Serious Shenanigans The New Space Opera and Social Commentary: An Analysis of Iain M. Banks's Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata and Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch Trilogy

Abstract

This thesis contributes to research on the genre of space opera. Space opera is generally considered the least sophisticated form of science fiction, and remains underrepresented in scholarly research. Yet, a considerable part of the greatest science fiction published over the past three decades has been space opera. Specifically, it has been New Space Opera (NSO), a renewed, innovative form of space opera that arose during the second half of the 1980s. The NSO uses space opera’s core elements of adventure and conflict to both entertain and address serious contemporary social, political, and economic issues. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that the NSO is an exceptionally suitable form to provide social commentary. I will show that the NSO is an innovation of the Classic Space Opera (CSO) in terms of both form and content, that the critical and satirical space operas written during the 1960s and 1970s aided this innovation, and that the perceived unsophisticated and clichéd nature of the Classic Space Opera (CSO) actually encouraged the development of the NSO. Furthermore, through a close-reading analysis of US-American author Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy (2013-2015) and Scottish author Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels Surface Detail (2010) and The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), which are typical examples of NSO novels, I will analyze how the narrative strategies of estrangement, defamiliarization, affect, and the novum, which are integral to the speculative and imaginative nature of space opera, are employed to provide social commentary on topics such as the oppression and dehumanization of cultural others, and on issues of identity and subjectivity formation.