Stockhausen. Karlheinz Stockhausen By David Paul - Orginally published in SECONDS #44. His father killed in combat, his institutionalized mother put to death by the authorities, he was a stretcher-bearer at sixteen treating casualties in a military hospital right behind the front lines.
As the war wound down, the huge red cross painted on the roof of the hospital proved too tempting for Allied air raiders to resist. With no time to bury the dead, his job became piling fresh corpses on top of old ones. Some bodies showed signs of life, but there was no time to check them out - they were buried under yet more bodies. What doesn't kill us might make us stronger if we're strong or smart enough in the first place. Fortunately, KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN, an essential pioneer of Electronic Music, prevailed, although his wartime experiences would have withered a less hardy soul.
Stockhausen. The Greatest Science Fiction Opera Composer in History. Actually there quite a few science fiction operas, Philip Glass composed one called The Making of the Representative of Planet 8, based on a libretto by Doris Lessing, about a civilisation that, guided by an extraterrestrial intelligence, learns to accept mortality and evolve into a 'collective universal soul'.
It has unfortunately never been made available on cd. There is Howard Shore's opera of The Fly, that was directed by David Cronenberg and there's an opera adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale. Lorin Maazel composed a not very well received opera of 1984, so the less said about that the better. And let's not forget about U, the first opera with a libretto in Klingon.