What's (Space) Opera, Doc?

When we we first had the idea for writing a series of books set on a warship in outer space, the words "Space Opera" were absolutely no part of our thinking process.  In fact, we were really not focused on "genre issues" at all.  Instead, we started talking about writing a series of novels (series novels being a really good market these days).  What to write?  Well, we really, liked Science Fiction, and we both know a lot about space, spacecraft, and astronomy, so that might be good.  And we are both military buffs, so, maybe some kind of military story set in space.  But we had not been happy with the way the military aspect of Science Fiction as it was generally handled:  the ships, the combat, the tactics, the depiction of life on board ship, the traditions and courtesies of the military, the satisfactions and rewards of a naval life, etc.

We also really, really liked the Aubry/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian which we thought did an absolutely splendid job of depicting all of those things in the British Royal Navy during the early 19th Century.  Wouldn't a series of Aubry/Maturin books in space be grand?  Or Alexander Kent.  Or C.S. Forrester.  Well, not exactly, of course, our characters and situations would have to be unique creations from our own heads and hearts, but if we could take a careful look at what makes these books such enduring tales to which people come back again and again and translate them into tales set in outer space we thought we might have something.

So, that was the starting point, a series of Napoleonic War British Navy Sea Tales, but set in the year 2315.  We looked at a few other literary successes.  We love Tom Clancy and from him we learned that readers really do care about the nuts and bolts of how weapons systems and sensors and communications apparatus works.  They want gritty details about what what makes these systems tick and what they do.  The reader doesn't just want to be in the CIC and in the Wardroom, but in Fire Control and the Missile Room and even in the warhead when it goes off.  We also really like Patrick Robinson and his strong naval characters and detailed discussion of strategy and tactics.  In fact, we discerned a common thread between O'Brian and Kent and Forrester and Clancy and Robinson:  detail.  How people live.  What they eat.  Where they sleep.  What they do for enjoyment.  What songs they sing.  How and with what do they kill their enemies?  What are their traditions?  So, we decided to throw out a lot of the common wisdom about how to write Science Fiction--don't bore your reader with too much detail; don't turn them off with too much technical stuff.  Now, we didn't and won't turn these books into fictional technical treatises, but we will continue to show readers how this stuff works, and how the people make it work.  It exists in our minds at that level of detail and we aren't afraid to share that detail with readers in a content-appropriate way.

We didn't know or care whether this approach made what we write Military Science Fiction, or Space Opera, or Space Navy Tales.  You could call this stuff "Banana Pudding" for all we care.  What we knew was this:  we wanted to tell exciting tales about fighting men at war in outer space.  We wanted the discussion of their ships, weapons, technology, strategy, and tactics to be detailed and within the realm of reason.  We wanted the people to be recognizable military personalities with recognizable military motivations, operating within a recognizable military system of rank, hierarchy, organization, and method, and--for the most part--exemplifying what we regard to be the defining military/naval virtues:  honor, courage, loyalty, toughness, competence, sacrifice, resourcefulness, humor, and resilience.

And, none of this nihilistic, pessimistic, "people are lousy and nothing you do matters" crap.  So, maybe we borrowed from Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and even George Lucas as well.  We wanted to tell stories in which individuals act with honor and courage and in which their laudable moral choices bring about good results.  In our stories, individual human beings and their moral choices, for good or evil, to be loyal or disloyal, to face danger or to flee, all matter.  No, perfect justice is not meted out in the end and all endings are not ideally happy, but in our stories the wages of courage and resourcefulness and resolve are not despair and dishonor.  Overall, these books are and always will be upbeat and optimistic.  Virtue is never pointless.  Resistance is not futile.  We, and our choices, matter.  Every hour of every day, we engage in acts and make decisions that have consequences, and we are responsible for both the decisions and the consequences.

There are people who say that books written along these lines are not "serious literature."  So what?  If readers enjoy them, have fun reading them, and are uplifted and strengthened by the experience, then we are happy.  That and, of course, we would like these books to find a large audience.  We've made a good start with To Honor You Call Us, finding readers in the thousands when we thought we would be lucky to find them in the dozens.  All we know to do is to keep writing what we set out to write in the first place, and to hope that readers continue to find these stories, to enjoy them, and to want us to write more.

Look for the next book in the Man of War trilogy, For Honor We Stand in three weeks or so.  We hope you like it.  We've certainly had fun writing it so far.