Week 09 Space Opera

I read Vintage Season for the Space Opera week. It was interesting to see how the genre could be interpreted into a short story. This story was set in “modern” times in the 1940’s with an Average Joe main character, Oliver. In doing this, the author kept the preliminary descriptions quite short and left more time to explain the intruding characters.

While being a Sci-Fi story it also included elements of a drama or mystery. Much of the novel focused on the relationship Oliver and Kleph and the mystery of the newcomers. As a mystery story, I enjoyed the range of possibilities and did not predict who they were until the very end. Because I knew it was a Sci-Fi story, the possibilities were way wider that if it had been set in regular 1940’s America. Were they humans? Where they aliens in disguise? Where did they come from and what did they want? These are common questions in invasion stories but made more interesting with the smaller scope of the narrative. The relationship between Oliver and Kleph was interesting enough, but I mostly appreciated how it gave us a window into another culture. Although it carried enough character conflict to be a drama, it was mostly a Sci-Fi mystery.