Space Opera Fridays: Dave Trowbridge on Space Opera and the Siege of Vienna

Space Opera and the Siege of Vienna: the Archetypal Perspective

In their 2003 article How Shit Became Shinola: Definition and Redefinition of Space Opera, David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer defined modern space opera as “colorful, dramatic, large scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character, and plot action … and usually set in the relatively distant future and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone.”

It would be hard to improve on that definition using words (although I could write an  entire blog post concerning the exceptions that prove the rule—and maybe I will one of these days), but I can show you what I go to space opera for with a single image.

That’s the Alexanderschlacht (The Battle of Alexander at Issus) by Albrecht Altdorfer, which was commissioned in 1528 by William IV, Duke of Bavaria. Altdorfer’s conception of the painting was almost certainly heavily influenced by the defeat of the Suleiman the Magnificent at the Seige of Vienna the next year, and his execution of the commission epitomizes what I look for in space opera, and what Sherwood Smith and I tried to do in our space opera Exordium, which is being reissued in a revised edition by Book View Café.

Alexanderschlacht portrays the victory of Alexander over Darius III in a battle that was the beginning of the end for the Persian Empire, which fell in 330 BCE with the death of Darius and Alexander’s assumption of his title as king, assuring the Hellenization of the Near East.  The work’s composition is thought to echo the four-kingdom eschatology of the Book of Daniel—Babylon (note the distant Tower of Babylon at the left side of the painting, under the crescent moon), Persia, Greece, and Rome), with Alexander’s victory representing the triumph of Greece over Persia, and echoing the hope that the relief of Vienna represented the triumph of Christendom (i.e., Rome) over Islam.

Exordium: From Star Wars to Epublishing

From Sherwood Smith on the Book View Cafe blog:

It’s the summer of 1977.

The buzz along our apartment building in Hollywood is that Star Wars is better than it sounds. I’m thinking, gheck. Except for the Salkind Three Musketeers movie, I loathed seventies films, especially the sf ones: either they were fight-the-monster movies, or else long, boring screeds in which the furniture was plastic, and everyone wore these jump suits that looked like they’d take an hour to get out of if you wanted to pee.

This one (Star WARS? Oh please)  sounded like car-crash derby only with space ships.

...

We get out at two a.m. (we’d miraculously gotten into the midnight showing), passed the enormous line waiting for the next showing, and Dave grins at me and says “Well?”

 

“I’m going back.”

And we did. We did for about six weeks, every weekend, and then we said, “We can do that.” So we got together one evening (I still have the notes) and wrote down all the elements that we loved in fiction that had been missing from movies for years, that Star Wars was tapping into, and we wrote down every extravagant swashbuckling trope we adored and wanted in a story, came up with Exordium, our space opera extravaganza.

I grin every time I hear this story. Dave is my husband, Dave Trowbridge, and today is his debut as a member of Book View Cafe (and the second Exordium book, Ruler of Naught, is now available!)

From Sherwood and Dave on John Scalzi's The Big Idea:

Ruler of Naught is Book Two of our space opera Exordium, which began life as a mini-series screenplay over twenty years ago, morphed into a mass-market paperback, and is returning again as an e-book series.

E-books are not only giving new writers an alternative to traditional book publishing, but letting oldsters like us resurrect yellowing paperbacks from used-book crypts. That’s a fun process (mostly), but from Exordium’s beginning we’ve struggled with the skiamorphs (shadow shapes—like wood grain on plastic) that are left not only when you move between media, but when your twenty-year-old vision of a technology’s cultural impact collides with present-day reality.

The Lesbian Chocolate Sex Scene, or Life With Exordium

This appeared today on the Book View Cafe blog. 

Among the joys of living with a fellow writer (in this case, my husband, Dave Trowbridge) are the unexpected things that come up during dinner conversation


“How was your day, dear?”

“Splendid! The lesbian chocolate sex scene works better than ever.”

It always was a terrific scene. Even in the original print version of Exordium 2: Ruler of Naught. I wondered what he and Sherwood (Smith, his co-author and co-conspirator) have done to make it better. Ruler of Naught, like the first Exordium volume, The Phoenix in Flight, have been extensively revised for their Book View Café ebook editions.

He goes on, “They’ve covered themselves in chocolate and are licking it off one another, and this of course distracts the enemy general enough to change the course of the entire space battle.”

Now We're Talking Space Opera!

Once upon a time, two young people who lived in the same apartment building in Hollywood and shared a love of science fiction, Dorothy Dunnett, and The Three Stooges, went to see Star Wars, came home and said, "We can do better!" And they did.

That's the shameless promotion bit. Here's the disclosure. The result was a five volume series called Exordium by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge, who is also my husband.

I didn't meet Dave until well after the series was published (in the 1990s, by Tor) and I'd missed them when they first came out. I picked them up as part of getting to know him, slogged through a difficult opening to the first book, and then got utterly carried away by the story. Rich and complex and intelligent. And not at all predictable. Dramatic and funny (an alien race who venerate The Three Stooges?), touching and gritty and romantic and irreverent. FTL battles in space (done right, according to physicist and Navy-type fans), puns and tragedy and Dangerous Liaisons intrigue. Politics (also done right). Did I mention the tri-partite aliens? Yes, I did.

Now the series is being re-issued as ebooks and that beginning has been rewritten (so even if you've read the print books, you should read these!). The first one, The Phoenix In Flight, is just out from Book View Cafe. It's in multiple formats, including those you can download for your Kindle or Nook.

Dave holds forth on "Space Opera and The Siege of Vienna." and Sherwood tells her own story of how Exoridum came to be written.