Review of New Adventures in Space Opera by Jonathan Strahan

Years and years ago, I said that my love for space opera was dimming. Space opera has always been one step away from science fantasy, of course, but I was getting bored with how same same all the nanotech-fuelled, AI-high stories seemed to feel. In the last couple of years, something has changed. I don’t know if it is me or the field or both, but I have been loving space opera again! When I opened my eARC of New Adventures in Space Opera, provided by Tachyon Publications in exchange for this review, I was pleasantly surprised by how many of the names I recognized among the contributors.

The book lifts off with Jonathan Strahan’s introduction, which provides escape velocity. He puts into words a lot of what I was feeling, described above, crystallizing how it feels like we are definitely in a new vogue of this subgenre. The military science fiction of the nineties and early 2000s is metamorphosing into a decolonial, or at least postcolonial, attempt at deconstructing the imperialist sides of space opera. I think that is what most fascinates me about the subgenre. Beyond that, however, I think the way authors are exploring how advanced tech and a sprawling, galactic humanity might reshape our understanding of personhood and autonomy has changed for the better. The Big Ideas are becoming more complex, more nuanced, than in decades previous. That isn’t to trash science fiction or space opera from before—but like any genre, science fiction must be responsive to its times. These new adventures feel different in the right way for the world in which we currently live.

The anthology opens with a banger, “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance,” by Tobias S. Buckell. It ends with an astrophysical twist which is clever but doesn’t exactly feel all that original, so your mileage may vary. What actually intrigued me more about the story is its handling of the idea of free will. The main character is a maintenance intelligence that is basically a copy of an uploaded human; when they uploaded themself, they signed a contract that removed their free will. At the same time, they seem to have plenty of autonomy, which is an intriguing paradox.

These meditations on personhood continue in “Belladonna Nights,” by Alastair Reynolds; “Metal Like Blood in the Dark,” by T. Kingfisher; and “A Good Heretic,” by Becky Chambers. These stories all variously have either nonhuman or transhuman protagonists and, as such, truly stretch one’s imagination when it comes to understanding how such protagonists navigate and learn concepts—like deceit—we humans take for granted.

Some of the stories are more prosaic. “Extracurricular Activities,” by Yoon Ha Lee, follows a young Shuos Jedao (one of the main characters from Lee’s Machineries of Empire series) on a special op. “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime” by Charlie Jane Anders feels very season 3 Star Trek, if you know what I mean, and I can’t say I loved it, but I understand what she’s going for. “Planetstuck,” by Sam J. Miller, is a little melancholy and haunting.

I bounced off a few of the stories hard. Lavie Tidhar continues to be an author who I think is just not for me, nor did I really follow “Morrigan in the Sunglare,” by Seth Dickinson. I liked Arkady Martine’s “All the Colors You Thought Were Kings”—it was interesting reading this as a contrast to her Teixcalaan duology that I just recently finished. That being said, I think the theme I got from the story—that we are doomed to be assimilated into oppressive, imperalist institutions if we think we can change them from within—isn’t sufficiently explored, even for a short story. Similarly, “The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir,” while rich in pathos and imagination, didn’t intrigue me or excite me that much.

All of this is to say: this is a varied collection. It’s unlikely you will enjoy them all, but you will probably enjoy some (hopefully most) of these stories—maybe the ones I didn’t like as much are the ones you’ll love! That there is probably something for every science-fiction reader in this anthology is a testament not only to Strahan and Tachyon’s curatorial skills but also to the cornucopia of space opera available these days, especially in shorter forms. And as much as I am less enamoured by slower stories like “The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir,” I really want to emphasize that I don’t think those stories are any less worthy of celebration or inclusion—space opera should not just be bang-bang-big-shoot-em-up-in-space! There is room for and value in stories that focus more on inner lives, on relationships, on giant space crabs!

Anthologies are always hit-or-miss for me, yet I had a feeling New Adventures in Space Opera would be more hit than miss. Maybe I just read it at the right time. Whatever the case, I was right. This book is just fuelling the fire stoked by my recent reads in the subgenre and leaving me hungry for more, more, more.