Space Opera (Rich Horton, editor; Diamond Book Distributors) starts off with an introduction that gives a historical overview of the evolution of the term “space opera” from its disreputable beginnings in the 1940s to the self-conscious modern revival of the subgenre after 1985.
It’s a pretty good summary with a few odd lapses. Missing, for example, is the informative detail that the term was coined by analogy with “soap opera”, but in its original context probably owed more to the now near-extinct term “horse opera” for a formulaic Western. Also, given the editor’s cogent argument that space opera never really went away during the pre-revival years, it seems inexplicable that he fails to mention such obvious exemplars as The Mote In God’s Eye (1975) and Startide Rising (1983), among others.
But these are nearly quibbles, relatively speaking. The larger lapse is that the editor of this anthology never engages the question of what “space opera” actually is – that is, what traits define it relative to other subgenres of science fiction. The consequence of this lack is that the stories in this anthology, while sometimes quite brilliant individually, add up to rather less than the sum of their parts, and it can be difficult to discern why any particular story was selected.
Looking at the first two stories…Yoon Ha Lee’s The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars opens the anthology with brilliant flourishes of Vancian baroqueness that delighted me and made me want to read everything else she has written as fast as I can get my hands on the works, but it is not easy to see how it is tied to “space opera” other than by a sense of time-depth and the presence of interstellar war in the background of the story. Still, it has a far better claim than James Patrick Kelly’s The Wreck of the Goodspeed – a quirky tale of religion, adolescent horniness, and a rogue AI that fails every test for space-opera traits I can think of.
And what are those traits? Space opera, like SF, is a radial category with different examples loosely bound to (and sometimes failing to exhibit one or more of) certain core traits. A fascination with large-scale conflict narratives is certainly one – the clashes of empires and civilizations and species are a recurring theme. Going with this is a cinematic, wide-screen quality of narrative; vastnesses of space, depth of time.
Much space opera overlaps in its tropes and settings with military SF; but where military SF tends to focus on the military life, the small-unit action and the psychology of command and obedience, space opera is more interested in grand strategy and big implications. Compare The Mote In God’s Eye (1975), an archetype of un-selfconscious pre-revival space opera (as well as a cracking good first contact novel and a puzzle story in the classic Campbellian mode), with Starship Troopers (1961), an archetype of military SF; the contrasts are clear here. It is also instructive to consider David Weber’s Honorverse novels, which are very near the midpoint of the continuum between these two subgenres. The subject of my last review, Trial by Fire, sits somewhere a bit outboard of the Honorverse novels towards the space-opera end.
Finally and most importantly, though space opera participates in SF’s affirmation of a rationally knowable universe and often contains elements of the classic sort of hard-SFnal idea puzzle, space opera has a very different emotional tone. The best puzzle stories have the cerebral quality of a locked-room murder mystery; the worst are lifeless think pieces full of talking heads. By contrast, the best space operas trade in grand themes of individual heroism, adventure, villainy, courage, adversity, betrayal, and triumph; the worst are over-predictable and mindlessly violent. Where that sort of thalamic charge is absent, space opera is not.
Alas, there is no such structural or thematic analysis even suggested by this sequence of stories. Gwyneth Jones’s Saving Tiamat, again, has nothing to do with any recognizable trait of space opera – the fact that it’s about cannibalism, assassination, and (arguably) dark villainy is insufficient for what is ultimately a rather bloodless (though well-executed) outing.
Gareth L. Powell’s Six Lights off Green Scar is, as its title alone manages to suggest, much more like it. Smaller-screen space-opera, here, with the touch of noir these sometimes have – the burnt-out interstellar explorer, the newshound hungry for a scoop. You know from the first moment this will be no cerebral, claustrophilic puzzle-piece; shit’s going to get thalamically real out there, and there will be violence and heroism and betrayal and at least the possibility of redemption. It’s not necessarily the best story in the anthology, but it’s the first to truly resonate with the anthology’s title – the first one can properly call “operatic”.
But Greg Egan’s Glory swerves away from opera again, big time. I’m a huge fan of Egan’s work, but how anyone can read a story that’s half about reconstructing mathematical theorems from a dead alien civilization and half mockery of human primate politics and think “space opera” is beyond me.
Chris Willrich’s The Mote Dancer and the Firelife zigzags back in the direction of space opera (almost any direction would do that, after Egan) but never really gets there. The setting has space-operatic potential, but a psychology-centered plot about a woman resolving her grief for a dead lover really doesn’t qualify even when one of them has gills and the other is an irritating ghost in a cybermachine.
Michael Flynn’s On Rickety Thistlewaite is a short excerpt from his gloriously space-operatic Spiral Arm sequence (The January Dancer and sequels). Go read the novels; they are odd, poetic, grandiloquent, and unique. Here for the second time we are clearly on theme, though the excerpted part does not show this as clearly as it might.
By contrast, Una McCormack’s War Without End suggests perversely bad judgment about what belongs in an anthology of ‘space opera’. Clue: a sour, brooding, and involuted story like something out of a bad New Wave anthology from forty years ago not only does not belong, it is a near-perfect antithesis of what does. (I will further note that if I truly wanted to wallow in this kind of depressive crud, I would just read literary fiction and have done with SF.)
David Moles’s Finisterra and Naomi Novik’s Seven Years From Home are two quite well-crafted alien-ecology tales, and it is nice to see Ms. Novik showing some range beyond her Temeraire books, but what claim either has to be space opera is at best unclear. Kage Baker’s Plotters and Shooters is a slight bit of parody that suggests the editor misfiles anything as space opera that has asteroids and guns in it.
Paul Berger’s The Muse of Empires Lost is more like it. Space habs in the interiors of giant bioengineered squid, mating with starships; interstellar travellers carrying crossbows for good reasons; a backstory thousands of years deep; history manipulated by an immortal parasite; weird powers; betrayal, revenge, and triumph. The tone is properly epic even if the space battles are missing in this instance.
Boojum (Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette) continues the streak of spacegoing critters, adding space piracy and rayguns. This one starts with a space battle. It’s an obvious (and successful) homage to the pre-Campbellian space opera of the 1920s and 30s. Jay Lake’s Lehr, Rex follows it with ironic comment on some of space opera’s most persistent tropes then and since. Both of these belong in a space-opera anthology.
Justina Robson’s Cracklegrackle, alas, dissipates the momentum. Though a fine and inventive story in its own way, it has little of the set dressing and none of the tropes or (being mainly about failure and loss) the emotional tone of space opera.
Alastair Reynolds has been one of the bright lights of British neo-space-opera, and he demonstrates why in Hideaway. Deep time measured in kiloyears, forerunner artifacts of mysterious power, implacable enemies, one last desperate hope, heroism, and (I predicted this before finishing) a revelation. This is how it’s done. This is what space opera in a modern voice looks like.
Ian McLeod’s Isabel of the Fall is beautiful and sad and not quite as far from space opera as War Without End; at least it has its beauty, a sense of time-depth, and an epic, mythic quality to it. Even so it is not clear what the work is doing in this anthology.
Robert Reed’s Precious Mental, on the other hand, certainly belongs. Reed has always been good at suggesting vastness. This tale tells of a ship larger than worlds, a near-immortal with a crime in his past, an ancient enemy who may or may not be the hidden overlords of the known galaxy, and a quest for vital knowledge that sprawled over eight million years.
Aliette de Bodards’s Two Sisters In Exile rings a new change on the old idea that forgetting the cost of war may lead to a greater one. It is arguably only marginal as space opera, but harmonizes well with the stories here that fall definitely within that genre.
I may be unable to evaluate Lavie Tidhar’s Lode Stars properly because I was laughing too hard at the Illuminatus! references, but I think this is like the previous – marginal, but harmonizing well with stories nearer the heart of the space-opera subgenre.
Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade announces itself as space opera from its first page, but it’s deliberately a sort pf stylized oriental miniature of the form that averts the climactic battle or big reveal. Good nevertheless.
Ian McDonald’s The Tear finishes off the anthology in the grandest of space-operatic style, with heroism and obsession and revenge and the destruction of a civilization tied to a cosmic secret that may allow humanity to survive the end of this universe.
Having read through the entire contents, I now think Yoon Ha Lee’s opening piece a better fit at one edge of the radial category of space opera than I did. Still, even being generous about the edge cases, only about half these stories really qualify as space opera, and there’s one anti-space-opera for which the editor merits a swift kick in the behind.
I think anybody who is going to compile a theme anthology named after a subgenre of SF damned well ought to have and make explicit a better theory of what the subgenre is about than this. Certainly another critic or reader could argue with my characterization of the space-opera subgenre and my handling of edge cases, but the flat refusal to judge we see here is as silly as compiling an anthology titled “Murder Mystery” in which nigh on half the stories don’t feature a murder. It’s false advertising, it’s a cheat, and it’s disrespectful of conventions that have value both for reader and writer.
I am left happy with most of the stories but unhappy with the anthology. Shame on you, Rich Horton. You should have done better than this.