaxy’s worst criminals...
...1988...
...But there was a moment around, say, 1935 when the sheer idea of putting a little futuristic technobabble in a story was exciting enough that the story didn’t really matter...
...It was science fi ction—science and fi ction at the same time...
Vol. 13 • May 2008 • No. 33
