The Space Opera Renaissance edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

The term “space opera,” as David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer explain in the introduction to their new anthology, The Space Opera Renaissance, has a long, tangled history. It was originally used as an insult, to describe the bad space pot boilers published in the lesser magazines, not the space stories that were liked by many people, such as those by E.E. Smith or Jack Williamson (works that most of us today would point two as the early classics of space opera). During the 1960, the writers of the new wave both used the term a bit more widely as they tried to put an end to that type of SF. But the form survived. Space adventure – and really, space opera is a type of space adventure – remained popular, and in fact is often the core of the genre. Moreover, as the 1980s and 1990s progressed, space opera expanded and it became an area where literary ambitious writers such as Iain Banks would write. As Hartwell and Cramer say in the introduction, “What is centrally important is that this permits a writer to embark on a science fiction project that is ambitious in both commercial and literary forms.”

The Space Opera Renaissance explores the history of space opera as we now define it. It includes stories from the 1930s (under the heading “Redefined Writers”; that is, the stories weren’t necessarily considered space opera at the time, but are now looked upon that way) though the space opera of today. It’s over 900 pages long and contains 32 stories, several of them quite long. A few may push your personal definition of space opera, but all help lay out the boundaries of the sub-genre. Most of the major writers of space opera are included; those that aren’t are because their space opera efforts have been novels, not shorter works (Vernor Vinge is a good example here).

The first group of stories, “Redefined Writers,” are by Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, Leigh Brackett, and Clive Jackson (the latter’s story is an amusing send-up of space adventure stories). Hamilton’s “The Star Stealers” is the only story in the collection that I thought was sub-par. It’s a rather stilted story about aliens who are approaching our galaxy to steal our sun and how the human race fights them off. It does help to define the genre, and Hamilton was an important early writer, but it’s not that good of a story. Williamson’s “The Prince of Space,” while also very dated, is much more readable. It’s not one of Williamson’s best, but it’s an enjoyable story.

Brackett’s “Enchantress of Venus” is the real gem of the early group. It’s a type of story that I usually didn’t consider space opera. It’s a planetary adventure story, along the lines of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars stories. But this type of story does fit some definitions of “space opera.” As the editors note, the categories of “space opera” and “science fantasy” have sometimes in their history been distinct, at other times merged. But, whoever you look at it, this is a great example of this type of story. Brackett is a good writer; her Erik John Stark stories, of which this is one, are colorful adventures set in a solar system where Venus is a world of swamps, Mars one of deserts, and so forth. They combine romantic adventure (“romantic” in this case in the broad sense of the word, not the narrower sense it’s often used in today) with fantastic settings. One way to picture these stories is they are what Burroughs might have produced if he could write much better than he did. This story, set beneath a gaseous ocean of Venus where an ancient race rules, is one I hadn’t read before. It’s great fun, and, like so many stories in the book, makes me want to go out and read or re-read other works by the authors.

The section “Draftees,” though it’s actually labeled “Draftees (1960s),” contains three stories from the 1950s and 1960s, by authors that are now pointed to as some of the early starting points of the space opera revival. All three are very good. Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon” is typical Smith, colorful, well written, and very strange. Humans travel between the stars, but they have found that something lives in subspace, something they picture as “dragons,” that can destroy ships that venture away from the light of stars (which keeps the dragons away). Humans can’t fight the dragons alone, so they partner telepathically with cats, who have much faster reflexes, and who see the subspace creatures as “rats.”

Samuel Delany befuddled a number of the new wave proponents. In many ways, he was doing exactly what they were advocating. He was literarily ambitious, he used new and fresh techniques, his prose was multilayered. But he used these techniques to produce several space opera, which they disliked. In fact, Delany, more than perhaps anyone else, helped launch the literary space opera in the 1960s. His novel Nova is perhaps the famous example of this, but his short novel “Empire Star,” included in this collection, is another fine choice. What can be more central to space opera than a young man with a mission to travel across the galaxy to help free a race of slaves. It has a number of interesting twists and turns, and from a plot perspective is classic space opera. But it’s narrative style is new, incorporating several modernist (or, really, post-modernist) techniques along the way to address the readers. It’s also structured into a nice package, where Delany cleverly ties up the various loose ends by story’s end. It remains a great read, and is most reminiscent of Alfred Bester’s great novels.

From here we move into the beginnings of the real modern renaissance of space opera, with such writes as David Brin, Lois McMaster Bujold, and of course Iain Banks. Brin’s story is set in his Uplift universe, and it can be compared to Stephen Baxter’s “The Great Game” later in the volume to illuminate some of the key differences between much of American space opera and much British space opera: this is especially telling because Brin and Baxter are far less overtly political than many of their counterparts such as David Webber, Ian Banks, or Ken MacLeod. Both Brin and Baxter set their stories in a future universe where there are massive problems and wars (in fact, it would be far more comfortable to live in Banks’s Culture than in Brin’s Uplift universe). But, Brin has a very upbeat view of humanity. The whole premise of the Uplift universe is that humans uplifted dolphins and chimps and made them partners in their expansion into the universe – unlike very other major culture in the galaxy that uplifts races, then makes them subservient clients for many centuries thereafter. In “Temptation,” the situation looks bleak for the dolphins (and for the human/dolphin/chimp civilization in general, since they are at war), but the underlying feeling is that the dolphins are by and large basically decent and will do the right thing (and, in the larger universe, that the humans are by and large decent and will do the right thing, having outgrown a number of their problems). Baxter’s story, by contrast, is set in his Xelee universe. There is a short-term optimism, in that humanity has overcome major scientific and technical challenges, has overcome several alien subjugation, and in the end continues to move out into the universe, becoming one of the two major civilizations in the galaxy. But here, humans are jealous of the Xelee, who are technologically superior yet ignore the humans. Humanity views the Xelee as a force they must someday overcome. In “The Great Game,” the humans position themselves to go to war against the Xeelee. The story ends at the start of the war, but those who have read the rest of Baxter’s future history know the final result: humanity unknowingly distracts the Xeelee enough that they are unable to save the universe. Thus, mankind’s envy and desire to rule eventually brings about the end of the universe for life as we know it.

Dan Simmons isn’t optimistic in the same way that Brin is (in fact, Simmons can often be quite dark), but “Orphans of the Helix” presents us with a group of future humans who act with basic dignity and morality in the midst of what can best be described as a classic space opera situation. A space ship carrying a large group of humans in hibernation drops out of supralight speed when the AIs controlling the ship pick up a distress beacon. They find a civilization built on a star-girdling tree that’s being savages by a berserker-like machine that, comet-like, returns at long intervals and wreaks havoc on the civilization. It comes from around a nearby giant star (this is a double-star system), and the assumption is that it must be a left-over war machine, since that star has no inhabitable planets. The starship could destroy it, but they face an issue: what if that machine is still serving a purpose and their choice would actually result in genocide. So they commit to investigation before destruction. Although Simmons has received a lot of attention for his novels, he is also a great short story writer, and this is a very good one.

The characters of Peter Hamilton’s “Escape Route” likewise encounter an alien artifact: in this case, the remains of a large space ship. The human ship that encounters it is supposedly on a prospecting mission, though in actually those who hired it are terrorists secretly looking for uranium to create a dirty bomb. The lead terrorist is at first unwilling to explore the ship, though his second comes to realize that what they find in that ship will change everything and that the economic chaos that will follow won’t be a good time to be an independent society that gained it’s independence by terrorism. Hamilton, like Simmons, is most known for his novels – in Hamilton’s case, for very, very long novels – but his short fiction is some of his best work. This is a good example of it.

Donald Kingsbury’s “The Survivor” is set in Larry Niven’s Known Space universe, during the Man/Kzin wars. It’s lead character is a cowardly kzin (cowardly by kzin standards, in any case), who eventually becomes the trainer of the alien slaves that the kzin had originally overthrown to become a space going power. These aliens – The Jotoki, who have five separate brains that form a group consciousness of sorts-- are a marvelous alien construct. The lead character – who the Jotoki call “Mellow Yellow” – is far more humane to them than the typical kzin, even becoming friendly with them. Kingsbury uses this to draw the reader in, to have the reader sympathize with and even begin to like “Mellow Yellow.” This increases the impact of the final part of the story, making it even more unsetting, as “Mellow Yellow” is given control over a group of captured humans, who experiments with, trying to make them more docile. This is a remarkable examination of the psychology of two alien species – one, the kzin, who we think we can understand because they are “big cats” but whom we ultimately don’t. It’s also proof that there are times when someone can write a great story set in someone else’s universe.

Gregory Benford’s “A Worm in the Well” is a fine hard SF story, but it’s one that I’m not sure of why it’s here. It’s a hard SF problem solving story, in which a young woman has to retrieve a worm hole from the sun to pay off her debts. It focuses on how she solves the problem. In the introduction to the story, Hartwell and Cramer talk about it “knowingly playing with the adventure traditions of space piracy,” but I don’t see that. But it was a good story, so can’t really complain much about its inclusion.

The final section of the book, “Next Wave,” covers the most recent space opera. In their introduction to Alastair Reynolds’s “Spirey and the Queen,” Hartwell and Cramer say, “It has some of the space-war sizzle and true weirdness that we see as a primary appeal of late-model space opera.” Weirdness – in many cases, a post-singularity sort of weirdness, in other cases (such as in Stephen Baxter’s stories), a mixture of the truly alien and cutting-edge physics (a good recent quantum physics book can be as weird as much of the strangest space opera) – is a big part of much, though not all, modern space opera. This weirdness isn’t new – it can be found in the works of Alfred Bester, Cordwainer Smith, and Bruce Sterling (Sterling’s Schismatrix were important developments along the road to modern space opera, and I’m surprised the current volume didn’t include one.)

Reynold’s “Spirey and the Queen” is certainly strange. It involves a war in a system where planets have not yet formed. The war is fought mostly by artificial constructs called “wasps,” and what humans there are have been genetically modified (some have tails like fish instead of legs, for example). The weapons of war include not only massive kinetic and energy weapons, but cyber weapons that can affect the enemy’s psyche. The story involves one ship’s attempt to capture and destroy a ship of traitors, and what they uncover to be the truth. It’s fast past and full of page after page of fascinating alieness. Reynolds has produced several of the best space opera novels of the new century, but he has also produced a number of good short stories, including this one.

Charlie Stross’s space operas have mostly been of novel length – Iron Sunrise and Singularity Sky. “Bear Trap” appears to fit into the universe of those novels (I say “seems” because there seem to be some ideas in common – the Festival, for example, but I’d have to go back to the two novels to see if truly ties in, or if these are ideas that Stross later re-used in different ways. In some ways, this story reminds me of some of the Accelerando stories: there is the same breathtaking future shock one experiences in those, the same way in which the worlds of humans and data are thoroughly intertwined. The story itself – beyond the background details – is entertaining enough, but rather minor. This is a story to read for the details. It’s a lot of fun, though not up to Stross’s later work.

This is a great collection, and a worthy successor to The Hard Science Fiction Renaissance. Highly recommended.

[Reviewer’s confession: This volume is over 900 pages long and contains 32 stories. It’s also very heavy, so my usual way of reading it is to read a story or two or three (depending upon length), then read a (literally) lighter book, then come back to this one. At this point, I actually still have about another five stories to read (I’ve been skipping about a bit) and have been writing this review as I go along. But, since we have company tomorrow night, followed by a convention (Confluence, our local convention), followed by more houseguests for much of the next week or so (with only a few days in between), I wanted to post this to my blog. If the final few stories deserve special comment or cause me to revise my views, I’ll update the review. I’ll probably also post the review on Amazon when I’ve read the last few stories.]