Have you read The Expanse books or watched the Amazon series? If so, what’s your opinion? How would the storyline fit into your thinking above? It’s more pre-apocalypse than post, unless the playing out of global warming is post from a climate perspective. The belt is certainly urban in that people are packed into dystopian asteroid or space station communities. But then you have the unpopulated “expanse” in between it all. Thanks.
I haven't read those, though I may check them out in the near future. From summaries, I expect I would place them outside this dichotomy, in the general zone where I had space opera, rather than on either side of it. As I wrote that aside, I was thinking of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture trilogy. Space-based scifi usually isn't post-apocalyptic in my view, even when it contains apocalyptic events, because there generally isn't the kind of cultural discontinuity that defines the post-apocalypse. Even if there is, the story tends not to be very interested in that aspect. To raise another Tchaikovsky example - as you may be able to tell, I spent much of the early part of this year on a big Tchaikovsky kick - you could imagine telling post-apocalyptic stories in the setting of his Children of Time series, but his novels don't. The collapse of Earth-based civilization there is really just a premise for him to set up his speculative evolution scenarios, and we skip over the parts of the timeline where people live through or later investigate what actually happened on Earth.
Breaking away from my newest fave, Alastair Reynolds sometimes slides into parts of this dichotomy in some of his stories. His Revelation Space books are interesting to think about through this lens: Chasm City is a very cyberpunk locale, with its megalopolis full of abandoned AIs, rogue nanomachines, and mad posthuman slumlords, but the setting as a whole skews post-apocalyptic because of the discontinuity created by the Inhibitors. Inhibitor Phase, for instance, sees a post-apocalypse protagonist kidnapped into a series of space opera vignettes with an extended cyberpunk interlude.
The Expanse is definitely a space opera. But it works on many levels and does a thoughtful job of thinking through the logical implications and outcomes of current trends. And it only relies on one major technological advance that’s entirely fictional, like warp speed on Star Trek.
Have you read The Expanse books or watched the Amazon series? If so, what’s your opinion? How would the storyline fit into your thinking above? It’s more pre-apocalypse than post, unless the playing out of global warming is post from a climate perspective. The belt is certainly urban in that people are packed into dystopian asteroid or space station communities. But then you have the unpopulated “expanse” in between it all. Thanks.
I haven't read those, though I may check them out in the near future. From summaries, I expect I would place them outside this dichotomy, in the general zone where I had space opera, rather than on either side of it. As I wrote that aside, I was thinking of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture trilogy. Space-based scifi usually isn't post-apocalyptic in my view, even when it contains apocalyptic events, because there generally isn't the kind of cultural discontinuity that defines the post-apocalypse. Even if there is, the story tends not to be very interested in that aspect. To raise another Tchaikovsky example - as you may be able to tell, I spent much of the early part of this year on a big Tchaikovsky kick - you could imagine telling post-apocalyptic stories in the setting of his Children of Time series, but his novels don't. The collapse of Earth-based civilization there is really just a premise for him to set up his speculative evolution scenarios, and we skip over the parts of the timeline where people live through or later investigate what actually happened on Earth.
Breaking away from my newest fave, Alastair Reynolds sometimes slides into parts of this dichotomy in some of his stories. His Revelation Space books are interesting to think about through this lens: Chasm City is a very cyberpunk locale, with its megalopolis full of abandoned AIs, rogue nanomachines, and mad posthuman slumlords, but the setting as a whole skews post-apocalyptic because of the discontinuity created by the Inhibitors. Inhibitor Phase, for instance, sees a post-apocalypse protagonist kidnapped into a series of space opera vignettes with an extended cyberpunk interlude.
The Expanse is definitely a space opera. But it works on many levels and does a thoughtful job of thinking through the logical implications and outcomes of current trends. And it only relies on one major technological advance that’s entirely fictional, like warp speed on Star Trek.