Anime and Manga such as Tytania and Bodacious Space Pirates are space opera as well, often harkening back o older tropes. The television show, Flash Gordon, is considered one of the most iconic space opera’s of all time. Battlestar Galactica, a prime example of the New Guard of space opera is a television show–one who’s original iteration was much more in line with the old definition of space opera. Star Wars, one the most iconic space opera stories was of course originally a movie. It lends itself well to visual adaptions and the screen. Space opera is common in television, the movies, anime, and manga. There are occsionally digression in Space Opera where a character will go slumming in a low-tech environment, given the appearance of a planetary romance, but these scenes are limited and in contrast to the rest of the story. Space opera alos often includes large space battle scenes as in military SF such as the Honor Harrington novels, and although military personnel are often frequent characters, the scope of Space Opera is much wider than one ship or fleet, or the concerns of one military character.
Hamilton’s Commonwealth universe features the “Silfen”, an obvious elf analogue and an argument in favor of the science fantasy/epic fantasy overlap. Space opera often overlaps with military SF, planetary romance, and science fantasy. Space Opera is kind of like the Epic Fantasy of the SF world, so much so that it’s often claimed to be a fantasy sub-genre due to lack of scientific rigor and focus on galaxy-wide politics and quest story-lines.
There is also the scope, as mentioned above. First, it commonly involves FTL travel, a la Star Trek’s warp drive, hyper space, jump drives, wormholes, etc. Space opera as it exists now has several common tropes and conventions that can be used to identify it. Nowadays, it’s not longer a pejorative term for bad SF. It stayed this way until the 70s, at which point several authors began to reclaim the term to describe a sub-genre of science fiction involving the above definition. Basically, soap operas or Westerns in space. The term “space opera” was coined in 1941 by Wilson Tucker to described as “the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn”. Space Opera is a sub-genre of speculative fiction and science fiction whose major defining characteristic is probably scale and which incorporates a vast majority of the tropes that preclude the label of “hard science fiction”. It’s been evolving over time, and has always been popular, but some of my favorite space opera has come out only in the last decade or so, and I think its the best version of space opera yet. It’s got a long history, and a diversity of definitions. Space Opera is one of my favorite genres of speculative fiction.
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