Saturday June 30 2007
| Posted by Jonathan | 06:22:am
Two more reviews of The New Space Opera:
- Adrienne Martini of the Baltimore City Paper liked the stories more than the editing, while
- Locus’s Gary Wolfe’s liked the book quite well.
Saturday June 30 2007
| Posted by Jonathan | 06:22:am
Two more reviews of The New Space Opera:
June 30th, 2007 at 7:29 am
I think Martini’s comments on the history of space opera are essentially wrong. And I think that space ships do so appear in SF that I would not call space opera.
(I just bought the book and will read it next week probably.)
June 30th, 2007 at 8:55 am
I wouldn’t want to quibble with a reviewer, but I’d tend to agree with you. The spaceship is iconic to science fiction, and appears in a far broader range of fiction than simply the space opera. Certainly, if anyone was to agree that spaceship in story = space opera, then we’d have to pretty extensively revise the history of SF.
Thank you, btw, for picking up the book. I really hope you like it, and will be interested to hear what you think about it.
June 30th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Haven’t read the book.
Isn’t Dozois in Australia?
I don’t know that it’s quibbling but the biggest issue is having inaccurate/misleading statements made and then readers who don’t know any better taking them as true.
Asking why this is “new” space opera seems to be a fair question. The review leaves the impression that this isn’t answered in the book. Is this true?
June 30th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Gardner’s been back in the US for several months now. In terms of misleading statements - setting aside defining ‘new space opera - we were very careful in our main volume intro to not mislead anyone. The book does, to some extent, answer questions about new space opera, but it doesn’t try to be academic either.
July 1st, 2007 at 11:12 am
The best original sf anthology of the last several years by far (and I’ve read quite a few, only Futureshocks by L. Anders came close but this one is better).
Outside of 2 authors I do not really enjoy, the only story I flat out disliked was the McDonald one, and the Reynolds story while good was not as good as Thousandth Night or Tiger, Burning.
But the stories by T. Daniel (the best of the book in my opinion), G. Jones, G. Egan, P.Hamilton, WJWilliams, D. Simmons, P. McAuley, K. McLeod, N. Kress, R. Reed, M. Rosenblum, S. Baxter, R. Silverberg and JP Kelly are really, really good to excellent.