Today is January 20, which means it’s A. Merritt Day at the DMR Books Blog. For this celebration of ol’ Abe’s birthday, I decided to take a look at a rarely discussed aspect of A. Merritt: his influence on the first generation of ‘space opera’ authors.

The term 'space opera' has been used and abused a great deal since it was first coined eighty years ago. One can find a reasonably good account of its early history here and a look at the subgenre's definition here.

For those who dislike hyperlinks, Space Opera is sci-fi high adventure on an interplanetary—or preferably, interstellar—scale. Exploding planets, mile-long spaceships and energy weapons are fairly standard, but not required. If a story features a ‘Galactic Empire’ or a ‘Galactic Patrol’ and spends much of its time doing actual space travel/combat, it’s probably space opera. In pop culture terms, Star Trek, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica are all space operas.

What does A. Merritt, who hardly ever wrote a tale featuring a spaceship, have to do with Space Opera? Just look at this list from my 2018 blog post, "A. Merritt: Lord of Fantasy":

"Merritt's reach was vast. Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Max Brand/Frederick Faust, Edmond Hamilton, August Derleth, CL Moore, Jack Williamson, Leah Bodine Drake, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, RH Barlow, Hugo Gernsback, E.E. "Doc" Smith, A.E. van Vogt, Leigh Brackett, Robert Bloch, Poul Anderson, (...) Henry Kuttner (...) -- all admired him."

Many of those listed were stalwarts of Weird Tales. Just as many--including several crossovers--were founders of the Space Opera SF subgenre. I'm talking about Doc 'Lensman' Smith, Ed 'World-Wrecker' Hamilton and Jack 'Legion of Space' Williamson. Hamilton, along with his wife, Leigh Brackett, and the other Space Opera power couple, Kuttner and Moore, formed the 'Big Four' of Space Opera, according to G.W. Thomas. Toss in A.E. van Vogt and Poul 'Flandry of Terra' Anderson and call it good.

So, what did Merritt do to influence all those writers? Other than Burroughs, Merritt was the biggest name in the SF field. There really was no ‘fantasy’ category at the time, which was lumped in with SF. Merritt himself considered The Moon Pool, The Metal Monster, The Face in the Abyss and Dwellers in the Mirage all to be sci-fi.

One thing that Space Opera and Merritt’s tales share is the breadth of imagination and the fast-paced sweep of the narrative. Mundanity and navel-gazing are kept to a minimum. The ‘lost worlds’ found in The Moon Pool and The Metal Monster—while situated on Earth—might as well be on another planet or in another galaxy.

Finally, Merritt actually wrote Space Opera himself. In early 1933, Julius Schwartz and Ray Palmer, publishers of The Science Fiction Digest fanzine, came up with the idea for an episodic, round-robin (interplanetary) Space Opera novel named Cosmos. They roped in various popular SF writers like Doc Smith and Ed Hamilton, but by far their biggest catch was Merritt. He contributed two chapters. More on ‘The Cosmos Project’ can be found here.

A special note should be made of Merritt’s influence on E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith. Smith is, basically, the Robert E. Howard of Space Opera. His The Skylark of Space (1928) is widely looked upon as the first true Space Opera novel. Smith’s ‘Lensman’ series is considered absolutely foundational to the subgenre. In one Lensman novel, Smith actually quotes a line from Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage.

Edmond Hamilton, who reckoned Merritt to be his all-time favorite author, is also considered to be the true originator of Space Opera by some. G.W. Thomas argues that side of the controversy here.

As much as Merritt influenced almost the entire First Dynasty of Sword-and-Sorcery, his legacy in regard to Space Opera is, perhaps, even more profound. When you can point to Conan on the one hand and Star Wars on the other, you have a legacy worth taking pride in.