Out of Pod Experience

It was only in the early 1990s that the term space opera began to be recognized as a legitimate genre of science fiction.

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Early works related to but preceding the subgenre contained many elements of what would become space opera.

The earliest proto-space opera was written by a few little-known mid-nineteenth century French authors, for example Star ou Psi de Cassiopée: Histoire Merveilleuse de l’un des Mondes de l’Espace (1854) by C. I. Defontenay and Lumen (1872) by Camille Flammarion.

Examples may be found in the works of Percy Greg, Garrett P. Serviss, George Griffith and Robert Cromie.

The novel does depict an interstellar conflict between solar men of Earth and a fierce humanoid race headquartered on Sirius.

While these early stories included interplanetary and interstellar travels and adventures, intergalactic travels and galaxies other than the Milky Way would not be introduced until years later when tales like Outside the Universe (Weird Tales, July–October 1929) by Edmond Hamilton appeared, after Hubble had published his discoveries in 1924-1925, and made the public aware that the universe expanded beyond our own galaxy and was much larger than the limited and static universe people had believed in until then.

In film, the genre probably began with the 1918 Danish film, Himmelskibet.

Some early stories of this type include J. Schlossel's "Invaders from Outside" (January 1925, Weird Tales),[11] Ray Cummings' Tarrano the Conqueror (1925), Edmond Hamilton's Across Space (1926) and Crashing Suns (in Weird Tales, August–September 1928), J. Schlossel's The Second Swarm (Spring 1928, in Amazing Stories Quarterly), and The Star Stealers (February 1929 in Weird Tales).

By 1931, the space opera was well established as a major subgenre of science fiction.