The New Space Opera 2

Editors Gardner Dozois and Jonathan continue their efforts to encapsulate and forward the state of SF space opera today with The New Space Opera 2 (EOS, 2009). Their 2007 collection The New Space Opera provided a very strong selection of stories from top SF authors such as Dan Simmons, Ian McDonald, and Alastair Reynolds. The New Space Opera felt fresh and at times exhilarating, with even the substandard stories tapping into the sense-of-wonder and the vastness of scale (in ideas, actions, settings) at the heart of the subgenre. In the introduction to The New Space Opera 2, Dozois and Strahan observe, "The true heart of science fiction has always been the space-opera story" -- a form they believe is "where much of the cutting-edge work in today's genre is being done" (1). Except for a couple of stories, however, The New Space Opera 2 overall falls short of the fresh, "cutting-edge" feel of the first collection, the sense-of-wonder strangely a bit flat and muted.

        In fact, many of the pieces don't push far in terms of inventiveness and scope, for ideas and aesthetically. Some pieces proved oddly boring for me, such that the collection as a whole was underwhelming. I am not alone in this response: Rich Horton, for The SF Site, writes, "Many of the stories are, truth be told, a bit routine, or a bit too arch in their attitude towards the genre"; Richard Larson, for Strange Horizons, suggests that several stories "suffer from being too long" and so some "monotony," which led him to "wishing I had more of a visceral reaction to what I had just put myself through." This sense of the "routine" and of "monotony" that Horton and Larson identify describe fairly well my experience of the bulk of the collection. I rarely reacted viscerally to many of the stories, whether owing to the ideas or to the writing, or both. Instead, I found myself puzzled at the relative poverty of imaginative reach and aesthetic daring. That said, as a whole the collection supplies more competent and good stories than decent or outright poor stories, and so I rate it at 3 out of 4 stars.

        Here are the stories and my ratings of them (out of four stars), with the five best stories in bold:

1. Robert Charles Wilson, "Utriusque Cosmi"  ** 1/2

2. Peter Watts, "The Island"  ****

3. John Kessel, "Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance"  ** 1/2

4. Cory Doctorow, "To Go Boldly"  ***

5. John Barnes, "The Lost Princess Man"  ** 1/2

6. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, "Defect"  ** 1/2

7. Jay Lake, "To Raise a Mutiny Betwixt Yourselves"  **

8. Neal Asher, "Shell Game"  **

9. Garth Nix, "Punctuality"  ** 1/2

10. Sean Williams, "Inevitable"  ***

11. Bruce Sterling, "Join the Navy and See the Worlds"  ***

12. Bill Willingham, "Fearless Space Pirates of the Outer Rings"  **

13. John Meaney, "From the Heart"  ***

14. Elizabeth Moon, "Chameleons"  ***

15. Tad Williams, "The Tenth Muse"  ***

16. Justina Robson, "Cracklegrackle"  ***

17. John Scalzi, "The Tale of the Wicked"  ***

18. Mike Resnick, "Catastrophe Baker and a Canticle for Leibowitz"  **

19. John C. Wright, "The Far End of History"  *** 1/2

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