And I’m a historian, and that’s what helped me create Teixcalaan and Lsel in the depth that I did. History is the trade secret of science fiction, to quote Patrick Nielsen Hayden. How did you approach this? And how do you get across enough information about their civilisation without info-dumping? And the space opera subgenre is perfect for this.Ĭreating an entire alien civilisation requires some intense worldbuilding. And far-future science fiction is my favorite place to play with large philosophical and ethical questions from sideways angles, to bring that high drama to ideas about, oh, what makes a person and how do we have good government and what does a planet-sized city really mean for the people who live in it, etc. When I think of ‘space opera’ I think about narratives which are high-intensity, high-drama: vivid emotionally and vivid conceptually. But I also love the ‘opera’ part of space opera as much as the ‘space’ part. I am a big Star Wars fan an even bigger fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune. I really love sprawling, visually lush, politically rich, space-based universes that are at the heart of ‘space opera’ as a genre. Why did you want to write a space opera? What do you love about space operas?
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