The New Space Opera: A Locus Award-Winning Collection of Visionary, Epic Stories - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060846755 ISBN 13: 9780060846756

Publisher: Harper Voyager, 2007

Synopsis

Winner of the Locus Award, from award-winning and nominated editors Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, a stellar collection of the grandest, most cutting-edge epic stories in science fiction’s biggest genre—all never-before-published—by it’s most revereds practitioners and most promising newcomers.

Contributors include Stephen Baxter • Greg Bear • Gregory Benford • Tony Daniel • Greg Egan • Peter F. Hamilton • M. John Harrison • James Patrick Kelly • Nancy Kress • Ken Macleod • Ian McDonald • Alastair Reynolds • Robert Silverberg • Dan Simmons • Michael Swanwick • Walter Jon Williams

What sets space opera apart from other fiction is its sheer scale: it is an exuberant celebration of the very large and the very small, of the very old and the very new, of the vast, panoramic instant we live in; the instant in which everything that went before melds with everything yet to be. It is Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.

The only book of its kind, The New Space Opera brings together for the first time the generation of writers who spawned and embody the “new space opera, ” aswell as other talents destined to join their ranks. Going beyond everything that has come before, this fresh, visionary anthology is essential reading for every science fiction fan.

About this title

About the Authors

Gardner Dozois is a highly esteemed author and Hugo Award-winning editor of several SF anthologies and, for twenty years, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.

Jonathan Strahan has co-edited The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy series of anthologies for HarperCollins Australia, co-edits the Science Fiction: The Best of . . . and Fantasy: The Best of . . . anthology series with Karen Haber for Simon & Schuster/ibooks, edits the Best Short Novels anthology series for the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, and co-edited The Locus Awards for Eos with Charles N. Brown. He is also the Reviews Editor for Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Fields, and reviews for the magazine regularly. He is currently working on The New Space Opera II.

From the Back Cover

The brightest names in science fiction pen all-new tales of space and wonder:

Kage Baker
Stephen Baxter
Gregory Benford
Tony Daniel
Greg Egan
Peter F. Hamilton
Gwyneth Jones
James Patrick Kelly
Nancy Kress
Ken Macleod
Paul J. McAuley
Ian McDonald
Robert Reed
Alastair Reynolds
Mary Rosenblum
Robert Silverberg
Dan Simmons
Walter Jon Williams

Reviews

Starred Review. 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. Many of the 18 stories play with the scope that characterizes classic space opera. In Greg Egan's Glory, creatures embody themselves as aliens to perform archeological research, only to get caught up in a struggle between two worlds. Robert Reed's Hatch, limited in locale to the hull of a giant ship, proves that the scope of the struggle for life is always epic. Stephen Baxter's Remembrance walks a line between the personal and the global as resisters against Earth's conquerors remember one man's struggle against the alien invaders. Kage Baker's humorous Maelstrom, in which an acting troupe on frontier Mars puts on a Poe story for the miners there, tells a personal story in an epic setting. The new space opera teaches us that despite the bizarre turns humanity may take to conquer these outré settings, a recognizable core of humanity remains.
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The rich space opera tradition, extending from the off-world voyages of Verne and Wells to this galaxy-embracing anthology, is arguably sf's most prolific subgenre. Veteran anthologist Dozois and coeditor Strahan present some of the newest boundary-stretching variations on the category's many themes. Accordingly, the roster of contributors includes some of contemporary sf's brightest innovators, such as Peter Hamilton and Robert Silverberg, as well as such rising stars as Tony Daniel and Mary Rosenblum. Ian McDonald brilliantly sketches entire future cultures and histories in Verthandi's Ring, the main concern of which is millennia-old intergalactic battles. In Hatch, Robert Reed describes the precarious lifestyle of a small human society eking out a living on the surface of a Jupiter-sized starship. Other tales monitor species-changing scientists, an eccentric Martian arts colony, and Earth's last traumatized survivor. 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. Hays, Carl
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Voyager
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060846755
• ISBN 13: 9780060846756
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 517
• Editor: Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan