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The New Space Opera 2

Edited by

Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan

For Jessica and Sophie,

who are far more likely to see the stars than me

Contents

Introduction

Utriusque Cosmi • Robert Charles Wilson

The Island • Peter Watts

Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance • John Kessel

To Go Boldly • Cory Doctorow

The Lost Princess Man • John Barnes

Defect • Kristine Kathryn Rusch

To Raise a Mutiny Betwixt Yourselves • Jay Lake

Shell Game • Neal Asher

Punctuality • Garth Nix

Inevitable • Sean Williams

Join the Navy and See the Worlds • Bruce Sterling

Fearless Space Pirates of The Outer Rings • Bill Willingham

From the Heart • John Meaney

Chameleons • Elizabeth Moon

The Tenth Muse • Tad Williams

Cracklegrackle • Justina Robson

The Tale of the Wicked • John Scalzi

Catastrophe Baker and A Canticle For Leibowitz • Mike Resnick

The Far End of History • John C. Wright

Other Books by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan

Credits

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

The true heart of science fiction has always been the space-opera story; the thrilling adventure tale of powerful rocket ships, dashing heroes, and far frontiers—stories of immense scope and scale, color and action, taking us to the ultimate limits of both time and space. Two years ago, when compiling the book that became The New Space Opera, we looked to present a snapshot of how the space-opera story had evolved from what Bob Tucker had in 1941 contemptuously defined as “the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn” to one of the most popular forms of science fiction of the eighties, the nineties, and the oughts, and one where much of the cutting-edge work in today’s genre is being done.

As we noted in the introduction to that book, starting in the early 1970s, writers on both sides of the Atlantic (Iain M. Banks, M. John Harrison, Barrington Bayley, Samuel R. Delany, Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge), building on the work of earlier eras, from the twenties to the sixties, by such great pioneers as Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, A. E.

van Vogt, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, and many others, started experimenting with what had in some ways by then become an old and threadbare form, investing it with a much more rigorous approach to science, a greater depth of characterization, better writing, and an increased sensitivity to political realities. While “old space opera” continued—and continues—to be written, part of the established spectrum of science fiction, this “new space opera” caught the imagination of the reading public, and to this day many writers identified with the form are among the bestselling authors in the field.

Our intention with compiling The New Space Opera was not to assemble a movement-defining book—a task that still remains to be done, in our opinion—but to map at least some of the territory covered by this sprawling (and sometimes contradictory: the line between New Space Opera and Old Space Opera, and just plain science fiction, for that matter, is often subjective and hard to draw, and no two people draw it in the same place) new form, providing a broad range of stories by some of the best writers working in the field at the time. And, of course, to provide as entertaining an anthology as possible in the process, one that would make the readers think that their money had not been ill-spent. Much ink was spilled over the result, with some critics drawing lines in the sand and declaring that some of the stories in the book were not really New Space Opera by their definition, while other critics drew other lines in the sand and came to exactly opposite conclusions about what was canonical and what was not.