Published on August 13, 2024 Published by John Scalzi
To get to the new, sometimes you have to catch up on the old. In this great idea for the New adventures in the space opera In this anthology, editor Jonathan Strahan takes you on a brief journey through the genre and pushes you to the limits of exploring the form.
JONATHAN STRAHAN:
Everything you need to know about New adventures in the space opera is right there in the title. Well, pretty much. New adventures… is the book I put together because I love space opera and wanted to know what happened next. It’s that simple.
I started reading space opera in the early 1970s. I was a precocious reader. I found Heinlein’s Citizens of the Galaxy at the local library when I was seven, and was hooked. From then on, I read mostly science fiction. And a lot of the science fiction I read was space opera. There was Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov, of course. And “Doc” Smith, Jack Williamson, AE van Vogt, Piper and Vance. There were lots of Imperial fleets, clashing battles, exploding universes, and so on. And it felt like it would never change, which I was very glad about at the time. In the ’70s and ’80s, there was Niven, Brin, Card, Cherryh, Bujold, and many more. Space opera was changing, although I wasn’t really aware of it at the time.
The space operas I read in the 1980s were different from those I had read as a teenager. Perhaps in response to a famous call by Interzone Editors for a new radical hard SF, or perhaps it was a reaction to economic and political trends in the US, UK and elsewhere, but just as cyberpunk was emerging in the US, so too was a new kind of space opera. The old stuff was still there, in books by David Brin and Orson Scott Card and others, but in the UK in particular Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, M. John Harrison and Colin Greenland were designing a darker, more political kind of space opera, less interested in stories of imperial war and Manifest Destiny and more interested in the stories of the people affected by the other side of the stories.
When Alastair Reynolds published Revelation spacethe new space opera, as it became known, was the dominant form of space opera, at least in print. Writers like Neal Asher, Richard K. Morgan, and Justina Robson expanded it, made it more thoughtful and sometimes more brutal. Of course, many classic space operas continued to appear in the ’90s and 2000s, but the new space opera became a staple of space opera as we understood it.
I was totally on board with the new space opera. I worked on a special edition celebrating it Location and co-edited, with Gardner Dozois, two anthologies of new space opera. It was an integral part of books such as my anthology Edge of Infinityand James SA Corey’s novels were among my favorites of the time. But I know this story, and I know it well. I was busy in the mid-2010s and early 2020s and didn’t think much about what was happening in space opera, but a few years ago I started to wonder. A lot of time had passed. Was space opera changing now that the new space opera was set? What came next?
And that’s why this book exists. To answer that question. I hadn’t stopped reading science fiction, so I had some suspicions, and they were confirmed by what I found. Science fiction has become more diverse, has a wider range of perspectives, and is much less interested in the perspective of colonizers and Imperial navies than it is in the perspective of those they encounter. It’s not so interested in the Empire, it distrusts colonialism and is all too aware of the terrible damage it does, and often it’s looking not out the hatches of a giant space cruiser but out the back from the other end of the cannon. It’s queerer, it’s more interested in people, and it’s sexier and funnier.
Why is this important, other than my curiosity? Well, to me, space opera is one of the most fundamental kinds of science fiction, and if it changes and evolves over time, then so does science fiction. So when we look at space opera, we can see how what we are interested in and what we care about has changed. I think that’s interesting and important. Are classic stories of exploding galaxies and far-reaching conquests still being told? Sure. But there are other stories now. And those core stories of space opera are actually a little different now.
If you are interested in any of this, I think the stories in New adventures in space Operas will interest, entertain and reward you because they are great stories, but I think they will also give you an insight into how exciting science fiction is right now. It’s a great time to be a reader.
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