New Adventures in Space Opera edited by Jonathan Strahan

[james_davis_nicoll]

A cornucopia of recent space opera.


New Adventures in Space Opera edited by Jonathan Strahan

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I just read the Tidhar - it’s free on tor , 2017 published - and damn it is good.

Depressing in outline, but funny in each detail - the layered references from the history of SF ( cordwainer Smith, Iain Banks, Herbert, for example), poetry, the deliberate warping of Jewish references, ironic and brazen. Some just feel magpiety, the joy of accumulating inventive detail - naming a gun after the capital of the Russian autonomous Jewish region - others more intrinsic - the opening quote and structure being Christian apocalyptic, not Jewish; the religious inversions ( the perversion of the mikvah, ritual cleansing here becoming its opposite - though body horror remains, the confusion of sukkhot with pesach, etc). And the inversion of pesach, the central explicitly stated theme

“for what we call Passover, they inexplicably call Invasion.“

itself an uncomfortable use, given the very real history of the blood libel, though the more the religious background of the story deviates from that of our world, the less the politics does.

( I’m still pondering its deliberate conflation of religion with what is now called the ‘settler colonial project’, and its deliberate .. I’ll stop. )

Deeply political story, textually erudite, far too painful to read, even more so than when it was written.

[(Anonymous)]

A novelette by Ann Leckie? That's going on my Christmas list! 🤩

-Awesome Aud

[(Anonymous)]

It's a superb collection. The de Bodard story was a standout, the writing exquisite. Tidhar,s was commented on above. Yoon ha Lee’s was exuberant fun. DeNiro’s a sharp vignette, I’ll seek out her other stuff.

Even the worst stories were pretty good, and the best were substantial, engaging with politics, identity, culture, gender, playful or bleak as appropriate. And language to match.

[estrevan]

What’s up with the deadnaming of Anya Johanna DeNiro? Is that how Strahan references her?

[james_davis_nicoll]

No, I fucked up. I grabbed the toc from ISFDB and didn't understand the import of a detail in their version when I was cleaning up the cut and pasted words. I keep forgetting ISFDB prefers deadnames.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Corrected, acknowledged, and apologized for.

[estrevan]

That’s a sad thing to learn about ISFDB. Especially when they could have phased it the other way round and made it less of a slap in the face (though still wrong).

Seeing Anya’s instagram posts as a happy middle-aged woman really helped me when dysphoria was trying to convince me I was too old to transition. She deserves better

[(Anonymous)]

What are the economics of anthologies these days?

All but three of the stories are available free online at the original publication ( the exceptions are the Reynolds, Miller, and Chambers), and I can’t imagine the curating of a collection is enough to garner sales.

[chrysostom]

Personally, I read fiction in print, so these will all be new to me.