The New Space Opera Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Jack Dann,

  friend across two continents and two lifetimes,

  and

  for all those writers who have kept the paper spaceships

  flying across the years

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  SAVING TIAMAAT • Gwyneth Jones

  VERTHANDI’S RING • Ian McDonald

  HATCH • Robert Reed

  WINNING PEACE • Paul J. McAuley

  GLORY • Greg Egan

  MAELSTROM • Kage Baker

  BLESSED BY AN ANGEL • Peter F. Hamilton

  WHO’S AFRAID OF WOLF 359? • Ken Macleod

  THE VALLEY OF THE GARDENS • Tony Daniel

  DIVIDING THE SUSTAIN • James Patrick Kelly

  MINLA’S FLOWERS • Alastair Reynolds

  SPLINTERS OF GLASS • Mary Rosenblum

  REMEMBRANCE • Stephen Baxter

  THE EMPEROR AND THE MAULA • Robert Silverberg

  THE WORM TURNS • Gregory Benford

  SEND THEM FLOWERS • Walter Jon Williams

  ART OF WAR • Nancy Kress

  MUSE OF FIRE • Dan Simmons

  About the Authors

  Also by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan

  Copyright Notices

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ALL HAIL!

  “THE NEW SPACE OPERA carries us deep into the young, vital core of science fiction: adventure, wonder, far places, strange beings—friends. Two pseudopods up! Highly recommended!”

  Greg Bear

  “These grand adventures across space and time use the expected broad brush and huge canvas, but they aren’t our fathers’ or our grandfathers’ space opera. Modern themes approached with modern sensibilities add up to one of the best anthologies ever assembled by this most prolific of science fiction editors. Eighteen twenty-first century seers show that science fiction has not lost its power to evoke the sense of wonder.”

  Joe Haldeman

  “The roster of contributors includes some of contemporary sf’s brightest innovators. . . . In sheer breathtaking, mind-expanding scope, this collection of some of the finest tale-spinning the subgenre has to offer delivers hours of exhilarating reading.”

  Booklist

  “The new space opera shares with the old the interstellar sweep of events and exotic locales, but Dozois and Strahan’s all-original anthology shows how the genre’s purveyors have updated it, with rigorous science, well-drawn characters, and excellent writing.”

  Publishers Weekly (* Starred Review *)

  “Interstellar adventure continues to be at the heart of science-fiction. In THE NEW SPACE OPERA, editors Dozois and Strahan bring together some of the finest writers in the field—to take us once more to the stars.”

  Vernor Vinge

  INTRODUCTION

  It’s hard to imagine just what the world was like when space opera was born. There’s a lot of talk in science fiction circles these days about the Singularity, the point when technological progress sweeps off the scale and the world essentially turns to magic. It must have seemed like the world was living through a singularity in 1900. Alabama turned on the first electric streetlights in 1882, Marconi filed the patent for radio in 1896, and the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903: it was an exciting time when science and technology seemingly could take on and solve any problem. It was also a time of frontiers, of the full flowering of the British Empire, which was bent on “civilizing” much of the world, and of the settling of the American West. Jack Williamson, one of the pioneers of space opera, traveled west to New Mexico in a horse-drawn wagon in 1915, the same year that E. E. “Doc” Smith was writing the first great space opera novel, The Skylark of Space.

  But we get ahead of ourselves. We should probably first touch on what space opera is, before we discuss it in any detail. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes space opera as “colorful action-adventure stories of interplanetary or interstellar conflict,” while Jack Williamson in The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction refers to it as “the upbeat space adventure narrative that has become the mainspring of modern science fiction.” And, perhaps getting closer to the feel of it, Paul McAuley in Locus refers to “lushly romantic plots and the star-spanning empires to the light-year-spurning space ships, construction of any one of which would have exhausted the metal reserves of a solar system . . . stuffed full of faux-exotic color and bursting with contrived energy.” It is, in short, romantic adventure set in space and told on a grand scale. According to Brian Aldiss, writing in 1974, it must feature a starship, the most important of science fiction’s icons, which “unlocks the great bronze doors of space opera and lets mankind loose among all the other immensities.” It is the tale of godlike machines, all-embracing catastrophes, the immensities of the universe, and the endlessness of time. It is also, to go back to Williamson, the “expression of the mythic theme of human expansion against an unknown and uncommonly hostile frontier.”

  While proto–space operas like Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Space and Robert W. Cole’s The Struggle for Empire were published as early as the late 1890s, and pioneered many of the tropes of space opera, it’s difficult to make a useful connection between such works and what we know now as space opera. Instead we need to look at the pulp fiction magazines of the twenties and thirties for the first space operas. Ray Cummings, who’d worked with Thomas Edison as a personal assistant and technical writer, published one of the first space operas, Terrano the Conqueror, in 1925. He was soon followed by Edmond Hamilton, who published early space operas such as “Across Space” (1926) and “Crashing Suns” (1928) in Weird Tales: epic tales of alien invasion and cosmic adventure that were more interested in generating a thrilling sense of wonder than in the details of character and such. Perhaps the greatest of the early space opera writers, though, was E. E. “Doc” Smith, whose The Skylark of Space was published in 1928. It was followed by two sequels, and then by his hugely ambitious Lensman series, which featured ever larger spaceships, fantastically destructive weapons capable of wiping out entire galaxies, and even the first galactic empires. After Smith and Hamilton came John W. Campbell Jr. and Jack Williamson. Campbell, who would go on to greater prominence as the editor of Astounding/Analog, brought a new command of scientific language to space opera in the galaxy-spanning adventures Islands of Space, Invaders from the Infinite, and The Mightiest Machine, all of which were published in the early thirties. Williamson, who started publishing in 1919 and continued writing up until 2005, wrote a space opera flavored with an older kind of romanticism, turning to Shakespeare for the temple for Giles Habibula, the old soldier of space in his classic The Legion of Space.

  The 1940s saw something of a sea change in space opera. In 1941 Wilson Tucker coined the term “space opera” to refer to “the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving for that matter.” But, just as he did, more sophisticated, challenging work began to appear. Novels like C. L. Moore’s Judgement Night and A. E. van Vogt’s Earth’s Last Fortress were better written, more complicated, and even more romantic. And certainly by the time writers like Leigh Brackett and Jack Vance were writing space opera in the early 1950s the term “space opera” referred to far better work than Tucker would ever have imagined.

  It’s here, with Vance, Brackett, Charles Harness, Poul Anderson, Alfred Bester, and others creating enduring works of high quality that still might be considered space opera, that Brian Stableford, for example, draws something of a line. Writing in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, he observed that by the late 1950s a number of the tropes of space opera, such as the galactic-empire scenario, had become a standard
ized framework available for use in entirely serious science fiction: “Once this happened, the impression of vast scale so important to space opera was no longer the sole prerogative of straightforward adventure stories, and the day of the ‘classical’ space opera was done.” Throughout the early and mid sixties, the above-named writers, plus others such as James H. Schmitz, Murray Leinster, L. Sprague de Camp, Gordon R. Dickson, H. Beam Piper, Brian W. Aldiss, Larry Niven, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, James Tiptree Jr. and Samuel R. Delany (whose 1968 novel Nova can be seen as either the last important space opera novel of the sixties or one of the precursors of the New Space Opera of the nineties, depending on how you squint at it), would add an increase in both social/political sophistication and line-by-line writing craft to the form. Writers such as Cordwainer Smith, Alfred Bester (especially with his The Stars My Destination), Frank Herbert (whose famous Dune, in spite of a great deal of serious speculation about the future evolution of human societies, is fundamentally a baroque space opera on a scale not seen since the Superscience era of the twenties and thirties), and Delany took the form to new heights of complexity, flamboyance, and vividness, and radically upped the Imagination Ante for every other writer who wanted to sit down at the space opera table and credibly deal themselves into the game. Even Robert A. Heinlein, especially in “juvenile novels” such as Citizen of the Galaxy, The Star Beast, and Have Space Suit, Will Travel, could be said to be writing conceptually sophisticated space opera.

  By the late sixties and early seventies, however, perhaps because of the prominence of the “New Wave” revolution in SF, which concentrated on both introspective, stylistically “experimental” work and work with more immediate sociological and political “relevance” to the tempestuous social scene of the day, perhaps because of the discovery of scientific proof that the other planets of the solar system were not likely abodes for life (and so, it seemed, not interesting settings for adventure stories), perhaps because the now more widely understood limitations of Einsteinian relativity had come to make the idea of far-flung interstellar empires seem improbable at best, science fiction as a genre was tending to turn away from the space adventure tale. Although it would never disappear completely, it had become widely regarded as outmoded and déclassé; the radical new writers of the generation just about to rise to prominence would collectively produce less space opera than any other comparable generational group of authors, and there would be less space opera written in the following ten years or so than in any other comparable period in SF history. By far the majority of work published during this period would be set on Earth, often in the near future—even the solar system had been largely deserted as a setting for stories, let alone the distant stars. Although stalwarts such as Poul Anderson and Jack Vance and Larry Niven continued to soldier on throughout those years, it was a common—and frequently expressed—opinion that space opera was dead.

  But by the late seventies and early eighties, such new writers as John Varley, George R. R. Martin, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick, Vernor Vinge, and others would begin to become interested in the space adventure again, reinvented to better fit the aesthetic style and tastes of the day, and, once again, the paper spaceships began to fly.

  In 1975, M. John Harrison wrote The Centauri Device, a novel that turned the conventions of space opera on their head. It was, apparently, intended to kill space opera, or at least be an anti–space opera. What it was, instead, was the work that provoked others to pick up the cudgel and change things again. By 1982, when the British magazine Interzone published a “call to arms” editorial looking for radical hard SF, a new generation of writers had come along on both sides of the Atlantic who were ready and willing to produce just that. First among them was Iain M. Banks, whose Consider Phlebas was boldly, defiantly operatic in nature and scope, and yet very much leftward-leaning politically. His sequence of science fiction novels involving the “Culture” set both the critical trend and the commercial standard for space opera in the early 1980s.

  This “new space opera,” though, wasn’t a technological fable of the turn of the century. By the beginning of the 1980s, when cyberpunk was emerging in the United States, it no longer seemed viable to tell bold tales of space adventure that looked to new frontiers where manifest destiny could be brought to the locals. Suddenly, the universe looked like a much darker place. Space opera was no longer looking to go out and take over the universe: it was looking to survive. This change can be seen in the work of Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, and even Colin Greenland. Retaining the interstellar scale and grandeur of traditional space opera, the new space opera became more scientifically rigorous and ambitious in scope.

  Things really took off in the mid-1990s, until by now, here in the Oughts, it’s possible to look around and spot legions of writers such as Dan Simmons, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, Orson Scott Card, Ken Macleod, C. J. Cherryh, M. John Harrison, Gwyneth Jones, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, John Clute, Peter F. Hamilton, Walter Jon Williams, Greg Egan, Nancy Kress, Stephen R. Donaldson, Tony Daniel, John Barnes, Kage Baker, Robert Reed, Mary Rosenblum, Lois McMaster Bujold, Eleanor Arnason, the before-mentioned McAuley, Baxter, and Greenland, and a half-dozen others, who are producing major works of space opera that are literary, challenging, dark, and often disturbing, but also grand and romantic, exciting, fast-paced, set in space, and told on an enormous stage. And right behind these authors are coming new waves of space opera writers such as Neal Asher, Elizabeth Bear, Scott Westerfield, Karl Schroeder, John Meany, Sean Williams, John C. Wright, and others—all of which proves, to us, anyway, that this, right here, these days in which we swim, is the Golden Age of Space Opera.

  This all too brief sketch gives you some idea of how we made the jump from Thomas Edison launching spaceships to Mars to slipping into a bar somewhere in the Kefahuchi Tract, wondering about being ambushed forty lights off the Galactic Rim. And yet, for all of it, the book you’re now holding was never intended to be a dry historical or critical work. When we started work on The New Space Opera we weren’t especially concerned about getting stories that met this definition or that, and we never once discussed how we might arrange the stories in the book to cumulatively make some argument or other. Instead we were looking for great new stories by some of the best writers working in the field. Back in 1974, Brian Aldiss wrote that “science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.” And that’s what we did want. A book that would fuel our imaginations, our senses of wonder, and a book that would do that for you too. It’s something we think the extraordinary group of stories here achieves easily. We believe you’ll agree. And, we hope, we might do this again. Space is infinite, or close to it, and the scope for the space opera tale is just as inexhaustible.

  SAVING TIAMAAT

  GWYNETH JONES

  One of the most acclaimed British writers of her generation, Gwyneth Jones was a cowinner of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for work exploring genre issues in science fiction, with her 1991 novel White Queen, and has also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, with her novel Bold as Love, as well as receiving two World Fantasy Awards—for her story “The Grass Princess” and her collection Seven Tales and a Fable. Her other books include the novels North Wind, Flowerdust, Escape Plans, Divine Endurance, Phoenix Café, Castles Made of Sand, Stone Free, Midnight Lamp, Kairos, Life, Water in the Air, The Influence of Ironwood, The Exhange, Dear Hill, and The Hidden Ones, as well as more than sixteen young adult novels published under the name Ann Halam. Her too-infrequent short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Off Limits, and in other magazines and anthologies, and has been collected in Identifying the Object: A Collection of Short Stories, as well as Seven Tales and a Fable. She is also the author of the critical study Deconstructing the Starships: Science Fiction and Reality. Her most recent book is a new novel, Rainbow Bridge. She lives in Brighton, England, with her husband, her son, and a Burmese cat.

  In the vivid and compelling story that follows
, she proves that coming to really know your enemy may make your problems harder rather than easier to solve.

  I had reached the station in the depth of Left Speranza’s night; I had not slept. Fogged in the confabulation of the transit, I groped through crushing eons to my favorite breakfast kiosk: unsure if the soaring concourse outside Parliament was ceramic and carbon or a metaphor; a cloudy internal warning—

  Now what was the message in the mirror? Something pitiless. Some blank-eyed, slow-thinking, long-grinned crocodile—

  “Debra!”

  It was my partner. “Don’t do that,” I moaned. The internal crocodile shattered, the concourse lost its freight of hyperdetermined meaning, too suddenly for comfort. “Don’t you know you should never startle a sleepwalker?”

  He grinned; he knew when I’d arrived, and the state I was likely to be in. I hadn’t met Pelé Leonidas Iza Quinatoa in the flesh before, but we’d worked together, we liked each other. “Ayayay, so good you can’t bear to lose it?”

  “Of course not. Only innocent, beautiful souls have sweet dreams.”

  He touched my cheek: collecting a teardrop. I hadn’t realized I was crying. “You should use the dreamtime, Debra. There must be some game you want to play.”

  “I’ve tried, it’s worse. If I don’t take my punishment, I’m sick for days.”

  The intimacy of his gesture (skin on skin) was an invitation and a promise; it made me smile. We walked into the Parliament Building together, buoyant in the knocked-down gravity that I love although I know it’s bad for you.

  In the Foyer, we met the rest of the company, identified by the Diaspora Parliament’s latest adventure in biometrics, the aura tag. To our vision, the KiAn Working Party was striated orange/yellow, nice cheerful implications, nothing too deep. The pervasive systems were seeing a lot more, but that didn’t bother Pelé or me; we had no secrets from Speranza.