What is Old Testament Space Opera, anyway?

Well, somebody had to ask, and that somebody was Eve in a comment the other day, so I guess that's as good a reason as any to tackle the sub-genre of space opera.

This may be stating the obvious, but... I like space opera. Maybe it's my age - growing up post-Star Wars, when Space Shuttle launches were still big news and kids still wanted to be astronauts (or X-Wing pilots).

Anyway, space opera: a sub-genre which brings its own problems for Christian fiction readers, most of whom immediately think of a fat lady on Mars...

For the uninitiated, space opera is old skool sf. Romantic heroes heading off into the unknown reaches of space with nothing more than a ray gun between them and some green bug-eyed monster. OK, that's a bit simplistic, but the chances are if you've got those ingredients, you're going to end up with a space opera of sorts. Think Star Wars. In fact, for the completely uninitiated, think science fiction, and you're probably already there.

Novels in this sub-genre often feature galactic civilisations, for example Asimov's Foundation series, James Blish's Cities in Flight, and more recently the Culture novels of Ian M Banks. As a consequence, God is largely ignored, the assumption being that any civilisation advanced enough to colonise the galaxy has long since realised that religion belongs to a less enlightened era.

But what if they didn't realise that? What if they realised the opposite - that it wouldn't be possible to colonise the galaxy without God in the equation?

So I began to think about how such a civilisation might come into being - and how the history of Christianity might have played out in that civilisation. And so the idea was born: re-tell God's story as a space opera, starting as close to the beginning as I felt I could get away with. Joseph reborn a precog; Jonah's whale as some kind of space-dwelling creature; it's not like there's any shortage of inspiration in the Old Testament, so...

Oh, and I did have grand ideas of it becoming a sort of brand - like 'Use of Weapons - a Culture novel', you would find 'Countless as the Stars - an Old Testament Space Opera' and know exactly what to expect, so you'd buy it immediately.

Well, a writer's gotta dream...