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| - Adventure Towns IN SPACE! Most Space Opera stories are lifted from other genres, then transposed into outer space. And the most obvious way to do it is to make everything take place on a planet. Not just any planet, but Planetville, the planet that serves the same function in space that towns and countries do in Earth-based stories. By extension, if a planet represents a country, an alien race represents an ethnic group, and an empire that spans Earth becomes a multi-planet empire. Planetville instantly explains these Speculative Fiction Tropes: Examples of Planetville include:
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| abstract
| - Adventure Towns IN SPACE! Most Space Opera stories are lifted from other genres, then transposed into outer space. And the most obvious way to do it is to make everything take place on a planet. Not just any planet, but Planetville, the planet that serves the same function in space that towns and countries do in Earth-based stories. If a Wild West story is about outlaws going from town to town, the Wagon Train to the Stars will be about outlaws going from planet to planet. If the Nazis conquer a dozen small countries, the space Nazis will conquer a dozen planets. If a plague broke out in a Third World country, the alien plague will fill an entire planet. By extension, if a planet represents a country, an alien race represents an ethnic group, and an empire that spans Earth becomes a multi-planet empire. Unfortunately, because Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, stories about Planetville make no sense. Nobody seems to realize how BIG a planet is -- everything in Planetville takes the same amount of time as stories set in towns or countries. In the updated Wild West story, the outlaws are "exiled from the planet" just like they'd be exiled from Dodgeville, and the outlaws have to leave... instead of challenging the authorities to find them when they have an entire planet in which to hide. When the space Nazis invade, they seem to need the same number of soldiers as the Earth Nazis needed to invade Europe. And when the crew of the Cool Starship finds the cure for the alien plague, the issue of distributing it to an entire planet rarely gets mentioned at all. These considerations are minimized or left out entirely in many stories. This might work if technology was really advanced -- if transport were so fast that crossing a planet took as much time as crossing a town or Earth country does today. But that almost never happens. Besides, even if Planetville were a global village in terms of travel time, a planet still has thousands of times as many people, thousands of times as many hiding-places, thousands of times as many strategic locations, thousands of times as many and as much of everything as a city on Earth today has. A side effect of this is that the characters never realize that things can happen in parts of planets. You will never see aliens trying to capture a planet's equator, or its polar caps -- it's the whole planet or bust. Planetville instantly explains these Speculative Fiction Tropes:
* Ditto Aliens: To outsiders, most any human ethnic group looks alike.
* It's a Small World After All: Planetville is as small as a town, so finding things is the same.
* One World Order: A country has one government except in civil wars. Planetville has only one except in civil wars.
* Planet of Hats: It's just like the wacky Adventure Towns of Earth.
* Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Nazis... In Spaaaaaace!
* Single Biome Planet: Do Earth towns have both a frozen and a jungle region? Planetville doesn't have them either. This trope is sometimes extended further still, with each star system apparently only having a single planet in it... every body in the system aside from Planetville itself is merely decoration if it is considered at all. Sometimes a result of the Law of Conservation of Detail in universes with dozens or hundreds of planets/star systems. Not to be confused with planets that are literally covered by a single city--that's an Ecumenopolis, a subtype of the aforementioned Single Biome Planet (and one of the few that is remotely within the realm of possibility). Examples of Planetville include:
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