What 'Space Operas' Reveal about Life on Earth

Space opera — stories about life in space and on other planets — is a genre dear to my heart. In childhood I followed the exploits of Captain Future in the pulp magazines and marvelled at the movie Destination Moon. Having wasted my youth on such adventures, I am squandering my old age on space opera once again, in the form of streaming movies and TV series.

Taken as entertainment, such space operas as For All Mankind, The Expanse, and Foundation are remarkably similar: good guys trying to establish good societies on other worlds, or at least mitigate bad societies.

But look at them a little more closely, and they look like harsh critiques of modern 21st-century society as a brutal war of all against all.

The satirical roots of speculative fiction are very old. It is a descendant of a genre called “Menippean satire,” in which scholars poke fun at the absurdity of their own erudition. In its more modern forms, speculative fiction portrays societies of the future, or on other worlds, as a way of satirizing our own. For all its interest in the future, SF is all about the present.

More precisely, it’s about the American present, since Americans have dominated the genre since the Second World War. Space opera is a sub-genre in which people spend most or all of their time in spacecraft or colonies on other planets. American space opera is largely a retelling of American history, from discovery of a “new world” to the founding of colonies to the establishment of an empire and its conflicts with alien empires.

Early space operas like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles were explicitly satires of the United States in the mid-20th century. They reflected mid-century concerns about immigration, disease, nuclear war and their impacts on American life. They also retold mainstream American history, with colonists trying to re-create their new world in the image of the old. Newcomers would “terraform” Mars with trees, miraculously filling the air with oxygen, and then build a scale-model America of small towns complete with movie theatres.

Today’s streaming space operas, if we look at them as satires of the present, are far more critical than Bradbury ever was. They depict people in oppressive, stagnant societies, working hard under terrible conditions, but never quite finding solutions to their problems.

Working-class spacefarers

Most characters in modern space operas are workers, doing tough jobs under bad conditions for little pay. In The Expanse, a worker loses an arm in an industrial accident and has to make do with a clumsy prosthetic; a better one would be too expensive. In the Korean film Space Sweepers, a family living on a space station barely survives by retrieving space junk.

Working conditions are invariably terrible, whether in giant spacecraft or in bases on the moon or other planets. Even when humans have been interstellar travellers for thousands of years, as in Foundation, spacecraft interiors are ugly and uncomfortable. The typical living space in For All Mankind or Beacon 23 is crowded and furnished with chairs and bunks even Ikea would reject.

Despite the fusion energy that powers them, the lighting in spacecraft and habitat interiors is very dim, a blue gloom occasionally interrupted by red lights when something goes wrong. The lighting in the real International Space Station is dazzling by comparison.

When anyone boards a mysterious spacecraft, it’s always pitch-black and the visitors must use the flashlights on their rifles to see where they’re going (and the rifles are always necessary). No one ever thinks to bring an infrared detector (or even a good LED trouble light) that could expose danger from a safe distance. I blame art directors trying for a funky noir atmosphere, much like the gloomy interiors of The Godfather where Don Vito Corleone and his sons plan new crimes.

A diet of cat food… or sludge

The food served on spacecraft and in habitats is equally funky: foil-wrapped squares of what looks like cat food, eaten with a plastic fork or spoon. This is a tradition going back to 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the astronauts watch BBC television on their tablets while eating sludge.

In The Expanse, a crew member makes her colleague a cup of coffee using match heads and fake lemon juice, explaining that real lemon would be better and that anyway, “It’s an acquired taste.” In the same series, a central character from the Asteroid Belt tries to cheer up her crewmates by offering to cook a Belter delicacy — “red kibble.”

For all its futurism, space opera shows us consistent technological stagnation, not only in food but in spacecraft as well. Computer screens are large but display coloured text on a black background, like an early 1980s computer. (It also reminds me of the 2024 look of Elon Musk’s X.)

Keyboards look equally antique, and onboard computers are slow and easily hacked. When artificial intelligence is available, the AI is a kind of personal assistant. But in Beacon 23, the AIs mostly stand around fretting about the latest turn of events, or plotting against one another or the chief villain, also an AI.

Present AIs are prone to “hallucinating,” creating absurdly false information. Those in Beacon 23 can display themselves as human-form hallucinations before vanishing into their own circuits. They have very little say in the conduct of business, perhaps because their ancestor HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey was so unreliable.

Designed to fail

And as in that classic movie, spacecraft design is so bad that any critical equipment is always attached to the hull, requiring someone to go outside when it malfunctions. This ensures a few minutes of suspense before the astronaut’s predictable demise. Incredibly, no one ever raises workplace health and safety issues, much less calls for an inquiry into the spacecraft manufacturer.

One would think a real spacecraft or habitat in the 23rd century would be entirely AI-run, sustaining its crew and passengers in well-decorated spaces that might resemble a big farmhouse on a summer day in Nebraska, complete with the illusion of cornstalks rustling in the breeze. Or a penthouse terrace overlooking downtown Calgary, with the Rockies on the horizon.

The AI would communicate with its humans via brain chips — like those Musk is fooling around with, but functional. The AI would also be able to print, cook and serve a paella or a sirloin steak, and create original movies as after-dinner entertainment. But that would make the spacefaring workers comfortably middle-class (or at least striving to become so). Modern space opera relies on corporate masters or old-fashioned tyrants, coasting on inherited power and with no incentive to improve the lives of the masses.

The interplanetary economy in space operas is politically charged: In For All Mankind, Russia gets to the moon first and the U.S. plays catch-up. Before long, Russians and Americans are claim-jumping each other’s water-ice deposits on the moon and even shooting at one another.

As the space race extends to Mars, Soviets and Americans are working together, but a secessionist movement emerges that wants to develop Mars, Bradbury-style, and make it independent of Earth.

The Martian colonists trap an iridium-rich planetoid in Mars’ orbit instead of sending it on to Earth; this wins them independence and the economic means to sustain it. A free and fair election is out of the question, because the colonists know they’d be outvoted by the billions on Earth. Better to outsmart the corporation-ruled government that supports them and make themselves a new corporate state, forcing Earth to become a captive market for iridium.

Problem-solving with small arms

Smaller disputes, like possession of a spacecraft or habitat, are settled with small-arms fire. Every spacecraft in The Expanse has its own armoury, and gunfights are frequent. No one seems alarmed by the possibility of multiple punctures in the hull. Similarly, the collapsing Galactic Empire in Foundation can blast whole planets, but prefers to enforce its wishes with squads of goons toting guns.

If we read space opera as a criticism of today’s society, it makes more sense than it does as a warning of future dystopias. It gives us a wealthy corporate class that is an equal-opportunity oppressor, keeping everyone else in poverty regardless of race or sexual orientation.

But today’s space operas offer no real solutions except to run away. In The Expanse, the Belters and others flee to other solar systems through gateways provided by mysterious aliens. In For All Mankind, a small, uncomfortable Martian settlement makes itself a nation — again, an escape from oppression, not the end of it for those left behind.

So if streaming space operas offer us a bleak picture of our present, they don’t offer a quick, easy solution. It will be up to us to devise something, right here on Earth, or we’ll never last long enough to seek paradise in the stars.