The Challenge of Space Opera
Space Opera is fun, but if you think about most of its tropes too much, it falls apart fast: they require an untenable amount of very specific contrived explanations to be sustained, if they can be sustained at all. (Fans of Star Trek/Wars who want to take these works literally can excel the creativity of religious fundamentalists in attempting to defend their canon.) But if you can suspend disbelief, there is a lot to enjoy about space opera; its popularity is hardly limited to people who are ignorant of its logical problems. So, I think there is something worth salvaging there - to try to develop a Space Opera that is parsimonious of contrivances and makes sense without a lot of hand-waving or unlikely, unstable situations.
It's helpful to define what I mean by a Space Opera, in terms of essential features of the setting. (To be clear, I am not speaking of typical Space Opera plots or character arcs, but the science-fictional backdrop of the stories - though we will take as a key principle here that the setting must allow adventures in space.) This is, of course, with a view toward tabletop gaming.
A Space Opera setting features:
- Interstellar polities (empires, confederations, etc) with hundreds or thousands of inhabited worlds, besides space stations.
- Several, and indeed possibly hundreds, of sophont species on rough par with humans in terms of capability, and likely including some artificial life such as humanoid robots.
- By implication of (1), it must include some means of rapid interstellar communication and transportation to sustain these polities.
- By further implication of (1), the means in (3) must be cheap and available enough for trade and war to exist between star systems.
- Human-like characters as major agents of civilization history, who are likely to have adventures in space.
As an example, although it may be a perfectly good setting in its own right, this would not be a space opera in our sense here: a setting where humans colonized the nearest twenty or so systems using cryosleep and nuclear thermal rockets, and cultural contact exists only by kilobits-per-second lightspeed communications and a ship every few decades carrying bulk data and a few of the most precious cultural objects of another civilization. Another example would be any setting where the characters are unable to have comprehensible adventures because they are capable of being backed up digitally (either because they're native digital intelligences, or because they're uploaded humanoid brains) and so are inordinately difficult to put in mortal peril. (Such a setting could still be fine, but it would not have the sorts of adventures you need for our Space Opera.)
Every one of these features is deeply problematic in light of what we know about science and technology. Oh, for the halcyon days when Einstein was the biggest kill-joy in science fiction! I don't intend to recapitulate in detail Atomic Rockets and other resources with why (1), (3) and (4) are difficult; see that site for details if it isn't obvious as to how hard reality slams into them. The brief problem with (2) is not that sophont life is particularly likely to be rare - this is an open question after all for lack of data, and humanlike intelligence seems pretty adaptive - but that sophont species encountering each other are likely to be at vastly different levels of technological development. This is because for the N=1 example we are aware of (i.e. humans) we were mostly non-technological for a very long time and then went from cannons to fusion bombs in a couple of centuries, and from vacuum tube bit-serial computers to GPUs in about fifty years.
(5) is a problem with Space Opera that has become particularly clear in the past decade or so, during which rapid advancements in artificial intelligence have been made in the real world, whereas interstellar travel remains as much a "far future" technology today as it did a hundred years ago. It seems almost certain that in the course of real-world human technological development, strong artificial intelligence will precede interstellar travel.
It is certainly possible to imagine that technological progress could sometimes take a different route; the current "AI Spring" of the 2020s could turn out to be a false start (for example, if stochastic gradient descent is bottlenecked by the amount of data available for training giant models.) But it would be exceptionally generous for that to buy us even fifty years without involving some kind of technological collapse that would eliminate space travel as well; enough, perhaps, for a Mars colony - but not for a manned expedition to Centauri. What is more, space opera demands dozens of civilizations, at least in the backstory, and it seems unlikely that all or most of them would have developed interstellar travel before AI.
Why is that a problem? Is not the Robot Buddy a staple of the genre? Robot Buddies are not the problem. The problem is that Robot Buddies, while technologically possible, are not a particularly likely development, and some of the more likely developments are very problematic for (5). Post-technological-singularity god-robots do not have human-comprehensible adventures in space, and while I at least do not consider technological singularity to be a likely immediate outcome of developing strong AI, it is certainly within the realm of possibility. In other words, it's certainly possible that a civilization develops strong AI and then interstellar travel, but does not undergo technological singularity; but it seems unlikely that the gap between interstellar travel and singularity is large. A society could (and should!) be prudent about such technological development, but even one civilization is unlikely to be cohesive enough to prevent technological advancement by force of unified social will for more than a few centuries without a wider repudiation of technology. What's worse, strong AI that is not in any danger of causing a singularity, still has a lot of drama-ruining potential: in what space opera could we accept waves of robots going before the human colonists and leaving them with naught but landscaped paradise-planets watched over by friendly and impartial AI police, orbited by the starships of the AI space navy? This is a world where human-like biological creatures are the precious cargo of robot spacefarers, not adventurers.
What can be done to remedy these issues? A great deal of thought has been put into (1) (3) and (4), devising scientifically acceptable means of apparent faster-than-light travel that are efficient enough for routine use. It appears to me that the most satisfactory solution is a network of artificial wormholes with the topology of an acyclic graph and certain constraints on the proximity of wormhole ends, these constraints being necessary to protect causality. (A time machine can be constructed with three wormholes arranged in a cycle.) Novel physical laws protecting causality can also be postulated to allow a "hyperdrive" of some sort, but the wormhole network is, I feel, much more strategically interesting. The problem with wormholes is that making and stabilizing artificial wormholes, not to mention deploying them to the intended locations, is such an incomprehensibly difficult task from a technological perspective that it is best reserved for a post-singularity civilization of just the type that we wish to avoid. If you can make artificial wormholes, your idea of an exciting story premise is probably along the lines of "the heroes prevent the heat death of their universe," and the adventure story about it probably involves entirely things that are as incomprehensible to human players as leading edge semiconductor manufacturing is to an amoeba. Now, it may be that there is some simple way to make artificial wormholes at a lower tech level - we just don't know - but then you have to deal with the implications of that technology being readily available. Humans, for example, can probably go only about five minutes before turning a new technology into a weapon.
Therefore, I've chosen to go with a wormhole network constructed by a post-technological-singularity civilization as the main means of expeditious interstellar travel. This is also helpful because they can play a role in enforcing a degree of technological stasis on the setting - they don't want rivals - while having an excuse for not being interested in actively ruling it. This handily addresses (2) and (5) The presence of a vastly superior alien civilization is itself dangerous to player autonomy no matter how aloof they are, but this can be addressed separately.
So, with the main problems addressed, I was able to start working on the Connected Space setting as a spiritual prequel to Beyond the Twelve Worlds.
I'd like to thank Reese for helping me develop some of these ideas.
See also CS/Conceptual Notes.