When my editor at Del Rey Books, back in the 1980s, suggested I write a space opera, I thought hard about it. And the harder I thought, the dumber space opera looked.
I mean, come on: If you've got the technology to travel between stars in a matter of weeks or months, you've surely got the technology to create anything right here at home. No need to schlep across the galaxy for some superdrug (Hal Clement's Iceworld) or superfabric (Isaac Asimov's The Currents of Space).
Eventually I did produce a space opera, Gryphon, which I recently re-read and found pretty good. But it came out as a tongue-in-cheek satire of space opera, because the whole idea of interstellar fleets is rendered silly by the laws of physics. (If you don't believe me, see Charles Stross's brilliant essay on the subject.)
Well, nevertheless, here's an idea for a space opera that I offer to anyone daft enough to use it.
Imagine a super-advanced society that travels instantly from planet to planet at any distance it likes, as easily as walking from the living room to the kitchen. (I know, this has been done, but bear with me.)
Now imagine a mildly eccentric member of this society. He (no female would be this eccentric) decides to build a spaceship and actually travel from one star to another. Like everyone else, he's pretty well immortal, so transit times of centuries or millennia are not an issue. Technology enables him to tap energy sources that will drive his spaceship at a steady 1 g, and his spaceship is large enough to sustain a lot of people and a complex ecosystem...not to mention a manufacturing system capable of providing everyone with enough shampoo (and conditioner) for a thousand-year journey.
In effect, he is not much different from those strange people who insist on rowing across the Atlantic or Pacific.
Now suppose that somewhere out in interstellar space, where no one ever goes, he and his companions find something that their advanced intergalactic culture has never detected before, and that might pose a very serious threat.
What might it be, and how would a starship full of eccentric semi-immortals deal with it?
I leave the answer to you; I've got enough on my plate.
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