Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have collected these nineteen stories to explore the supposed divide between mainstream literature and speculative fiction. They've written an eye-opening and informative introduction as well as compiled dozens of quotes by the individual authors on the subject of Sci-Fi vs. Literary Fiction or"Li-Fi"*. Writers and fans in the field have long complained of being marginalized by the general public and even more so by the literary elite. How did this happen and who's to blame? Does it even freakin' matter any more?

Before Hugo Gernsback there was no separate science fiction genre (or "scientificton" as Gernsback called it, Forrest Ackerman popularized the current two-word term). Writers from Mary Shelly, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and Twain used themes of the fantastic in their works that are still considered classics of Literature today. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells explored advancements in contemporary science and technology and were lauded by audiences around the globe inspiring millions.

As Gernsback and later, John W. Campbell and others codified early science fiction traditions they were deeply mired in the pulp magazine traditions. Fun stuff to be sure, but the gee-whiz boys' adventure stuff was very lacking in well-rounded characters and well-crafted plotting. It has been pointed out recently that even notable award winners of the 1950s weren't really turning out timeless prose. Let's face it, the SF Ghetto was constructed from the inside out and zealously maintained from within.

Around 1970 followers of the New Wave movement like Moorcock, Aldiss, and Disch tried busting out of the ghetto but could never find a large enough audience. An incursion in the other direction occurred in 1973 when Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon was shortlisted for the Nebula for Best Novel. It lost to Rendezvous with Rama which, with all due respect to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, is a novel with some cool science and a great setting where not much actually happens. In a 1998 Village Voice essay Jonathan Lethem called this moment "a tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream". Really? Maybe it was just too soon. In the decades since Lethem made that morbid observation popular culture has become very accepting, if not downright starved for science fiction and its fantastical siblings. Granted, much of that is re-hashing Space Opera pastiches from the 50s or teen vampire fluff, but science fiction prose continues to grow, mature, and inspire. Besides, I really can't imagine Pynchon as a Guest of Honor at a big convention. Although he would probably like filking.

To me these concerns over genre distinctions are silly but will probably never go away. Booksellers and librarians will still need some classifications so that they can direct you to the right shelf. There will always be a handful of literary elitists in pooh-poohing our favorite books as escapist drek. And deep within the bowels of SF fandom, grumbles will continue about certain writers abandoning the field for snootier credentials (O hai Mr. Vonnegut & Ms. Atwood!). Or even worse, Outsiders coming in to completely destroy all their precious memories of Astro-King vs. the Bimborgs of Pluto (admit it, a remake of that would totally rock.). The thing to remember is that the distinctions between types of literature are not walls with razorwire to be patrolled. They are shifting vague zones— grey areas, if you will.

The Secret History of Science Fiction is all about authors mixing it up, exploring, Boldly Going where they like and never sacrificing quality. These stories are good enough to make The New Yorker's Eustace Tilley pop his cartoon monocle. You'll get profound and often disturbing looks at the human psyche and what we do to each other. The effects of science and technology upon society are also explored in this volume by writers who really know science fiction, not just slumming. Instead of quick summaries of these worthy reads I'm going to close with a few quotes by the authors about this whole imaginary divide of imaginations.

Gene Wolfe:

What we now normally consider the mainstream – so called realistic fiction – is a small literary genre, fairly recent in origin, which is likely to be relatively short lived.... It's a matter of whether you're content to focus on everyday events or whether you want to try to encompass the entire universe. F you ga back to the literature written in ancient Greece or Rome, or during the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, you'll see writers trying to write not just about everything that exists but about everything that could exist.

Connie Willis:

The thing I have always liked best about science fiction is that it defies definition.
It keeps constantly reinventing itself – and just when you thought stories about robots or time travel or first contact had been done to death, it thinks of some brand-new story to tell.

T.C. Boyle:

I've thought about the domination of the literary arts by theory over the last 25 years — which I detest – and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterization, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level – moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

It seems to me that SF is standing, these days, in a doorway. The door is open, wide open. Are we just going to stand there, waiting for the applause of the multitudes? It won't come; we haven't earned it yet. Are we going to cringe back into the safe old ghetto room and pretend that there isn't any big bad multitude out there? If so, our good writers will leave us in despair, and there will not be another generation of them. Or are we going to walk through that doorway and join the rest of the city? I hope so. I know we can and I hope we do, because we have a great deal to offer – to art, which needs new forms like ours, and to critics who are sick of chewing over the same old works and above all to readers of books, who want and deserve better novels than they mostly get. But it will still take not only courage for SF to join the community of literature, but strength, self-respect, the will not to settle for the second rate. It will take genuine self-criticism. And it will include genuine praise.

Here is the complete Table of Contents:

Introduction by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel
"Angouleme" Thomas M. Disch
"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" Ursula K. Le Guin
"Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis" Kate Wlihelm
"Descent of Man" T.C. Boyle
"Human Moments of World War III" Don DeLillo
"Homelanding" Margaret Atwood
"The Nine Billion Names of God" Carter Scholz
"Interlocking Pieces" Molly Gloss
"Salvador" Lucius Shepard
"Schwarzchild Radius" Connie Willis
"Buddha Nostril Bird" John Kessel
"The Ziggurat" Gene Wolfe
"The Hardened Criminals" Jonathan Lethem
"Standing Room Only" Karen Joy Fowler
"10^16 to 1" James Patrick Kelly
"93990" George Saunders
"The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance" Michael Chabon
"Frankenstein's Daughter" Maureen F. McHugh
"The Wizard of West Orange" Steven Millhauser

*That latter term was coined by that merry prankster Orson Scott Card. Say what you will about the guy, "Li-Fi" is pretty Goddamned fucking funny.

The Secret History of Science Fiction may be purchased here, here, or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to Real Literary Critics as Chris Hsiang. He will not get off their lawns.

To create When It Changed, editor Geoff Ryman (author of the multiple award-winning novel Air), set up science fiction authors with scientists, and had them develop stories together. The awesome list of contributors includes Paul Cornell, Justin Robson, Liz Williams, Kit Reed, Adam Roberts, Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod and Ryman himself. According to the publisher's Facebook page:

When It Changed is an attempt to put authors and scientists back in touch with each other, to re-introduce research ideas with literary concerns, and to re-forge the alloy that once made SF great. Composed collaboratively – through a series of visits and conversations between leading authors and practicing scientists – it offers fictionalised glimpses into the far corners of current research fields, be they in nanotechnology, invertebrate physiology, particle physics, or software archaeology. From Planck's Length (the smallest indivisible distance) to Plankton (potential saviours of the Earth's ecosystem), from virtual encounters between Witgenstein and Turing, to future civilisations torn asunder by different readings of the Standard Model, together these stories represent a literary 'experiment' in the true sense of the word, and endeavour to isolate a whole new strain of the SF bug.

Ryman told the news department at Manchester University, where he's based at the University's Center for New Writing:

We wanted to go out and locate what is fresh and new in the sciences, and gives writers a chance to work with researchers to come up with different, contemporary themes. When it Changed actively extends the scientific repertoire of fiction — all fiction, because we have mainstream writers as well. But it gave some of the best SF writers I know of a chance to work closely with a scientist. Some of the ideas they've come up with are mind-blowing ... round the world particle colliders, virtual research, or suits that heal their wearers. And the scientists get to comment or explain.

The book's launch party is tomorrow, Oct. 24, in Manchester, UK. We can't wait to see a copy! Too bad it's not out in the U.S. until April 1 next year.

Adams' latest anthology project is called Brave New Worlds, and it'll be published by Night Shade Books, which put out several previous Adams projects. According to Publisher's Marketplace, it'll consist of reprints covering "the best of dystopian fiction from best-selling authors."

But can Adams' new magazine publishing project, Lightspeed Magazine, help stave off the rise of dystopia in the world of short fiction? We can only hope. Published by Prime Books, which already puts out Fantasy Magazine online, Lightspeed will focus more on science fiction, posting four original stories per week. Says the press release:

Lightspeed will be edited by John Joseph Adams, the bestselling editor of anthologies such as Wastelands and The Living Dead, and Andrea Kail, a writer, critic, and television producer who worked for thirteen years on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Adams will select and edit the fiction, while Kail will handle the non-fiction.

Lightspeed will focus exclusively on science fiction. It will feature all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and writers will be encouraged to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope. New content will be posted twice a week, including one piece of fiction, and one piece of non-fiction. The fiction selections each month will consist of two original stories and two reprints, except for the debut issue, which will feature four original pieces of fiction. All of the non-fiction will be original.

Lightspeed will open to fiction submissions and non-fiction queries on January 1, 2010. Guidelines for fiction and non-fiction will be available on Lightspeed's website, www.lightspeedmagazine.com, by December 1, 2009.

The result is The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology, out now from Tachyon Publications. The title pretty much says it all.

This collection starts of with three classics that could be in that perfect season of The Twilight Zone that the ghost of Rod Serling only wishes he produced. There's "Of Time and Third Avenue" by Alfred Bester in which he uses one of his favorite themes, that getting your favorite wish (knowing the future, reading minds, or having your perfect lover) is not the great idea you thought it was. I prefer Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" which appeared in F&SF in 1954. A brilliantly mad thrill ride of imagination; perhaps the old-school hipster jazzbeaux language seemed too dated to make Van Gelder's cut but what a trip, "All reet, all reet!"

Ray Bradbury, meanwhile, takes us to a colony on a perpetually rainy Venus in "All Summer in a Day". Here he once again makes a perfect blend out of the nostalgia and utter suckitude of childhood. Shirley Jackson's "One Ordinary Day With Peanuts" is a perfectly charming slice of urban life and a glimpse of the secret method by which the world might actually work. Jackson could be either howlingly funny or deeply disturbing as in her quintessential ghost story The Haunting of Hill House. She is best known for "The Lottery", which produced furious controversy after its first appearance and is now often included in many school's reading lists.

Another story that even non-readers will remember from class is "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. This is F&SF's most popular story of all time. I dare you to keep from choking up at the brief flowering of a genius, and his tragic end. Too damn sad? You can take a refreshing plunge into goofiness with "A Touch of Strange" by Theodore Sturgeon, about the blossoming of a nerd romance.

There are a lot of old favorites here. I'm so envious of those of you who might be reading some of these for the first time. I was also surprised how fresh and stimulating these stories are, after years of repeated reading. Have I gained new perspective over the decades or is it just Damn Good Writing?

Try and remember where you were when you first encountered Kurt Vonnegut's superman "Harrison Bergeron" and his last stand against a tyranny of the mediocre. Cranky hallucinogenic rambling or poignant universal eulogy? You get both and a whole lot more in "The Deathbird" by Harlan Ellison®, dog lover. I read "The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree, Jr. with a greater appreciation than I did as a teen. It starts off as a tropical Hemingway trek that turns into two people's desperate escape from alien beings. This insightful story left me appropriately uncomfortable. That James, what a nutty guy.

Most of these tales reveal an entire self-contained world in a dozen or so pages. Neil Gaiman shows us a glimpse of eternity in just under three with "Other People". Some short stories can be a gateway to an author's larger universe. "Solitude" by Ursula K. Le Guin is a story of anthropology and family heartbreak on a planet of the Ekumen. This is the same galactic setting as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. When the man in black fled across the desert, Stephen King's "Gunslinger" followed him for the first time across the pages of F&SF. That story is here, as is "Two Hearts", the coda to Peter S. Beagle's beloved The Last Unicorn.

Some Hard SF purists might dismiss many of these stories, and mores the pity. You won't find much detailed technical jargon, or clear-cut heroes and villains who take on the universe as a problem to be solved. There are many stories here that explore the impact of science on society, such as Damon Knight's "I See You". He posits a miraculous technology available to every household that allows anyone to look up anything in history — and which means the loss of privacy forever. Like that could ever happen. In "macs", Terry Bisson presents a gruesome combination of cloning and victims' rights in a documentary fashion. To the unprepared, Bisson's technique of pure unattributed dialogue— without any description of setting or action,— can be a bit jarring, but he does it better than anyone else I've read and produces a very intimate effect. (Look for that internet darling, "They're Made of Meat" or a personal fave of mine, "Press Ann").

Many of these offerings head off to the vaguely-defined zone of Fantasy but not in any predictable elfy-welfy manner. We could toss around terms like Surrealism or Magic Realisim, or just sit back and enjoy the finely-crafted enigmas and wonders. Michael Swanwick presents a society with spaceships and virtual immortality living on "Mother Grasshopper", a planet-sized insect where disease is a precious gift. Plagues also figure in "The Dark" by Karen Joy Fowler, as do the Tunnel Rats of the Vietnam War and reports by campers of mysterious bipeds in the woods.

The final piece in this anthology is by the brilliant Ted Chiang, who will never, ever write enough stories to satisfy me. "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" uses that classic science fiction convention, the time machine, in the nested stories style of Scheherezade's fabled One Thousand and One Nights. Chiang weaves deeply moving threads of shifting fortune, guilt, and repentance in a very clever and rational approach to time-travel all through the lens of Muslim faith. Just beautiful.

This is an ideal collection for someone who wants to start reading more SF, or for us grizzled old bibliophiles who would like to have some favorite stories in one convenient trade paperback. I was repeatedly blown away by the impact such short pieces, some quite familiar to me, still had on me. Half an hour's reading, and I spent the next day or so catching myself staring off into space muttering, "Oh wow."

We've all been discussing the apparent decline in short fiction lately. Recently, at a reading and panel discussion, author Marta Randall decried the lack oh venues for short stories. She noted that so many new writers go directly for the"huge sagging trilogies" rather than learning how to knock our socks off in a dozen pages. The Publishing industry is all about the 600 pp doorstop, and why? Because that's what readers think they want. "I'm not going to fork over US$7.99 for something slim I can finish in an afternoon," we say,"I want more bang for my buck, more meat for my moola!" But are we really getting the best deal? Ms. Randall insists that more craft and talent go into a really good short story than some epic pot-boiler plumped up with needless exposition and obsessive description. They say this is the twilight for the print periodicals like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science. Everyone is very excited by the possibilities this new-fangled "internet" might provide, but no one really seems to have a clear picture yet for a viable model for how writers will be compensated fairly. Yes, writers should get paid for their work, that's why it's called work.

I hope all of you will continue support short story writing. Pick up magazines and anthologies like this one or quarterly independent 'zines such as Electric Velocipede orLady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. The rise of super short "flash fiction", such as that in the upcoming anthology Last Drink Bird Head looks interesting. Strange Horizons is a great site to read new short fiction, poetry and articles every week. I'm still deeply mired in dead tree stuff, so all this is unexplored territory. Please feel free to share with us in the comments your favorite current short story authors and professional venues for this important and vital form of speculative fiction.

Here is the complete Table of Contents of The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology.:

Alfred Bester "Of Time and Third Avenue"
Ray Bradbury "All Summer in a Day"
Shirley Jackson "One Ordinary Day With Peanuts"
Theodore Sturgeon "A Touch of Strange
William Tenn "Eastward Ho!"
Daniel Keyes "Flowers for Algernon"
Kurt Vonnegut "Harrison Bergeron"
Roger Zelazny "This Moment of the Storm"
Philip K. Dick "The Electric Ant"
Harlan Ellison® "The Deathbird"
James Tiptree, Jr. "The Women Men Don't See"
Damon Knight "I See You"
Stephen King "The Gunslinger"
Karen Joy Fowler "The Dark"
John Kessel "Buffalo"
Ursula K. Le Guin "Solitude"
Michael Swanwick "Mother Grasshopper"
Terry Bisson "macs"
Jeffery Ford "Creation"
Neil Gaiman "Other People"
Peter S. Beagle "Two Hearts"
M. Rickert "Journey into the Kingdom"
Ted Chiang "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate"

The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology.
may be purchased here , direct from the publisher, or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to many short fiction authors as Chris Hsiang. He always looks up to tall fiction authors because, well, he has to.

Edgar Allan Poe is usually credited for creating the detective fiction genre but it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that really nailed it with his timeless creation, Sherlock Holmes. The world's first and greatest consulting detective is the model for countless later fictional investigators as disparate as The Batman and television's Dr. Gregory House. And he no doubt inspired as many real-life careers.

There is something that's always been very compelling about an individual of modest birth, who succeeds against every obstacle using naught but pure intellect and a thirst for ever more knowledge. To be sure, Holmes had some major character flaws: he was an utter jerk even to those closest to him, a misanthropic humanist, a recovering drug addict (his cocaine habit was, in later tales, "not dead, but merely sleeping"), and an overly enthusiastic violinist to boot. Still, he uses his immense gifts in aid of a society that he could never quite feel comfortable with. Sherlock Holmes is a Geek God on par with his distant descendant, Mr. Spock.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. " – Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four

A fitting statement indeed for this supreme rationalist. Holmes would only believe what he could observe and prove. This led to some odd quirks in his otherwise encyclopedic knowledge. In the very first Holmes story, the 1887 "A Study in Scarlet", his new acquaintance and faithful chronicler Dr. John H. Watson discovers that Holmes is unaware that the Earth revolves around the Sun. It plays no part in his criminal investigations and so he had never considered it. Despite this he used the most current scientific knowledge to solve cases that plumbed the depths of the human psyche and affected the affairs of mighty nations. It is to Sir Arthur's credit as a writer that he created such an amazing character so at odds with the author's own beliefs. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was hopelessly infatuated with the fads of spiritualism and the supernatural. This was the guy totally bamboozled by two young girls and their hoax of the Cottingley Fairies. Yet he made Holmes, that paragon of logic and analysis feel so real.

Take another gander at the above quote. If the Detective ever encountered a case truly unworldly and improbable that he couldn't Scooby-Doo it apart like the Sussex Vampire or the Baskerville Hounds, his trusty Occam's Razor would allow him to deal with it in the same cool dry reason that he used against pickpockets or philandering spouses. This is the basis behind The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.. The original stories of Sherlock Holmes may not be science fiction, they surely belong on the borderlands and have influenced many a speculative genre writer.

Editor John Joseph Adams oversaw this anthology of twenty-eight tales of the Great Detective, involving hard science, the undead, aliens, allohistory, dinosaurs, pirates, Canadians and other weirdness. Click here for a look at the complete Table of Contents.

Nearly all of them are reprints, but it's pretty cool to have them all in one volume, and there are some you might have missed. Shamefully, I must admit I never read Neil Gaiman's oft-reprinted and deservedly popular "A Study in Emerald" before. It really is a must-read for Lovecraft fans. Squamous and rugose notes of the Mythos can also be felt in Tim Lebbon's "The Horror of Many Faces" and Barbara Hamby's "The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece".

Another story steeped in the supernatural that caught my bibliophilic eye was Barbara Roden's "The Things that Shall Come Upon Them" wherein Holmes teams up with fellow investigator Flaxman Low. Low was a fictional psychic investigator, perhaps the first, the literary creation of Doyle's friend Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Pritchard. The 1957 film Night of the Demon was based on one of his stories. In Ms. Roden's story, the two detectives solve a case using wildly differing methods but arriving at the same conclusion. I got a kick out of Holmes' initial dismissal of Low as a cheap imitator and charlatan. Low, of course, is a total Holmes fanboy.

There are significant appearances by the rest of the Holmesian dramatis personae besides the trusty Watson, who solves a case before his friend in a story by Stephen King. Long-suffering landlady Mrs. Hudson gets her moment in the sun at long last in a piece from Laurie R. King's Mary Russell canon. Rat-faced whipping boy Inspector Lestrade is here of course, as is The Woman — sublime Irene Adler, and the formidable older brother Mycroft Holmes. And what Sherlock Holmes collection would be complete without that Napoleon of Crime, Professor James Moriarty and his sinister right-hand man Col. Sebastian Moran. We even get a crossover with another Arthur Conan Doyle character, the quintessential early science fiction boffin, Professor Challenger.

Even more of a treat are the stories where Holmes crosses paths with historical figures. A Young H.G. Wells assists in Stephen Baxter's "The Adventure of the Internal Adjustor" Aan elderly Rev. CharlesDodgson helps investigate the cold case of the untimely demise of a student named Doyle many years ago in Tony Pi's "Dynamics of a Hanging". Arthur Conan Doyle himself appears as a client who summons Holmes and Watson to investigate crop circles and strange lights in the night sky over his estate. "The Adventure of the Field Theorems" by Vonda N. McIntyre is a sharp and very funny look at the differences between Sherlock Holmes and his creator.

In the fifty-six stories and four novels penned by Sir Arthur, he alludes to other cases that Dr. Watson was sworn to never reveal. In The Improbable Adventures, we can finally read the truth(s) behind the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, the criminal Merridew of abominable memory", and others.

Sadly, Mr. Adams did not see fit to include any tales concerning the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Perhaps he felt the world is not yet ready for that tale. For those of you stout of heart, I was always fond of this interpretation of that ghastly case. Okay, it's pretty silly, but I like it. The Holmes-Dracula File by Fred Saberhagen is probably more worthwhile. I also recommend this tragically overlooked film by the great Billy Wilder, it includes midgets, steampunky tech, Christopher Lee as Mycroft, and a certain famous loch.

I should also mention contributions from legends Michael Moorcock and Anthony Burgess or those stories that explore the Fermi Paradox and Everett's many-worlds interpretation. Suffice it to say, this is a great collection of stories that really only samples a wee bit of the shelves and shelves of works that writers and fans of the Great Detective have written. The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a good place to start or rediscover your love for one of the world's greatest literary creations, Sherlock Holmes.

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes will be out soon. You may purchase it from these bozos
or your local independent bookseller.

Grey_Area is known to the Baker Street Irregulars as Chris Hsiang. He awaits Guy Ritchie's film with cautious optimism.

Space opera, with its themes of grand adventures, bold heroes, and of course, cool spaceships blowin' stuff up, has been one of Science Fiction most enduring and widely read sub-genres. Before we see what's new, let's check out where it's been. Its history might surprise some newer fans with the shifts in perspective and attitude towards it in the Science Fiction field.

The Lensman stories of E.E. "Doc" Smith are usually revered as the among the first quintessential space opera works, but they were never called that when they first came out. The term was originally created by science fiction author and hardcore fan Wilson Tucker back in 1941, to describe a type of story in the pulp magazines that was already falling out of favor. Here's that oft-cited quote again:

In these hectic days of phrase-coining, we offer one. Westerns are called "horse operas," the morning housewife tear-jerkers are called "soap operas," For the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving for that matter, we offer "space opera."

Ouch. Throughout the 40s and 50s, space opera continued to be a byword for the worst sort of genre writing, reviled for its casual disregard of any real science. The over-the-top melodrama inspired snickering parodies, replete with tentacled BEMs menacing histrionic space-dames. By the 1960s, the New Wave writers like Moorcock, Aldiss, and Ballard dismiss all Science Fiction prior to them as hack space opera. Science fiction would only develop as Serious Art when juvenile themes about aliens and spaceships in the far future were consigned to the rubbish bin of history. The true destiny of SF as literature was in exploring the near future of society and the inner space of the mind. And there'd be lots of tripping out and freaky sex. Like far out, man!

In the next decade, the winds changed and there was a trend, spearheaded by publishers Lester and Judy Lynn DelRey, to embrace the groundling appeal and guilty pleasure of space opera. Screw this literary pretension, let's just bask in the Gee-Whizzery! The space adventure stories of Leigh Brackett and Poul Anderson were re-labeled as space opera. Authors like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle continue to turn out tales of star-spanning civilizations with current theories of astrophysics and complex cosmopolitics. Meanwhile, the cult followings of a canceled TV show and a new movie from the kid who did American Graffiti were continuing to grow. Like it or not, thanks to Star Trek and Star Wars, to the world at large space opera is Science Fiction.

The 1980s saw David Brin, C.J. Cherryh, Dan Simmons, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Vernor Vinge producing sophisticated works of thrilling adventure and galactic civilizations that never cheated the reader intellectually. In 1987 Iain M. Banks took the UK by storm with Consider Phlebas, his first novel of The Culture. Banks and other British authors such as Ken MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds, and Peter F. Hamilton have caused some to announce an age of New Space Opera, completely shedding the earlier pejorative connotations of the term. I really don't know if any of this is really "new", just maybe a bit more grown up. The writing got better, and some themes have changed, but we still love grand adventure stories with spaceships.

So how does this latest anthology fit in with this grand tradition? The New Space Opera 2, in stores in July, enjoys more well-known names than the 2007 volume. The collection contains nineteen previously unpublished stories by the following authors: Robert Charles Wilson, Peter Watts, John Kessel, Cory Doctorow, John Barnes, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Jay Lake, Neal Asher, Garth Nix, Sean Williams, Bruce Sterling, Bill Willingham, John Meany, Elizabeth Moon, Tad Williams, Justina Robson, John Scalzi, Mike Resnick, John C. Wright.

Despite this gallimaufry of talent, I was disappointed overall by the offerings in this collection. I have enjoyed many novels of the last twenty or so years that could be pigeonholed as "New Space Opera." In particular, my love for the Culture novels could be described as unhealthy. So, why didn't any of these stories ever really fire up my warp drives? Perhaps the short story form itself is to blame. It's difficult to cram the sweeping grandeur and, well, operatic scale required into thirty or forty pages. I often felt as if some of the writers had to skimp either plot exposition or character development, leaving little more than a sketch of what could be a really cool bigger story.

I also have a personal pet peeve about the overabundance of Posthumans in these stories. Maybe it's just me, but it is difficult to empathize with omnipotent immortals with ineffable motivations. Surely after the Singularity, all of Human experience will be perfectly summed up in an eleven-dimensional olfactory haiku crafted from dark-matter. Until then, stories about these godlike characters — even ones as beautifully written by such smart people like Watts, Lake, and Wright — just leave me cold.

At short story length, it is also too easy to go for the giggles, becoming Space Operetta. The old conventions of classic SF offer just too much low-hanging fruit ready to fall into parody. The Bold Starship Captain is an obvious target in Doctorow's somewhat forced "To Go Boldly" and Scalzi's "The Tale of the Wicked", a sweet tribute to Asimov and Fleet officers everywhere. Mike Resnick threw all caution to the wind with a shaggy dog story that's so bad it's almost good, almost.

Someone who went to the lighter side with rather better effect is a newcomer to prose Science Fiction, Bill Willingham. The veteran comic-book writer most known for the popular Fables series spins a gleeful and zippy tale of space pirates and costumed adventurers. Maybe it was supposed to be a postmodern commentary on tired genre tropes, but I had pure fun reading it. Here's hoping we see more Willingham stories in Science Fiction soon. Another pleasant surprise from a writer usually not associated with spaceships is Tad Williams. He uses some of the world-building skills evidenced in his Otherland series in "The Tenth Muse". It's a nod to Old School Star Trek with comic touches and some actual opera that rises above mere farce

Would the Venture Brothers cartoon work without the broad humor? In Elizabeth Moon's "Chameleons" two boys and their faithful bodyguard find themselves in deadly peril on a seedy space station. This is probably my favorite story in the collection, with a catalog of gadgets and invention, along with memorable characters. Oh, and screaming good thrills. Interstellar espionage and intrigue has always been a prime ingredient in space opera. Updating these themes to good effect are John Meany's "From the Heart" and the nicely twisted "Lost Princess Man" by John Barnes. Also of note, for fans of Neal Asher's Polity universe, is the top-secret mission in "Shell Game".

While I cannot give The New Space Opera 2 my most glowing recommendation, there are some decent stories here. Adherents to the Transhumanist cause might find more enjoyment out of this collection than I did — some of the collection just left my poor l'i'l meatbrain behind. Space opera has been beaten like a red-headed stepchild and gone through an awkward adolescence. It may still have some growing to do, and who knows how it will mature? Despite the snide remarks and supposed "resurgences", Space opera has always been a major part of the science fiction family and I see no reason why we would ever abandon it entirely. It's just too much fun.

Well, I suppose you could buy it from Amazon.
But wouldn't you rather get The New Space Opera 2 from your local Independent Bookseller?

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the Cosmic Spear Carriers as Christopher Hsiang. There will be more reviews, really.

What if the Nazis won WWII? What if Al Gore became President? What if Robert E. Lee used dinosaurs at the Battle of Gettysburg? What if I ordered the chicken instead of the fish? We've all asked ourselves these questions. Indeed, this kind of thought experiment forms the basis for an enduring subgenre of speculative fiction called alternate history. Appropriately, this subgenre has many names: The British say alternative history, the French uchronie , and historians use the term counterfactual history because they do not want to admit that they are secretly big SF nerds. There's also parahistory and my favorite, allohistory. I think IT workers call it Ctrl+Alt+Hist. But I digress, wildly.

The contents of Other Earths also branch off on many unexpected paths, not just in setting but in style and scope as well. Gevers and Lake have chosen some very atypical, even experimental, approaches to allohistory. As they point out in their introduction, this type of work has a strong military theme: Harry Turtledove and Eric Flint spring immediately to mind. While war affects the storylines of each of the pieces in this book, only a few of these stories actually occur during combat. "The Receivers," by an uncharacteristically understated Alastair Reynolds, takes place on the British Home Front during WWII. Rather than being built around a pivotal battle or the decision of a great general or politician, the Point of Divergence here rests upon the lives of two common soldiers who would have become famous composers in our world.

Literary treasure Gene Wolfe presents one of those stories of an Post-War England where Hitler won. Here we have spies and a dangerous mission involving the fate a great world leader. Far from the best work of this truly great author, "Donovan Sent Us" is still packed with compelling dialogue, tension, and of course some surprising twists. The triumphant Axis is a commonly-used Point of Divergence in allohistories including the very well-known Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. A touch of PKD's later work can be felt in a hallucinogenic nightmare by Jeff VanderMeer about the last American president and the horrors of 9/11. We may not be living in the best of all possible worlds, but it could be a lot worse.

How realistic should an allohistory be? I really like Jo Walton's trilogy of novels starting with Farthing where the alternate world behaves exactly like ours without the inclusion of any fantastic elements. More often authors can't seem to resist adding a certain something-something: psychic powers, aliens, advanced technology, or trained dinosaurs. Who can blame them? Stuff like Naomi Novick's Napoleonic dragons is pure fun, even if your belief needs more suspension than the Dover-Calais Bridge. Other Earths spans this continuum from very realistic and compelling tales by Robert Charles Wilson and Paul Park to the magical or batshit insane.

I had some trouble accepting Stephen Baxter's technologically advanced Incan empire dominating a more primitive Europe and the rest of the globe even with a diversionary point of cosmic proportion. I blame the excellent and informative Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, a must read for any student of counterfactual history. Greg Van Eekhout avoids explaining how the Holy City of Las Vegas came to be controlled by the Knights Templar and fez-wearing Chicago mobsters and his story is actually the stronger for it.

Another common type of allohistory is one where magic works like in the Lord Darcy stories of Randall Garret. We have two examples in Other Earths. Theodora Goss weaves together the legends and history of the Magyar people to bring us the tale of the Tündér, the Hungarian version of the Faerie, who have endured the Inquisition, pogroms, and concentration camps. Compare and contrast this with Liz Williams' story about a version of England in the year 1602 ruled by a half-fey Queen.

Although there are many decent stories in this anthology, it was the one by Lucius Shepard that really grabbed me and wouldn't let go. For those of you unfamiliar with Shepard, his edgy and visceral writing can come as quite a shock. He refuses to be pigeonholed in any easy category of speculative fiction infusing lyrical magic realism into tales of jungle warfare, smoky dives, and scar-knuckled brawlers. "Dog-Eared Paperpack of My Life" concerns an author who stumbles upon one of his books on Amazon, though he knows he never wrote it. With one fateful click he embarks on a harrowing and freakish exploration of self-discovery. There's a great deal of Joseph Conrad in this one, with quite a lot of depravity and a bit of that one goofy Jet Li movie. Not for the squeamish or overly sane.

The closing piece by Benjamin Rosenbaum is a brief meditation on the form. An excerpt:

We love choice. Choice is liberty, choice is the bounty of the common man. When we tell ourselves alternate histories, we are reassuring ourselves of the profaneness of events. We might have lost the war. And then everything would be different. There was a point of diversion. For want of a nail.
(If you had kissed the other one instead...)
And so too in this moment: For want of will, for want of clarity, for want of love, we could lose this moment, this war, this choice. We stand at a fork in the road, and one road leads down into darkness and the other up into light. Choose, choose, choose, choose, choose wisely.

Despite the disappointing lack of lack of Civil War dinosaurs, Other Earths might be a refreshing change for fans of alternate history, or whatever you call it in your world.

Commenter Grey_Area is known amongst the brave men of the 79th Armored Triceratops Cavalry as Christopher Hsiang. All your books are belong to him.

Co-editors Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern sold their anthology, Is Anybody Out There?, to Daw Books via Martin H. Greenberg's Tekno Books. And here's the anthology's pitch:

Our topic is the Fermi Paradox: Why is it that, in such a vast cosmos, with hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy alone, and no doubt billions of Earth-like planets orbiting them, we have found no evidence of intelligent alien life? No evidence that aliens have ever visited Earth (other than discredited UFO mythology), no detectable signals in all our SETI searches with radio telescopes... So: we're asking for entertaining stories that explore explanations for this enigma, looking seriously or comically at solutions to Fermi's question. Is intelligent life a fluke, arising only once or twice in the universe's long history? Does intelligence arise frequently, but with gulfs of time and distance keeping technological civilizations irretrievably apart? Do such civilizations inevitably implode or self-destruct within a few hundred years? Is our definition of intelligence fatally subjective? Are aliens among us right now, unseen? Are there aliens everywhere, but determined not to let us notice them? These, or other hypotheses, no matter how unlikely, should inform contributions to IS ANYBODY OUT THERE?

It's refreshing to read a collection like Eclipse Two right after the themed anthology We Think Therefore We Are. A lot of the stories in We Think felt a little slight, perhaps because they were straining to fit in with that anthology's overarching theme of artificial intelligence. Eclipse Two, by contrast, has no theme — Strahan says in the intro that he's not that interested in particular genre lines, or whether stories are experimental or traditional. The stories simply reflect Strahan's notion of good story-telling, and for the most part that's a solid criterion. As a result, most of the stories — with one or two notable exceptions — felt pretty straightforward and traditional, by contrast with some older anthology series like Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, where every story seems to be trying really hard to be experimental.

I'd say two-thirds of the stories in Eclipse Two were either decent or great, and stuck in my mind after reading them. The other third were at least interesting or had one or two neat ideas or turns of phrase. Most of the stories follow a pretty satisfying narrative arc, although one or two suffer from the dreaded "Here's An Idea. The End" syndrome. Pretty much every story has a few moments of sparkling wit, where some far-future alien mixes up King Kong and Hong Kong, or people joke about replacing your cyber-avatar with Goatse images and Rick Astley.

Even though the anthology is unthemed, some themes do suggest themselves after reading the whole thing. For example, a few stories are about robots or androids, who investigate their own origins and/or discover they're not what they thought they were. A couple of other stories deal with humans having their consciousnesses uploaded into a virtual world, even after their bodies are lost or destroyed — so that a virtual MMO-type world winds up serving as a kind of synthetic afterlife. In a bit of overlap, some other stories also deal with people who are quasi-immortal, for one reason or another. To sum up, a lot of the stories deal with being post-human, one way or another.

A lot of these stories have ideas that you've probably seen before, but they won me over with their execution. For example, Daryl Gregory's "Illustrated Biography Of Lord Grimm" is a street-level view of what it's like to live under the rule of a supervillain — in this case, one clearly modeled after Marvel Comics' Doctor Doom — but as the story gets more and more dire, and the destruction wreaked by Lord Grimm's battle with the U-Men gets more disturbing, all comparisons to Kurt Busiek left my mind. Likewise, Peter S. Beagle's "The Rabbi's Hobby" deals with the common trope of a mysterious person (in this case a young woman) turning up in old photographs where nobody remembers her actual presence. But Beagle's amazing flair for characterization, and his explanation for the phenomenon, transform it into a much fresher, more memorable type of story.

Probably my favorite in the book is Stephen Baxter's "Turing's Apples," which has a really unique spin on the idea of first contact from an alien civilization. Baxter's story in We Think Therefore We Are left me pretty cold, but this time around he's in top form, with asperbergers-inflected sibling rivalry, crazed terrorists, data-mining, and aliens who aren't actually interested in communicating with us, as such. Another stand-out story is Ted Chiang's "Exhalation," which will leave the image of a robot dissecting his own brain stuck in your mind for ages afterwards.

Maybe because it's not that revolutionary — just a really good read — Eclipse Two left me hopeful about the future of short stories. For the most part, these stories don't feel like vignettes, or abortive novels, or pitches for longer works. And as I mentioned, a lot of these stories stick in your mind after you're done reading, in some cases because of a single arresting image, and in others because of a compelling character study. (The Gran Torino-esque robot general of Jeffrey Ford's "The Seventh Expression Of The Robot General" and the cranky soothsayer old lady of Nancy Kress' "Elevator" keep popping into my mind at odd moments.)

So yeah, Eclipse Two is well worth picking up new, so you can find out what the fuss is about, and take part in the fevered discussions of its themes of artificial intelligence, fractured loyalties and tormented immortalities.

First of all, Gardner Dozois just announced the table of contents of the next Year's Best SF anthology, and it seems to include a lot of stuff from original anthologies like Eclipse 2, Fast Forward 2, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Galactic Empires, Fast Ships, Black Sails, Seeds Of Change and others. Maybe I'm on crack, but was there always such a high proportion of the year's best stories from anthologies rather than magazines? (Full list below.)

Meanwhile, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the source of a few of those best stories, just announced it's going bi-monthly. (Side note: I'm glad "The Political Prisoner" and "Five Thrillers," my faves from last year's F&SF, made it in.) In practice, this move doesn't mean F&SF will get all that much smaller — it'll be doing all double issues, so there will be only about 10 percent less content in 2009. And I get why it's happening — postage costs are shooting up, and this is a way to reach subscribers more cheaply.

But it also seems to bring the magazine closer to being a bimonthly anthology, instead of a magazine. (To me, part of the distinction between magazines and anthologies is the extreme regularity with which magazines appear. Your mileage, as usual, may vary.) More importantly, it seems to be another stage in the slow, lingering death of the print mags: already, their circulations are plummeting, and they claim less rack space in bookstores and newstands. Coming out half as often means you get half as much visibility in retail venues, since few bookstores will keep you on the shelf for two whole months. It means F&SF is resigning itself to servicing its existing subscriber base, instead of trying to reach new readers via retail distribution.

So here's the full TOC of this year's best:

• TURING’S APPLES, Stephen Baxter (Eclipse 2, ed. Jonathan Strahan)
• FROM BABEL’S FALL’N GLORY WE FLED, Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s, February 2008)
• THE GAMBLER, Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2, ed. Lou Anders)
• BOOJUM, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette (Fast Ships, Black Sails, ed. Ann VanderMeer & Jeff VanderMeer)
• THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF SPACE, Alastair Reynolds (Galactic Empires, ed. Gardner Dozois)
• N-WORDS, Ted Kosmatka (Seeds of Change, ed. John Joseph Adams)
• AN ELIGIBLE BOY, Ian McDonald (Fast Forward 2, ed. Lou Anders)
• SHINING ARMOUR, Dominic Green (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2, ed. George Mann)
• THE HERO, Karl Schroeder (Eclipse 2, ed. Jonathan Strahan)
• EVIL ROBOT MONKEY, Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2, ed. George Mann)
• FIVE THRILLERS, Robert Reed (F & SF, April 2008)
• THE SKY THAT WRAPS THE WORLD ROUND, PAST THE BLUE AND INTO THE BLACK, Jay Lake (Clarkesworld, March 2008)
• INCOMERS, Paul McAuley (The Starry Rift, ed. Jonathan Strahan)
• CRYSTAL NIGHTS, Greg Egan (Interzone, April 2008)
• THE EGG MAN, Mary Rosenblum (Asimov’s, February 2008)
• HIS MASTER’S VOICE, Hannu Rajaniemi (Interzone, October 2008)
• THE POLITICAL PRISONER, Charles Coleman Finlay (F & SF, August 2008)
• BALANCING ACCOUNTS, James L. Cambias (F & SF, February 2008)
• SPECIAL ECONOMICS, Maureen McHugh (The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Ellen Datlow)
• DAYS OF WONDER, Geoff Ryman (F & SF, October/November 2008)
• CITY OF THE DEAD, Paul McAuley (Postscripts # 15)
• THE VOYAGE OUT, Gwyneth Jones (Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, ed. Lynne Jamneck)
• THE ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GRIMM, Daryl Gregory (Eclipse 2, ed. Jonathan Strahan)
• G-MEN, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Sideways in Crime, ed. Lou Anders)
• THE ERDMANN NEXUS, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s, October/November 2008)
• OLD FRIENDS, Garth Nix (Dreaming Again, ed. Jack Dann)
• THE RAY-GUN: A LOVE STORY, James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s, February 2008)
• LESTER YOUNG AND THE JUPITER’S MOONS’ BLUES, Gord Sellar (Asimov’s, July 2008)
• BUTTERFLY, FALLING AT DAWN, Aliete de Bodard (Interzone, November 2008)
• THE TEAR, Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires, ed. Gardner Dozois)

DeNiro's review starts out by asserting that space opera hasn't crossed over to the mainstream as much as other subgenres of science fiction have. Cormac McCarthy may have made the post-apocalyptic dystopia story respectable with The Road, but nobody's writing literary epics about "hyperactive starships."

And then DeNiro launches into his actual critique of The New Space Opera: most of the stories are actually about posthuman characters who have been modified to survive in deep space. They've given up so much of their humanity to become spaceworthy, it's made them emotionally inacessible to readers. And they're tiny, against the massive scale of galaxy-wide intrigues and thousand-year wars. (I definitely found this to be a problem with some of the stories in the volume as well, when I read it last year.) Contrast this with old-school space opera, which was comfortable putting regular old humans in charge of its starships.

But the stories fail to engage with the fact of their characters' emotional dissociation as part of the narrative. And if you're going to write alienating mini-sagas about transhumanism, DeNiro suggests, you need masterful prose instead of the merely serviceable writing in this anthology. Most of all, the anthology promises "fun," but delivers careful, hide-bound stories instead. DeNiro does pick out a few exceptions, including James Patrick Kelly's "Dividing The Sustain" and Tony Daniel's "The Valley Of The Gardens."

DeNiro's bracing critique gave rise to an interesting roundtable discussion, which he participated in, over at SF Signal, which mostly dealt with the meta-question he raised: why hasn't space opera crossed over to the mainstream the way other SF sub-genres have? Authors from the anthology tried to answer, or refute, DeNiro's question.

Kage Baker asks why space opera needs to be relevant anyway. Paul McAuley attempts to claim that Doris Lessing's Canopus In Argos series was mainstream. (It's probably the least mainstream of all her works.) Tobias Buckell cites the popularity of Star Wars as proof that space opera really is mainstream. Anthology co-editor Jonathan Strahan argues that you shouldn't think of space-opera as entrenched within the science fiction field, but rather as at the center of the SF field. Gwyneth Jones says space-opera is more versatile than people give it credit for, and it's a good vehicle for asking questions about statecraft.

In the end, though, none of them addressed DeNiro's question of whether "new" space opera has to gain its newness by jettisoning the humanity of its characters. And whether that might be part of the reason why it's not relatable for readers who aren't die-hard science fiction fans. [Rain Taxi] and [SF Signal]