Scan barcode
A review by mburnamfink
The Space Opera Renaissance by David G. Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer
4.0
The Space Opera Renaissance is the kind of book that deserves to drift in stately orbit around a gas giant while "Also sprach Zarathustra" plays. It's a massive tome of a book, 941 pages, 32 stories, close to 90 years of science fiction history. There are some very good stories in this collection. With this much diversity, you're sure to find something that you love, and the authors read like a who's who's of the field.
Space opera has always been something of an archaism, as science fiction tried to carve out a niche as serious literature. While early pioneers like E.E. 'Doc' Smith and Olaf Stapledon could imagine mythologies of cosmological scope, much of the early pulps were filled with poorly written adventurous tripe, the 'horse operas' of cheap western fiction redone on the Red Hills of Mars, rather than the Dakotas. Serious science fiction in the vein of Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction could discuss the engineering challenges of rocketry as a venue for a kind of Heinlein-Clarke 'competent hero', a man handier with a slide rule than a ray blaster. New Wave and cyberpunk turned defiant against outer space, conquering new realms of inner space and cyberspace. Yet the flame remained alive in the hands of M. John Harrison, and then a host of British retro-scifi writers (Banks, Hamilton, Reynolds) who imagined new kinds of post-imperial space opera. As fans, we love space opera, even as we're embarrassed by it.
Yet there's also an unbalanced quality to this collection, editorial choices that I found puzzling. No stories by Doc Smith or M. John Harrison, despite their status as grandmasters of the genre. Cramer and Hartwell use the page count to include complete novellas, but the early stories are some very rough pulps that outstay their welcome. Lois McMaster Bujold is represented by "Weatherman", which is a fantastic character study but entirely planetbound, while David Drake gets a fragment of a story about a Roman legion kidnapped and used as intersteller mercenaries, another mud bound adventure.
Space opera is a big tent of a sub-genre, but if I were to define it, it'd be about a certain grandeur of scope, of clashing planets and galaxies at stake, as well as a larger-than-life quality of its characters. It's a big universe, but with a fast spaceship, they can make it their own. There's lot of room to construct, parody, deconstruct the genre, to generate that necessary sensation of awe. There's a spot for a really great thematic collection, one that links the history of the genre to it's future, and frustratingly this is not that. I doubt anyone knew more about science-fiction than Hartwell, and Cramer was his partner of almost 20 years. So it's not enough for them to pick good stories. I want perfect stories, and this collection is about 500 pages overweight for perfection.
Space opera has always been something of an archaism, as science fiction tried to carve out a niche as serious literature. While early pioneers like E.E. 'Doc' Smith and Olaf Stapledon could imagine mythologies of cosmological scope, much of the early pulps were filled with poorly written adventurous tripe, the 'horse operas' of cheap western fiction redone on the Red Hills of Mars, rather than the Dakotas. Serious science fiction in the vein of Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction could discuss the engineering challenges of rocketry as a venue for a kind of Heinlein-Clarke 'competent hero', a man handier with a slide rule than a ray blaster. New Wave and cyberpunk turned defiant against outer space, conquering new realms of inner space and cyberspace. Yet the flame remained alive in the hands of M. John Harrison, and then a host of British retro-scifi writers (Banks, Hamilton, Reynolds) who imagined new kinds of post-imperial space opera. As fans, we love space opera, even as we're embarrassed by it.
Yet there's also an unbalanced quality to this collection, editorial choices that I found puzzling. No stories by Doc Smith or M. John Harrison, despite their status as grandmasters of the genre. Cramer and Hartwell use the page count to include complete novellas, but the early stories are some very rough pulps that outstay their welcome. Lois McMaster Bujold is represented by "Weatherman", which is a fantastic character study but entirely planetbound, while David Drake gets a fragment of a story about a Roman legion kidnapped and used as intersteller mercenaries, another mud bound adventure.
Space opera is a big tent of a sub-genre, but if I were to define it, it'd be about a certain grandeur of scope, of clashing planets and galaxies at stake, as well as a larger-than-life quality of its characters. It's a big universe, but with a fast spaceship, they can make it their own. There's lot of room to construct, parody, deconstruct the genre, to generate that necessary sensation of awe. There's a spot for a really great thematic collection, one that links the history of the genre to it's future, and frustratingly this is not that. I doubt anyone knew more about science-fiction than Hartwell, and Cramer was his partner of almost 20 years. So it's not enough for them to pick good stories. I want perfect stories, and this collection is about 500 pages overweight for perfection.