From the Bookshelf: The New Space Opera 2
May. 22nd, 2011 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAn additional good thing about going off on vacation is that, instead of plugging my way through videos and loading site after site online, I managed to read a good many books. Most of them came out of the ship's library, but despite having brought more volumes with me than I needed to, I did manage to read a few books of my own. One of those titles was an anthology of science fiction stories edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, "The New Space Opera 2." It had been waiting to be read for at least a while; having taken an interest in the concept of "new space opera" through Vernor Vinge's "The Fire Upon the Deep," Iain M. Banks's "Consider Phlebas" and some of his other "Culture" novels, and a different anthology, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's "The Space Opera Renaissance," when I saw this particular book in the bookstore I bought it. It was only then, though, that I really picked up on the "2" in the title, and then of course I had to order the previous volume online and get through it first.
A single word trying to sum everything up did come to mind as I was reading, and that word was "fizzy." Detached from small extensions to "familiar" science-fictional universes, I navigated through advanced SF concepts to be grasped intuitively if at all in the service of adventurous tales, many of them seeming to involve "secret agents" of one sort of another instead of "military SF's" "the Battle of Trafalagar, or maybe Jutland, in space" (much less the more "visual," but that much more tricky to justify on anything more than a gut level, "the battle of Midway in space, only with the carriers also shooting at each other at point-blank range.") In saying that, I suppose I'm tempted to think back to the joking definition "science fiction is what I point at when I say science fiction," if perhaps with the term to be defined replaced.
There did seem to be something of a difference to me between the first volume and this one. In the first, an awful lot of the stories seemed to take place at slower-than-light speeds; in the second, things were a bit more relaxed (if, of course, "relaxed" applies to "speeding up"), something I'm more than willing to let "space opera" encompass. With the first volume, I suppose I did waver between "it's more interesting to describe elaborate yet current physics-respecting methods of interstellar travel than just saying 'wormhole' and moving on" and wondering if science fiction has really worked itself along to a level where big parts of what used to be in SF's toolkit can no longer be accepted (or if, perhaps, "visual" science fiction has picked those pieces up in such a casual way that "written" science fiction has to go one better now). I didn't really mind missing out on that particular problem, but I suppose I can note that some of the more resonant pieces for me in the second volume did still take place at slower-than-light speeds... even if their characters were now "more than human."
With that said, I suppose I can move on to a certain awareness of how a number of stories in this second volume seemed themselves "aware" of "space opera conventions." Cory Doctorow's "To Go Boldly" would seem the prime example, and did lead to a thought or two about how his particular focus (or tics, or obsessions, or at least my own unfounded impressions) would make it a natural fit for him. From there, it was easy enough to see the same sort of thing in Bruce Sterling's "Join the Navy and See the Worlds," although I did wonder if Sterling was much tackling "the Space Age" as "space opera." There's even an apparently non-hostile reference to "the Force" in another story. A different one features a character who's abducted from Earth in the 1960s (but by very different aliens than the bog-standard "flying saucer" variety) and returns at around the present day to complain about how there isn't enough stuff in orbit; I happened to have noticed that basic complaint in a story in a different anthology. On another somewhat different note, one story might come the closest of the volume to featuring a full "space navy," but doesn't seem quite like "military SF" in that the ship's computer takes an interest in Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.
The anthology was enjoyable, as I've said. However, I suppose that in reading the small biographies at the beginning of each story, I did begin to feel my disconnection from "written SF" (pretty much because I'm wary discussions of it will badmouth Star Wars in passing, if also because the Science Fiction Book Club has shut down) more strongly.
A single word trying to sum everything up did come to mind as I was reading, and that word was "fizzy." Detached from small extensions to "familiar" science-fictional universes, I navigated through advanced SF concepts to be grasped intuitively if at all in the service of adventurous tales, many of them seeming to involve "secret agents" of one sort of another instead of "military SF's" "the Battle of Trafalagar, or maybe Jutland, in space" (much less the more "visual," but that much more tricky to justify on anything more than a gut level, "the battle of Midway in space, only with the carriers also shooting at each other at point-blank range.") In saying that, I suppose I'm tempted to think back to the joking definition "science fiction is what I point at when I say science fiction," if perhaps with the term to be defined replaced.
There did seem to be something of a difference to me between the first volume and this one. In the first, an awful lot of the stories seemed to take place at slower-than-light speeds; in the second, things were a bit more relaxed (if, of course, "relaxed" applies to "speeding up"), something I'm more than willing to let "space opera" encompass. With the first volume, I suppose I did waver between "it's more interesting to describe elaborate yet current physics-respecting methods of interstellar travel than just saying 'wormhole' and moving on" and wondering if science fiction has really worked itself along to a level where big parts of what used to be in SF's toolkit can no longer be accepted (or if, perhaps, "visual" science fiction has picked those pieces up in such a casual way that "written" science fiction has to go one better now). I didn't really mind missing out on that particular problem, but I suppose I can note that some of the more resonant pieces for me in the second volume did still take place at slower-than-light speeds... even if their characters were now "more than human."
With that said, I suppose I can move on to a certain awareness of how a number of stories in this second volume seemed themselves "aware" of "space opera conventions." Cory Doctorow's "To Go Boldly" would seem the prime example, and did lead to a thought or two about how his particular focus (or tics, or obsessions, or at least my own unfounded impressions) would make it a natural fit for him. From there, it was easy enough to see the same sort of thing in Bruce Sterling's "Join the Navy and See the Worlds," although I did wonder if Sterling was much tackling "the Space Age" as "space opera." There's even an apparently non-hostile reference to "the Force" in another story. A different one features a character who's abducted from Earth in the 1960s (but by very different aliens than the bog-standard "flying saucer" variety) and returns at around the present day to complain about how there isn't enough stuff in orbit; I happened to have noticed that basic complaint in a story in a different anthology. On another somewhat different note, one story might come the closest of the volume to featuring a full "space navy," but doesn't seem quite like "military SF" in that the ship's computer takes an interest in Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.
The anthology was enjoyable, as I've said. However, I suppose that in reading the small biographies at the beginning of each story, I did begin to feel my disconnection from "written SF" (pretty much because I'm wary discussions of it will badmouth Star Wars in passing, if also because the Science Fiction Book Club has shut down) more strongly.