This is a huge anthology, a not quite academic attempt to document just what people mean when they call a work of science fiction “space opera” and how that’s changed over the last 80 years. By document, I mean the husband and wife team of David G. Hartwell and Katherine Kramer have assembled 32 short stories and novellas that are among the best examples of the subgenre (or represent key authors) and added an introductory essay along with brief introductions for each piece.
The Space Opera Renaissance is massive, nearly a 1,000 pages, and I was fortunate to have TS1 buy it for me as a holiday present; okay, I put it on my gift list, she wouldn’t have known about it otherwise, but it was a great gift. The stories reach back to the late 1920s, before the name science fiction even came into use, and early ’30s with Edmond Hamilton’s “The Star Stealers” and “The Prince of Space” by Jack Williamson, both excellent examples of spacelanes shoot-em ups and the clear progenitors of Star Trek and Star Wars.
Up until about the end of World War II–and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan–this type of story was the stock in trade of the low end pulp magazines, but would rarely be found in ‘prestige’ publications like Astounding Scienc Fiction (later renamed Analog Science Fiction and Fact, under which it still publishes today). Plays to the masses, rather than quality. Williamson, amazingly, remained an active, respected sf writer well into his 90s, almost to the day he died last November, winning the Hugo for Best Novella in 2001 at age 94!
Space opera, tales of more than human heros saving the day/planet/humanity/galaxy from destruction by a combination of intelligence, wit and military might, fell into even greater disrepute over the next decades, becoming almost an epithet and reaching its nadir at the hands of the British New Wave authors of the 1960s such as Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard. These writers, along with Americans like Damon Knight, urged their peers to turn away from fleets of spaceships and evil aliens and towards an examination of the near future and how we might face the dangers dangling over us. The anthology, with sparse pickings, has only three stories from that time; I particularly enjoyed the highly influential Samuel R. Delany offering, “Empire Star”.
In the wake of Star Trek and Star Wars writers began returning to galactic-level action until today space opera, having subsumed the criticisms, has become perhaps the dominant subgenre of science fiction. Not only in sales, which I’ve little doubt that all the books set in the two Star universes prove, but in quality of authors and work. Almost all of my current favorite writers, like Stross, Hamilton, Macleod, Banks, Bujold, work largely in this form; heck, for many years I read pretty much every Star Trek novel Pocket Books put out.
So the bulk of The Space Opera Renaissance is pieces from the last 30 years, reasonable as the author’s stated aim is to show the breadth of this rebirth. Hartwell and Kramer include lots of the big names: David Brin, David Drake, Dan Simmons, David Webber, Catherine Asaro, Allen Steele, Gregory Benford, Don Kingsley, Sarah Zettel, Robert Reed, Paul McAuley, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, and each of my fave five.
Most of these stories are excellent and the styles range over a broad territory, providing coverage of just how much diversity exists in today’s space opera tent. The Webber, for instance, gives the origin of his hugely popular Honor Harrington character (I suppose, I haven’t read any of the books, though I have read his Dahak trilogy) and the Bujold does similar for Miles Vorkosigian, and I have read all of that series. Simmons, Steele, Reed and McAuley are all new reads for me, mostly excellent.
Also included are Michael Moorcock, who falls on the Leigh Brackett fantasy side of the ledger, and hence doesn’t appeal to me and even Ursula K. Leguin who, I think, really does not belong here. “The Shobies’ Story” is a good one, but isn’t space opera unless the definition is stretched so thin that it has little meaning; I very much enjoyed Ansaro’s quite alien, award-winning novella but will say the same about its inclusion.
For my money this is an excellent book. If you aren’t familiar with all of the authors then this will introduce you to them painlessly and other stories, some you’ve surely read before, will bring back pleasant memories. I plan on reading more works of several.
highly recommended
BillSaysThis 