To keep things plausible, you may want to take a couple of months and peruse the TV Tropes list of "So You Want To Write A..." links and examine the ones relevant to your science fiction novel/game. Such as:
For science fiction authors and game designers who need a quick plausible scientific non-obvious background to inspire their next novel, there are one or two in this website. Here is a list of links that will send you directly to them.
An exquisite fusion drive transport from a 1981 Boeing study commissioned by NASA. Along with the schedule to service a 5,000 person Ceres mining coloy.
Any technological development that threatens the profits (or existence) of a megacorporation will be ruthlesslessly suppressed by said corporation. Which will make hot times for the poor people developing said technology.
Around crowded space stations the Customs Police have to inspect ships for contraband and do safety inspections to certify the ships. Which puts them at direct cross-purposes with the ship owners. Hilarity will ensue.
How Terra's monopoly on phosphorus delayed the Martian Revolutionary War. And the situation becomes grim as Mars Colony covertly tries to find alternate sources of phosphorus, while a panicky TerraGov does their level best to suppress this. Which science fiction authors would find to be a nice juicy explosive situation full of dramatic possibilities.
Commercial laser power stations can rent laser time to laser thermal rockets. But the military will not be happy about warship-destroying laser in civilian hands. So they might just nationalize them.
The algae which is a vital part of a spacecraft's closed ecological life support system might mutate and produce deadly toxins. And genetically engineered safe algae might be guarded with draconian patent-protection lawsuits like a futuristic Monsanto.
Certain biochemistries are mutually deadly. Human biochemistries use lots of hydrogen-sulfur bonds. If an alien biochemistry used nitrogen–sulfur bonds, we might actually dissolve each other.
Interstellar archeologists digging in the ruins of an extinct high-tech alien civilization might very will unearth some high-technology. Hilarity will ensue as the archeologists try to run to the patent office, space pirates try to dry-gulch the archeologists and swipe the tech, and megacorporations threatened with technological disruption hire assassins to kill everbody and destroy the tech. A simple outline can be found in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy.
Planets settled because of rich mining deposits of Something Profitable (or paradise planets who suddenly have the misfortune of Something Profitable being discovered) tend to rapidly become authoritarian dictatorship hell-holes. Just the sort of depressingly exciting place to put your protagonists.
Santa Claus machines are perfect for establishing an interplanetary base. But they are also perfect for cranking out hundreds of weapons of mass destruction. They will have to be guarded.
When a trader's or transporter's spacecraft becomes obsolete due to technological disruption, times become financially tough. Which creates lots of angry ship owners. Which can drive exciting plots for your novel.
Various valuable services usable as business models for space corporations. Or as the business model for novices trying to establish a space business in the raw cut-throat space frontier.
This is a motivation for spacegoing nations to establish a space military service. If asteroid miners are actually moving asteroids, everybody is going to want lots of warships to ensure that one isn't "accidentally" dropped on their nation by an enemy.
Reactionless drives ain't scientific at all. But if you postulate their existence, there is a long tradition of using such things to turn a submarine into instant starship.
The entire page is a list of strange astronomical objects just begging to be made into a science fiction story
Harris Classifications
In his article Staying on the Cutting Edge of Science Fiction, James Wallace Harris notes if you study the history of science fiction ideas, they break down into a limited number of areas:
Interplanetary travel
Interstellar travel
Alien life forms
Artificial beings (robots, AI, digital life, artificial life)
Predicting future social structures
Predicting future politics
Impact of new technology and inventions
Impact of new science (anti-gravity, multiverse, higher dimensions)
Utopias
Dystopias
Post-apocalypse and collapse
Post-humanism (mutants, clones, mental powers)
End of humanity, end of the world
The focus of this website is on interplanetary and interstellar travel. But I have a few odd pages devoted to some of the other ideas.
Here is a mind map of one possible way to divide up science fiction ideas:
from Marvel What If? Vol 1 14
artwork by Herb Trimpe, Pablo Marcos, and D. R. Martin
For a science fiction author, nothing makes your stories not age well quite as badly as an over-looked assumption. Sadly, they are almost impossible for an author to spot. And in any event the author has better things to do, like writing the story.
The classic example is all those pulp scifi stories where the protagonists unthinkingly light up their cigars and cigarettes inside their spaceships. If they all perish of asphyxiation by fouling their air supply with tobacco smoke, they will get zero sympathy from RocketCat. But for the scifi authors, everybody smoking like chimneys was just one of those over-looked assumptions. An assumption so universal as to be invisible to the author.
Don't be smug, chances are that your stories will contain similar egregious flaws only visible fifty years from now. Even now young children are puzzled by stories where the protagonists use something called telephone directory yellow pages to find numbers that can be dialed into wall mounted phone. And more recent stories have mysterious things called "dial-up" internet connections, which are cut off if somebody else in the house picks up the telephone handset.
More forgivable is when the author makes a good faith effort to predict the future, but badly misses the mark. At least they tried.
The general precaution an author can take is making a diversion. You throw in some very odd futuristic detail to remind the reader that they ain't in Kansas any more. And hopefully distract the reader so much that they fail to notice any over-looked assumption you mistakenly left in. For instance, Robert Heinlein was fond of mentioning in passing how the door dilated open.
CIGARETTES 1
"Lights are off because relays opened when the crash short circuited them." Morey and the entire group were suddenly shaking. "Nervous shock," commented Zezdon Afthen. "It will be an hour or more before we will be in condition to work." "Can't wait," replied Arcot testily, his nerves on edge, too. "Morey, make some good strong coffee if you can, and we'll waste a little air on some smokes." Morey turned and went to the galley. Five minutes later they returned to the corridor, where Arcot stood still, looking fixedly at the engine room. They were carrying small plastic balloons with coffee in them. They drank the coffee and returned to the control room, and sat about, the terrestrians smoking peacefully, the Ortolian and the Talsonian satisfying themselves with some form of mild narcotic from Ortol, which Zezdon Afthen introduced. "Well, we have a lot more to do," Arcot said. "The air-apparatus stopped working a while back, and I don't want to sit around doing nothing while the air in the storage tanks is used up."
'All systems functioning normally,' said Hal. 'Two minutes to ignition.'
Strange, thought Floyd, how terminology often survives long after the technology that gave it birth. Only chemical rockets were capable of ignition; even if the hydrogen in a nuclear or plasma drive did come into contact with oxygen, it would be far too hot to burn. At such temperatures, all compounds were stripped back into their elements.
His mind wandered, seeking other examples. People — particularly older ones — still spoke of putting film into a camera (today digital cameras are standard), or gas into a car (soon electric cars will be standard). Even the phrase 'cutting a tape' was still sometimes heard in recording studios — though that embraced two generations of obsolete technologies.
A circa-1900 era artist attempts to visualize the futuristic year 2000. Our attempts to visualize the future will probably be just as ludicrous. Image courtesy of Paleo-Future Blog
A common failing of with those who write future histories is a failure to take into account Future Shock, that is, the rapid progress of technological advancement. Refer to the "Apes or Angels" argument. Consider that one hundred years ago the paper clip had just been invented, Marconi had invented the wireless radio, the Wright brothers had invented the airplane, and the latest cutting edge material was Bakelite. Assuming that technology continues to advance at the same rate, all of our flashy technological marvels of today will look just as quaint and obsolete in the year 2100. And in 2500, they will look like something made by Galileo.
Remember, this assumes that the rate of technological progress remains the same. The evidence suggests that the rate is increasing.
This is because future history SF novels are not meant to predict the future, so much as they are meant to illuminate a specific point the author is trying to make.
I am once again stunned at the insistence that Star Trek has to be allegorically relevant, but if it must, I'd prefer it take on more scientific/ethical issues, like a justification for banning genetic enhancement. or how a society with FTL, molecular replication, and teleportation has managed to sidestep a technological singularity.
Some of you might remember the Evil Overlord's List, a list of all the generic cliche mistakes that Evil Overlords tend to make in fiction (16: I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."). I think that it might be a good idea to begin bolting together a similar list of the cliches to which Space Opera is prone, purely as an exercise in making sure that once I get under way I only make new and original mistakes, rather than recycling the same-old same-old.
This is not an exhaustive list—it's merely a start, the tip of a very large iceberg glimpsed on the horizon. And note that I'm specifically excluding the big media franchise products—Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, and similar—from consideration: any one of them could provide a huge cliche list in its own right, but I'm interested in the substance of the literary genre rather than in what TV and film have built using the borrowed furniture of the field.
Planetary civilizations
This subheading covers common cliches/mistakes made in discussing inhabited (Earthlike) planets and the people who live on them.
Planets are small and easily explored
All the land masses on a planet are easily accessible
Asteroidal dust makes an irritating ping as it bounces off a ship's hull
... for some reason you never run into it at multiple km/sec
Actually, hitting a space rock or other spaceship is no big deal, a bit like being in a minor car accident
... Even though the kinetic energy released by an impact increases with the square of the velocity, and you're travelling hundreds to millions of time faster
Gas giants are good for mining volatiles
... Because dealing with Mach 6 wind shear, 10,000 Bar pressure, and a lethally deep gravity well is trivial
... Because we need volatiles such as 3He, to fuel our aneutronic fusion reactors (hint: Boron is cheaper and much less scarce)
All comets have tails
... they're sort of hairless and scaly, like a [sarcasm limit exceeded - Ed.]
Rocky planets are either airless or shirt-sleeves worlds with breathable air
Pay no attention to Venus, runaway greenhouse worlds are imaginary
Big stars are as long-lived and likely to have planets as dwarf stars
Supernovae happen routinely and are no big deal
Interstellar space is totally empty
... You can fly as fast as you like without worrying about dust particles
You don't have to worry about interstellar gas, either
... Except when there's not enough of it to keep your ramscoop accelerating
Incidentally? Ramscoops totally work! (Larry Niven said so in 1968.)
You can go fast enough to experience relativistic time dilation without worrying about the pesky cosmic background radiation blue-shifting into hard X-rays and frying you
You can forget all about hitting the occasional interstellar 4He nucleus with some multiple of the energy of an alpha particle, several million times a second
... Don't worry about hitting the electrons bound to the neutral hydrogen either, gamma photons totally aren't a thing
You can use handy black holes and neutron stars to make handbrake turns in space
You an also use gas giants to make handbrake turns, at high relativistic speeds
Don't let the fact the space is full of exciting high energy physics put you off going there, squishy meatsack-persons!
Biology
Biology is complicated—so much so that many SF authors suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome in approaching the design of life-supporting planets.
All planets harbour a single apex predator that eats people
All planets harbour is a single venomous insect/reptile analog that poisons people
The native flora and fauna use a biochemistry that we can derive sustenance from
... This includes weird-ass micronutrients
Pay no attention to the native microbiota, they're harmless
... You won't even suffer from hay fever! Much less systemic anaphylaxis.
Ecosystems are robust; why not let your ship's cat stretch her legs whenever you land?
... This goes for your ship's rats, too
Planets only have one class of plant-analog and one class of animal-analog
... Only Earth has reptiles, amphibia, fish, birds, insects, mammals, fungi, etc.
Terraforming is really simple; you can do it with algae capsules delivered from orbit
There are no native parasites that might eat Maize, so we can turn the entire largest continent into a robot-run plantation
... Soil exhaustion isn't a thing
... Terrestrial constraints on agriculture don't apply on other planets
You can keep a starship crew healthy and sane indefinitely using a life support system running on blue-green algae, tilapia, and maybe the odd soy bean plant
Life support systems are simple, stable, and self-managing
It is safe to put bleach down the toilet on a starship; your algae/tilapia/soy will totally deal with it it when it comes out of the recycler
Vitamins? Naah, we'll just genetically modify the crew to make their own
If you implant humans with the gene for chlorophyl they can magically become photosynthetic
... Okay, if you add the genes for RuBiSCO and the C3 pathway they can magically become photosynthetic
... Because of course two square meters of skin is enough surface area to photosynthetically capture enough energy for a high-metabolic-rate mammal to live off
Humans can too hibernate/deep sleep between star systems! All you need is a cold enough chest freezer
... Just as long as their intestinal flora go into cold sleep at the same time
... and so do the low metabolic rate arctic pseudofungi spores they picked up at the last planetary stop
Economics
Fingernails-on-blackboard time for me. (See also: Neptune's Brood)
New Colonies may be either agricultural or mining colonies; rarely, resort colonies
Everyone uses Money to mediate exchanges of value
Money is always denominated in uniform ratios divisible by 10
Money is made out of shiny bits of metal, OR pieces of green paper, OR credit stored in a computer network
There is only one kind of Money on any given planet, or one credit network
The same kind of Money is accepted everywhere as payment for all debts
Visitors are always equipped to interface with the planet-wide credit network
Planetary credit networks are incredibly secure except when the visitor needs to hack into someone else's bank account
Barter is a sign of primitive people who haven't invented money
People who rely on Barter are simple, trusting folks (and a bit stupid on the side)
Inflation? What is this, I don't even ...
Deflation? What will they think of next?
Sales tax? What's that?
Income tax? What's that?
Import duty? What's ... (rinse, spin, repeat)
You can get a loan from your friendly bank manager whenever you need one
Bank loans accrue interest
If you fail to replay a bank loan you may be arrested and held in debtor's prison
... Or sold into slavery
... Or your organs can be seized
... Because your body is just one of your fungible assets, right?
... And harvesting organs for transplant surgery is a universal practice
It is profitable to ship crude break-bulk cargo like timber or foodstuffs between star systems because starships are cheap and easy to repair and operate
Break-bulk shipping in open cargo holds has never been improved upon
Nobody ever thinks to ship their high-tax cargo via a free port or use complex financial arrangements to avoid customs duty without having to hire a dodgy armed ship with a poor credit rating
Politics
Planets have a single unitary government (or none at all)
Planetary governance is no more complex than running a village or small township
... This is because the planetary capital is a village or small township, not, say, Beijing or Mexico City
If there are two or more ethnicities represented on a planet their collective politics are simple and easily understood by analogy to 20th century US race relations
All planetary natives everywhere speak Galactic Standard English, or Trade Pidgin
New Colonies can't afford police, detectives, customs inspectors, or the FBI
New Colonies don't require visting spacers to conform to local dress codes or laws
New Colonies don't have gun control laws
New Colonies don't have laws, or if they do they were written by a mad libertarian
Despite the lack of laws, nobody underage drinks in the saloon
... Nor is there an extensive school truancy problem or much illiteracy
On reaching pensionable age, all colonists are forced to retire and deported to the Planet of the Pensioners
There is no unemployment because happy smiley frontier needs cowboys or something
If the planetary government is a democracy, the new Mayor will be elected by a town meeting
If the planetary government is an oligarchy, the new Patrician will be elected by a town meeting (of oligarchs, in the back room of the saloon)
If the planetary government is a theocracy, there will be only one sect of the planetary religion and no awkward long-standing heresies that are too strong/embedded to suppress
... And there will be direct rule by Clergy, along the lines of an oligarchy: no Committees of Guardians of the Faith, no separation of executive and legislature, none of the complexity and internal rivalries of Terrestrial theocracies (e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia)
If the planet is a colony of the Galactic Empire, the new Planetary Governor will be appointed by the local Sector Governor
... It's Governors all the way up (until you hit the Emperor)
Monarchy is the natural and perfectly ideal form of government
Only an Imperial Monarchy can ensure the good local governance of a myriad of inhabited planets scattered across the vast reaches of deep space
Monarchies are never a Single Point Of [Galactic] Failure
Monarchs are never stupid, mad, ill, or distracted by a secret ambition to be a house painter instead
Viziers are Always (a) Grand and (b) Evil. (At this point, let's just #include the regular Evil Overlord list, m'kay?)
Democracies are always corrupt
You can always bribe your way out of sticky situation if you're from off-world
All planetary legal systems work the same way (some remix of Common Law, constitutional governance, and trial by jury).
The standard punishments for a crime range from a small fine, to slavery in the uranium mines for life (about 18 months), to an excruciating death
Trials are swift and punishments are simple and easy to understand
Justice is always punitive/retributive/exemplary, never compensatory/preventative/rehabilitative, much less poetic/cryptic/incomprehensible
... If the Author disapproves of the death penalty, substitute mind-wipe for the death penalty (like, there's a difference?)
Culture
There is usually only one culture per planet
... Sometimes there are two, to provide for an oppositional plot dynamic
... Pay no attention to the blank spots on the map
... And especially don't go looking for the unmarked mass graves
Planetary natives are either Colonists or Indigenous
Indigenous peoples are either Primitive or Advanced (and Decadent)
Advanced Indigines either don't have space travel or gave it up (see: Decadent)
Primitive Indigines are either Tribal or Mediaeval
Mediaeval Indigines invariably recapitulate the politics of the Hundred Years War
Visits to Mediaeval Indigenous Colonies can be approximated to a side-quest into Fantasyland
If the planet is a Colony it is either a Lost Colony or a New Colony
Lost Colonies may resemble Primitive Indigines but never Advanced
New Colonies resemble Tombstone, AZ, circa 1880
New Colonists live in log cabins, ride mules/horses and carry ~six-guns~ blasters
... You can find logs (cabins, for the construction of) everywhere on planets
... They're like abandoned crates in first-person shooters
Psychologically speaking, everybody is either WEIRD or Primitive
Primitive (non-WEIRD) people are stupid and unimaginative
WEIRD people accept and embrace change and innovation; non-WEIRD people reject both
Colonies are usually modelled on WEIRD 1950s cultural norms
Colony People come in two genders
The Women on New Colonies are either:
... Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen (because colonies need babies)
... Dungaree-wearing two-fisted starship-engineering-obsessed lesbians desperate to get off-world
The Men on New Colonies are either:
... Manly plaid-shirt-wearing heterosexual farmers breaking sod in the ~west~ new world
... Dastardly drunken muggers waiting behind the spaceport saloon for an unwary spacer
QUILTBAG: huh? Who are those people and why doesn't somebody cure them?
... (Alternatively: everybody is QUILTBAG, pale patriarchal heterosexual penis people are extinct)
Clothing invariably obeys some regional dress code that has been observed on Earth in the past thousand years; in extreme cases 1950s business attire will serve to avoid attracting undue attention
You can recognize someone's gender on any planet because:
... Women wear dresses or skirts with make-up and long hair
... Men wear pants (or occasionally suits of armour)
... Also, a space shuttle in-falling from low earth orbit totally doesn't arrive at ground level with kinetic energy equal to about ten times it's own mass in TNT, because if it did it would be a field-expedient weapon of mass destruction
Flying a spaceship is not only easy, it's easier than flying a Cessna
Spaceship life support systems are simple to maintain and repair and very forgiving
Spaceships communicate across interplanetary or interstellar distances by radio
Aliens are multicellular organisms with nervous systems and musculoskeletal systems
Aliens communicate in language
... Using noises
... Emitted by their mouths
... At frequency ranges we can perceive
Aliens are individuals
Aliens are eusocial hive organisms
Spacefaring aliens are conscious
Aliens are WEIRD people with latex face paint or funny haircuts
... Because primates are a universal deterministic outcome of evolution on all worlds
Wittgenstein was wrong about talking lions. (If they could speak we'd find what they can say fascinating—mostly because we'd be waiting for them to mutter, "I wonder what those bipeds taste like?")
Aliens build starships sort-of like humans, but with wonky furniture
Aliens are interested in us (see Wittgenstein above)
Aliens want to trade with us
Aliens want to exchange bodily fluids with us (ewww ...)
Aliens want to induct us into their civilizational-level fraternity/sorority and make contact in order to teach us the house rules
Alien species only have one dominant culture
Alien species are noteworthy for their universally applicable stereotypy, utterly unlike us complicated and divergent human beings
Aliens have a much longer history of spaceflight than humans, but unaccountably failed to stumble upon and domesticate us during the 11th century
Aliens have religious beliefs because they have the same theory of mind as human beings and attribute intentionality to natural phenomena (see also: Daniel Dennett)
Alien religion resembles those of a human culture that thrived prior to 1000 CE and is now considered quaintly obsolescent by most humans
Aliens can't control themselves
Aliens are unconditionally hostile
Aliens are robots
... Robot-aliens are just like alien-aliens, only more alien, because robots
While this might be a cliche, it is also the definition of
eat and west.
You have two poles of rotation on a planet. Looking down at
one, the planet spins clockwise, looking down at the other, the planet
spins counter-clockwise. You choose the one where the planet is spinning
counter-clockwise as the north pole, and the other as the south. Since
west is defined by the direction 90 degrees counter-clockwise from north
(and 90 degrees clockwise from south), and east in the opposite direction,
this means that planets always "rotate east-to-west" and celestial objects
always rise in the east and set in the west (with rare exceptions, such as
moons orbiting faster than a planetary rotation period).
So: in the ongoing investigation of space opera, I've looked at cliches, I've tried to come up with a rough definitional general rule ... but I've avoided what's possibly the largest elephant in the room, namely, plot structures.
A key aspect of space opera is that it's about epochal events and larger-than-life characters. Most genres can be written to work in a variety of modes; for example, consider the difference in the level of melodrama in spy thrillers betwee James Bond and Graham Greene's The Human Factor. Similarly, high fantasy can be quietly introspective and pastoral, or focus on the clash of kings and dark lords, and horror can run the scale/focus gamut from The Yellow Wallpaper to The Stand.
But space opera is different: it's almost impossible to conceive of a space opera with a plot that revolves around the eqivalent of a middle-aged English professor's mid-life crisis as he carries on a furtive affair with one of his female students under the nose of his long-suffering wife (the somewhat cruel stereotype of the MFA-approved Great American Novel). I mean, you could do it, but your professor would have had to have invented a new type of FTL drive that threatens to revolutionize interstellar travel, the student is a spy from a cartel of space traders and is trying to get the blueprints out of him before she stabs him in the kidneys (because: lecherous middle-aged prof, ew), and his wife—the professor of political science at Galactic U—is actually a retired assassin (and just wait 'til she finds out about the student). Into the middle of this quiet literary novel of academic infidelity and domestic lies, we then add an evil religious cult of alien space bat worshipers who want to steal the new space drive to equip their battle fleet when they sweep in from the Orion Arm to bring fire, the blaster, and the holy spacebat inquisition to the Federation, and when they kidnap the professor his wife and his grad student have to work out their differences to get him back before he cracks under (well-deserved) torture and gives the fanatics the ultimate weapon ...
(Huh. Actually, that'd make a cracking space opera; just not one of mine. Anyone want to borrow it?)
I stand by my point: you can't write space opera without ramping up the stakes to melodramatic levels. (Well, maybe you could if you were Iain M. Banks, but he was special that way.) The need for romanticist drama is one of the pillars of the sub-genre. And one of the recurring core tropes of the genre, which is so fundamental you can hardly call it a cliche (any more than boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl is a "cliche" in genre romance) is the Campbellian Hero's Journey.
If you are reading this blog you are familiar with the Hero's Journey monomyth because it's ubiquitous in our mythology and entertainment. Campbell derived it from studies of myths in many cultures, publishing his exposition The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949: his theory was that major myths from various world cultures can be traced back thousands of years and share a common cyclic template (with roughly 17 stages). Since then, it's been used repeatedly by entertainers as a construction template; for example, Christopher Vogler more or less codified it as a recipe while working for Disney studios. The plot of the original Star Wars trilogy was an explicit appropriation of the HJ cycle by to George Lucas (to be fair, before Vogler's codification); it's no accident that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father (Vader is Dutch for "Father") or that the fight between Skywalker and Vader in The Empire Strikes back is one that Skywalker loses—but survives to re-fight more successfully later. A key feature of the monomyth is that the hero leaves home on a quest, faces challenges, confronts and is struck down by his father/the darkness, then rises again, atones/achieves enlightenment/excellence, and triumphs in a final struggle that represents maturation.
Campbell's work isn't uncritically or universally accepted, to say the least, and there are variants on it: for example, Valerie Frenkel critiched him for focussing exclusively on the male variant of the Hero's Journey. It turns out that there are plenty of recurring myths where a version of the monomyth applies to women, with similar but distinctively different recurring stages focussing on the heroine's progress from girl to mother. Rather than fighting to defeat/overturn the parent, the heroine's struggle is to become the parent: rather than returning to the original home but as master (the male branch of the monomyth) the female version has her joining a new household as its mistress and new mother or goddess/priestess.
Yes, this is all horribly gender-stereotyped. But I'll take a stab in the dark at diagnosing its origin: the stages in the monomyth echo the mammalian K-selective reproductive cycle—on hitting puberty the young adult leaves the nest/parents, goes looking for a mate, meets and overcomes obstacles (competitors and predators), finds a mate, forms a new mated pair. In the case of humans or other primates there may also be issues about troupe/pack hierarchy to be resolved. Yes, there are problems with this: it doesn't map onto social structures once established settlements and agriculture become the norm and the young adults are expected to stay home and plough the fields. But the monomyth remains deeply appealing because the mythic framework it builds on has very deep roots that go all the way down to primate reproductive biology.
The monomyth doesn't have to be melodramatic: you can, at a pinch, apply it to that stereotypical MFA lit-fic novel of lecherous middle-aged academics without too much trouble. (The journey is one of internal psychological discovery, the threats are the protagonist's inner demons, the allies are the psychiatrist, the crisis/conflict is one of understanding ...) But as often as not, it's a structure for heroism: melodrama acts as a spice, raising the stakes and giving us a reason to pay attention to the protagonists, for their deeds are significant and implicitly may affect us (or the proxy the author has provided for our viewpoint).
So: Space Opera. Take the monomyth as a framework for how the action unfolds, and mix it up with melodrama. Then add space ships, ray guns, and wide-scale travel backdrops. Arguably the monomyth comes first, before the background: although some of the more skilled authors of the sub-genre spin their plots within the constrains of a background world, and sometimes manage to avoid the monomyth completely. (I'd go so far as to say that "Matter" by Iain M. Banks is an almost complete rejection of the form, as is "Look to Windward" ... actually, I suspect IMB had his own different idea of a story structure in mind for the Culture novels: as often as not they're epic tragedies ("Consider Phlebas") or illustrations of the limits of heroism.)
But if you're trying to spin a space opera, and you're reaching for a plot skeleton that works, the monomyth is your friend. Here's an exercise for the involved reader: take my dysfunctional Galactic U professorial marriage from the beginning of this essay and use the monomyth structure to come up with a plot, climax, and ending that delivers a satisfactory sense of closure. You might first want to consider who you are focussing on—the lecherous male prof, his spouse the academic with a dead-and-buried past (she thought) as an assassin, or the grad student with the secret mission. Then you need to consider what stage of the Hero's Journey you are joining them at—for there's no reason to assume the story starts at the beginning, rather than in media res. Next, work out what challenges and allies they might encounter on their way to the climax and resolution, and what role the other characters play in their quest. Finally: what is the prize they're seeking, how do they achieve it, and at what cost? For added points, see if you can find a way to twist the standard Hero's Journey cycle to apply a surprise climax to it—for example, by spinning this steamy menage-a-trois with added murderhate and alien space bats so that it appears at first to be one protagonist's journey but then switches track and turns out to be about one of the others (your classic example of this would be IMB's "Use of Weapons") ...
To keep things plausible, you may want to take a couple of months and peruse the TV Tropes list of "So You Want To Write A..." links and examine the ones relevant to your science fiction novel/game. Such as:
