From the Bookshelf: The New Space Opera 2

An 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... )