Luna Press is delighted to announce the acquisition of Space Opera: The First Hundred Years, by Val Nolan!
Val is no stranger to the Luna family, having co-authored the successful series Spec Fic for Newbies with Tiffani Angus, and I am therefore thrilled to welcome this new and exciting project.
Starships. Aliens. Robots. Distant worlds and larger-than-life protagonists. Space Opera is a subgenre of excess which is loved and scorned in equal measure… sometimes simultaneously! Its epic battles wow us with scale and spectacle, its outlandish extraterrestrials prompt us to look anew at ourselves, and its evil empires give us pause about the injustices of our own societies. Space Opera: The First Hundred Years charts the evolution of this subgenre from 1928 – the year generally recognised as its origin – all the way to our highly diverse present day. It offers an accessible, informative, and sympathetic look at the literary and artistic importance of stories, novels, films, TV shows, comics, and more from each year between 1928 and now, teasing out the connections and developments of this versatile form and how it reflects changing political, historical, and cultural contexts across a turbulent century.
As an academic literary critic and a creative writer of Science Fiction, Val Nolan (co-author of the Spec Fic for Newbies series) is ideally placed to write this book. Space Opera: The First Hundred Years is a dream project for this lifelong fan of Science Fiction extravagance. He marshals years of real-world experience of student and reader enthusiasm for the subgenre’s zapgun energy to deliver a book that is part galactic gazetteer, part lightspeed adventure across the frontiers of literary history! Providing a deep dive into the universe of outrageous interstellar adventures, Space Opera: The First Hundred Years will thrill Science Fiction fans while also providing an essential companion to classroom discussion of the genre’s unstoppable standard-bearer.
A Message from Val Nolan:
“Let’s see what’s out there…” Five words from the pilot of Star Trek: The Next Generation that have stuck with me since childhood. For a kid growing up in rural Ireland, that sentiment captured my imagination in a way little else did. It was my gateway to Space Opera, and through it I grew to adore a whole universe of stories, not just on TV but in short fiction, novels, movies, comics, and more. I came to love big dumb objects brooding with mystery in distant star systems. I began to crave technobabble. I sought out vast spacecraft and plucky protagonists snatching last minute victories from the jaws of titanic extraterrestrial beasts. I embarked on a journey not just across the galaxy but, eventually, to the study and teaching of Science Fiction at university level. Space Opera: The First Hundred Years is the culmination of that adventure. It is a star map to the origins and development of Science Fiction’s unstoppable standard bearer. It is what I learned “out there” and which I am now lucky enough to share with readers. It is, for the kid who grew up to be an academic still dreaming of the stars, a voyage I have been waiting all my life to take.
About Val Nolan:
Val Nolan is a Research Fellow at Aberystwyth University. He is co-author of the SFFH writing-guide series Spec-Fic for Newbies (Luna Press, 2023, 2024) and author of the monograph Neil Jordan: Works for the Page (Cork University Press, 2022). His academic articles have appeared in Science Fiction Studies, Irish University Review, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Irish Studies Review, Foundation, Symplokē, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and elsewhere. His own fiction has been published in Year’s Best Science Fiction, Best of British Science Fiction, Interzone, the ‘Futures’ page of Nature, and Andromeda Spaceways, among other venues. He writes the regular ‘Folded Spaces’ column for Interzone exploring the history of Science Fiction criticism.
Space Opera: The First Hundred Years will be released in 2028. Keep up with the production journey on our monthly newsletter!
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