Book: Seetee Ship by Jack Williamson

-Jack Williamson was a legend, one of the SF authors that Asimov and Heinlein read when they were young. His first published story came out in 1928. Many of his books — The Legion of Space, The Humanoids, Darker Than You Think — are icons of the genre. He continued writing up until shortly before his death last year, at the age of 98.

-Seetee Ship dates from the early 1950s. "Seetee" is short for "contra-terrene", which is an obsolete term for antimatter. The book is set in our Solar System, but assumes that the planet beyond Mars was turned into an asteroid belt when an seetee planet from outside our system collided with it, and thus there's still a fair amount of seetee around. It poses a major navigation hazard, and is impossible to handle safely, so working with it is tightly proscribed by The Powers That Be. It also holds the key to cheap energy, so our hero is very interested in finding a safe way to work with it. Most of the novel consists of a careful dance between the "asterites", citizens of the asteroids who are covertly working with seetee, and the corporate employees who want to stop them or, even better, seize all knowledge of seetee for themselves, the better to make bombs with . . . Kinda light, kinda short, with somewhat dubious physics, and a plot twist that is obvious a long time before the writer intended for it to be. The moderately pervasive sexism, and brief flashes of racism (the stereotyped Russian, Italian, and Japanese officers of the corporation) are annoying. (Though, to be fair, the women are portrayed as very competent at their jobs, and also as fiercely honest.) Recommended to people who like 1950s SF.

Book: The Space Opera Renaissance by Hartwell and Cramer

-This 944-page spider-smasher of an anthology has been occupying a lot of my reading time for a few weeks now. It was well worth it, for the intro alone, which I will recap here. Like many people, I was a little fuzzy on the origins of the term "space opera". I am now enlightened. Wilson Tucker, the guy who actually coined the phrase (in 1941), pretty much meant it to mean "bad science fiction" (with the only non quality-based genre-markers being "space ships" and "saving the world").

-Up through about the early 1970s, no author ever intentionally set out to write in the genre "space opera". (With the possible exception of Jack Vance, who wrote a novel about an opera company in space.) "Space opera" still meant "bad". Then a weird bunch of shifts happened. Some authors tried to recapture the good parts of the bad SF of the 1930s. In particular, Leigh Brackett, who had written some good-but-nevertheless-similar-in-tropes-to-the-bad-stuff SF in the 1930s, co-authored the script for The Empire Strikes Back, which was also good-but-nevertheless-similar-in-tropes-to-the-bad-stuff. And, was part of the huge commercial success that was Star Wars.

-So, people started intentionally trying to write space opera, and a lot of the good SF of the 1930s-1950s (in particular Doc Smith's Lensman books) was retroactively reclassified as space opera. (While he was alive, Smith would probably have been a little insulted to have his work called space opera; he considered himself to be writing something close to hard SF.)

-By the 1990s, there were authors of my generation who regarded "space opera" as having no particular negative connotations, and set out to write some. In the US we got a lot of military/capitalistic space opera, and in the UK we got a lot of transhumanist/socialist space opera. Much of it is very good.

-And now we have this anthology. (Which, because of the historical twists of the genre, arguably contains no examples of "space opera" as Wilson Tucker defined it.) Because it's about the renaissance of space opera, most of the stories in here are recent. More than half date from 1990 or later.

-Comments on specific stories: Bujold's "Weatherman" has convinced me I should give up my prejudice against Bujold (I was first introduced to her by a particularly psycho ex) and pick up some of her novels. Peter Hamilton's "Escape Route" also led me to add some books of his to my wish list. The only story in the book I couldn't get through was Tony Daniel's "Grist", yech. Scott Westerfeld's "The Movements of Her Eyes" was kinky in whole new ways — a new spin on "brains are sexy". (Yes, this is the same Westerfeld who wrote Uglies.)

-David Weber's "Ms Midshipwoman Harrington" gets a longer comment. I've rarely run across a story that felt so calculated. Honor herself is a special kind of Mary Sue — not a Mary Sue that represents the writer, but one meant to be a one-size-fits-all Mary Sue for the reader. Right down to the cat on her shoulder. The space-travel-and-combat assumptions are so obviously chosen to make space combat exactly like Age of Sail ship combat as to completely destroy verisimilitude for me. (As contrasted with, say, Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire's Fall series, where we have exciting space combat which seems grounded in real physics.) ( Cut for plot spoilers. )

-A few pages in the anthology are (in my opinion) wasted on parodies. A few others are used for stories that are (to my eye) clearly planetary romances, not space operas. (Brackett's "Enchantress of Venus", Moorcock's "Lost Sorceress of the Silent Citadel".) A few are just Not My Thing. (Delaney's "Empire Star", Le Guin's "Shobies Story".) And a fair number are quietly, exotically, brilliant: Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat & Dragon", Catherine Asaro's "Aurora in Four Voices", Robert Reed's "The Remoras", John C. Wright's "Guest Law", etc.

-So: This isn't light reading, both due to its actual mass, and because of its intent to present a genre in context, and a genre in motion. But, if you're up for that, highly recommended.