Space Opera is the sub genre that pulled me into the greater science fiction pantheon. It always promised a sweeping narrative that jumped across the galaxy, luring you in with interpersonal drama paired with sparkling, or sometimes, barely held-together starships. Its call always has been, and always will be intoxicating to me. My biggest issue is that sometimes, I feel they can be overly long and favor worldbuilding so much that the rest of the picture suffers as a whole. Now, this is not endemic to the genre, but I’ve been burned quite a few times in this arena. But luckily Jonathan Strahan has just the solution – short stories. New Adventures in Space Opera is an eclectic showing of many authors and their various approaches to Space Opera.
I was a little skeptical at first. How would anyone pack the scope, the grandeur of space opera into the neat little package that is the short story? Well, folks, my skepticism proved to be baseless; the stories collected here rocked all my worlds. As much as I want to talk about every single one of them, it would exhaust you even more than it would me. I’d be quite energized myself to be honest. So I want to highlight 4 stories that really stood out to me as capturing both the feel of space opera in its grandiosity while showcasing the short story form.
All The Colours You Thought Were Kings by Arkady Martine is impressive from the get-go. It features an empire, nanotechnology, and political intrigue all wrapped up in a few pages. Martine has been a favorite author of mine since A Memory Called Empire, and seeing her flex her writing muscles is always a joy. And where she excels the most is situating the reader in a time and place with ease. You dive right into an imperial ceremony where the clone of the empress is preparing for a coup through a dueling rite of passage. The scope of the empire is on full display as the magnitude of the display is described intricately. Tension pulls the sentences taut as you dive deeper into the story. It’s also brutal in its brevity. The ending is one for the ages.
A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime, by Charlie Jane Anders, was an absolute riot. The story is the right kind of insane absurdity in the face of absolute consuming horror that I crave. It’s a heist story where the main protagonists are caught between a hedonistic pleasure planet and an all-consuming fleshy presence that aims to assimilate all. It’s goofy fun and the characters are over the top in the best way possible. It felt very much like Anders had a lot of fun writing it, too as it had some incredibly great lines in the dialogue that had me laughing to myself. But underneath the fun were some good themes about figuring out who you were and finding the right people to help you on your journey. Definitely not my normal serious fare, but a real winner in my book (and this collection).
The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir by Karin Tidbeck caught me off guard in all the ways I want to be when reading short, focused fiction. It’s the story of a janitor aboard a living ship as they go about their day-to-day. Before she knows it, she’s been informed that the ship will be salvaged for meat because she has grown too large for her shell. But the janitor and the mechanic aim to keep her alive and find her a new home. This is a beautiful story that really captures the mundanity and exploitation of invisible labor. The character’s relationship with the ship is wonderfully presented both in small interactions and through short summaries of a TV show she is watching. Tidbeck nails it by showing the “episodes” out of order, mixing up the plot and highlighting the non-linearity of people’s lives. These episodes are juxtaposed against the janitor’s hopes of traveling amongst the stars while being relegated to taking out the trash after she is whisked away from her backwater home. It’s an excellent piece that really gets at the heart of what media can do both on paper and for our lives. It should never be a blueprint for how we see ourselves, but it can help lead the way as we take our meanings from it.
Immersion by Aliette De Bodard is an incredible piece of fiction that uses its science fiction elements to tell a story about culture, identity, empire, and belonging. It’s the kind of short story that is really hard to describe to someone else without entering into a monologue that no one can escape from. De Bodard plays with perspective shifts from paragraph to paragraph, adding layers to the story and themes. It’s a little confusing at first, but starts to really sink in and deliver a real punch at the end. Her writing is fierce and methodical, cutting to the heart of the issues she wants to explore. Not a single word feels wasted, and it makes the whole experience fulfilling. While I am sympathetic to the themes she wrangles with, her presentation makes them so much more tangible and reveals things in a way that reading textbooks and news about it can’t really exhibit. I know the story is over ten years old, but it really was the highlight of the collection for me.
If you are looking for a collection that showcases space opera without having to invest all your energy into a single story – this is it. New Adventures in Space Opera was exactly the kind of jolt I needed in this space.
Rating: New Adventures in Space Opera – A Rollicking Good Time
-Alex
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
