The Space Opera
This week's genre/topic is an interesting one. Space opera's, as Dr. Steiling has described, provides a different kind of audience with their own kind of Western. Typically, I don’t think that the people who enjoy the space opera are the same types of people that enjoy Westerns. The demographic shifts entirely from the alpha male to the inspired nerd.
I started The Martian for this week by Andy Weir. One of the things I enjoyed about this novel was the attention to detail of science coupled with Weir’s ability to create a fantastically unreal world. He pairs reality and fantasy with such great detail that the reader immediately relates and believes that this story is factual. We become sucked into the novel incredibly fast. As an interesting and relevant aside, I did a little digging and found that Weir published the novel on his blog in separate installments as he was writing it. The reason that the science in The Martian comes to feel so believable/true is because different correspondents to Weir’s blog would leave him critiques on the representation of scientific facts and calculations.
While the scientific factuality of his novel is inspiring, to say the least, I will say that at times the calculations and explanations became long-winded. I found myself occasionally skipping over a page or two in order to get back to the story, trusting that Weir had appropriately detailed everything that needed to be detailed.
All in all, I enjoyed what I read for this week. Weir and space operas are not typically the type of story that I would find myself enjoying but I was pleasantly surprised. This class has opened me up to all kinds of different reading possibilities and that’s been really great.
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