The Final Frontier

     This blog was created for the 2018 spring class for Lit of Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy course at Ringling College of Art and Design. In this blog I will talk about the books we read and what they mean to me personally. If you have come across this blog and have not read the book I am talking about this week, I will warn you now that I will spoil it.
     This week we started our journey into The Final Frontier. In other words, we started learning about science fiction (Originally called Scientifiction or Scientific Fiction because it was meant to be fiction based in science, later shortened to Sci-Fi because what was based in fact slowly dissolved in to what we wished science was). We started in Contemporary space opera, a genre whose name was coined as a joke due to the popularity of western operas at the time. Space was considered the Final Frontier, the final stage of exploration, which explains why this genre was so often compared to westerns. The most obvious example of a Space Opera would be Star Trek. But that is not what I am going to talk about in this post. I am instead going to talk about a story in this genre that changes the game a little: The Man Who Sold The Moon. This story takes the idea of space being the final frontier to a different aspect of progress. Instead of it being about exploring space, its about enterprising it, making a business out of something no one had dreamed of touching before. The story is about a pair of entrepreneurs who, in their teamwork, have made a lot of money. Their duo consisted of one who did all the business work, and the other coming up with crazy ideas on how to make money. The ladder's latest idea was that if they could reach the moon first, they could somehow sell it as land to investors. The idea itself is new and the story is quite entertaining, and it's a very interesting way of interpreting what  space travel will be, which if America ends up getting up there first, it is very likely that it is what will happen. 
     Based on this story I think it is safe to assume that the space opera is about expansion and exploration. It's about dreaming what life will be like when we reach this point, a fantasy that we want to achieve. Which is unlike the rest of sci-fi, which will be explained in my later posts when I talk about cyberpunk and diverse position science fiction.