Oh, and there will be vague, mostly nondescript spoilers here.

Federations aims to be an anthology of short stories about interstellar civilizations — think Star Trek, Star Wars, or Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. But really, most of the stories in this collection are just classic space opera, with only a little discussion of the challenges and joys of multi-planetary collaboration. There's quite a lot of space war, a fair bit of first contact, and a dash of deep-space exploration. And that turns out to be a more thrilling experience, in many ways, than a more tightly thematic collection of stories about deep-space alliances might have been.

For one thing, along with that wider range of stories, the anthology spans a wider variety of time periods, from our present day to a distant future. Some stories contain the merest glimmer of hope that humans will form alliances at some point in the future with other worlds.

For example, one of the best of the book's many space-war stories is Lois McMaster Bujold's lovely, melancholy "Aftermaths," in which a woman and her assistant collect the dead bodies from a deep-space war with the Barrayarans. And the woman, MedTech Boni, insists on collecting the enemy dead bodies as well as the friendly dead, treating them both with the same compassion and respect, even though we discover she's lost something closer to home in this particular war.

But still, my favorite stories in the collection are the ones which engage directly with the theme of federations. The ones which show different planets (and in most cases different intelligent species) colliding, either in war or in diplomacy, and trying to understand each other. The ones which take apart the idea of a confederacy of greatly different interstellar cultures, and what kind of shape it would take. Those are the stories which are most likely to stick in your mind after you're done reading the whole thing.

For example, there's Genevieve Valentine's "Carthago Delenda Est," about a ship full of humans, in a rendezvous point with a bunch of alien ships, all waiting hundreds of years for a super-advanced ambassador from a distant planet called Carthage to arrive – and while the gathering of different species sits in one place and waits, they create a kind of incidental peace, punctuated with bickering, cooperation and even a bit of interspecies nookie, and you sense they're creating the first tentative links in what could become a real alliance.

There are also a few delightfully snarky stories which deconstruct, and in some cases satirize outright, the idea of a civilization made up of civilizations, and these are among the book's standout stories. Jeremiah Tolbert's "The Culture Archivist" mashes up Star Trek's Federation and Borg into a single civilization that's cybernetically enhanced via nanotech and goes around trying to assimilate other cultures into its rapacious capitalist sameness. K. Tempest Bradford's "Different Day" imagines the Earth being contacted by not just one, but three different alien races within the same interstellar group, each with its own agenda. And James Alan Gardner's "The One With The Interstellar Group Consciousness" recasts all of the romantic-comedy cliches into a story of a vast interstellar society trying to find another interstellar society or federation to "mate" (i.e., join) with.

The most upbeat story, and one of the most amusing, is probably Alan Dean Foster's "Pardon Our Conquest," in which a petty alien dictator finds out what happens when you tangle with the vastly more advanced galactic Commonwealth — the Commonwealth is incredibly nice to you and showers you with kindness, until you have no choice but to give in.

And then there are the stories that look at interstellar commuincation from a more idiosyncratic, and hence more fascinating, vantage point — like S.L. Gilbow's "Terra-Exulta," which talks about the linguistic challenges involved in terraforming alien planets — and shows, in a very Orwellian way, how you can justify genocide against countless alien species if you just create the right terminology for it. (Like "Ecoviscerate." Or "retoration," which means "the removal of all life from a planet in order to repopulate it with other life forms to create a more balanced ecology.") And then Catherynne M. Valente's "Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War Elegy" reflects a whole swath of interstellar history through the lens of a wine glass, by walking us through the different vintages that an illicit winery on an alien planet created.

Federations is definitely one of those anthologies that offers something for everyone, including some more traditional space-war stories, and a few rollicking space adventure tales, like "Warship" by George R.R. Martin and George Guthridge, and Harry Turtledove's mildly amusing "Someone Is Stealing The Great Throne Rooms Of The Galaxy." If (like me) you harbor nostalgia for Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, then you'll be happy to revisit Helva in "The Ship Who Returned."

Whether they're taking us to deep-space battles, showing us uneasy collaboration between vastly different races, or satirizing the very idea of a benign interplanetary alliance, the stories in Federations mostly keep a very human perspective on the hugeness and strangeness of a galaxy teeming with life. And that's reason enough to sign on to its galactic charter. [Amazon]

High Bloods, John Farris (Tor)

It's the near future, and LA is overrun with werewolves. An International Lycan Control force is set up to keep tabs on the "high bloods," those that can keep their werewolfish nature under control. But then something goes terribly wrong, and the book becomes a hard boiled crime novel. With werewolves.

Wireless, Charles Stross (Ace)

Notorious future-forward sci-fi author Charles Stross has collected the strands of some of his short fiction into this compilation. Stories feature everything from relocating the cold war in deep space to a Lovecraftian take on the Iran-Contra scandal. The collection showcases Stross's short works that have never found their way into any of his longer pieces.

Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Subterranean)

Dozois and Martin have gathered a crop of modern sci fi writers to write their own stories exploring Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" universe. The "Dying Earth" series is a cornerstone of its very own sub-genre of dystopian sci fi, and these stories give some other writers a chance to lend their voice to this seminal canon.

Metatropolis,edited by John Scalzi (Subterranean)

Five sci fi writers collaborated on their own urban future, and then each took a turn writing stories set in their collectively imagined universe. The result is a portrait of a possible future of cities. From the io9 review:

These feel like cities where anything can happen, from getting your skull cracked to discovering your life purpose. And most important of all, when I was done reading about this future dys/utopia, I wanted to spend a lot more time there.

The Osiris Ritual, George Mann (Snowbooks)

George Mann's well-received "The Affinity Bridge" created a steam-punk Victorian London landscape for his intrepid mystery solvers. Now his steam-punk Sherlock Holmes is back to solve another mystery, interacting with some distinct characters along the way. This one is for fans of clockwork robots, airships, and good old fashion mysteries.

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Neil Gaiman (DC)

This hardcover volume collects a few of Gaiman's Batman pieces, focusing on his canon-spanning final story, "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" This story stretches from one end of the Bat's career to the other, offering a new angle on the Batman mythos.

Purple and Black, K.J. Parker (Subterranean)

"Purple and Black" is an epistolary novel, or one told only in letters. In this case, the letters are between a reluctant intellectual emperor and his best friend on the front lines of combat. The result is an exploration of the duty of leadership, of war, and of friendship. It's also printed in two colors, purple for the official empire business between the two friends, and black for the less formal, more personal letters.

The Stars Blue Yonder, Sandra McDonald (Tor)

A military commander dies, but then comes back to life on a mission to save all of humanity. This mission takes him all over space and time, where he meets his yet-non-existent grandchildren and his descendants from thousands of years in the future. He also manages to thoroughly confuse his grieving wife with resurrection and stories of far-flung time travel. The two work together to save everything they've ever known.

Bar None, Tim Lebbon (Night Shade)

After the world ends, a group of tenacious survivors hole up in a giant home in Wales, but supplies start to get thin, and they learn from a supernatural stranger of a haven a few days away. It's the Bar None, and it's maybe the last bar on Earth. The survivors then decide to do probably what anyone would do in their situation: against all odds, braving corpse-strewn countryside, they try to track down a cold beer. From the io9 review:

In the end this is a deeply sentimental and intimate look at memory, loss, and those perfect days barbecuing and tossing a few back with good friends. And flesh-eating monsters.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, Stephen Hunt (Tor)

Amelia Harsh, a sort of steam-punk female Indiana Jones, and a cast of adventurers sets out in an ancient U-boat to discover the sunken "perfect society" of Camlantis. Also on board are a band of female mercenaries, escapees from an underwater prison, and an insane guide. Sounds good to me.

Blood Red Sphere, Lawrence Barker (Swimming Kangaroo)

A recovering "cactus juice" addict passes his days scavenging ancient artifacts from the surface of mars and selling them. Then one such object, the "blood red sphere," attracts attention from pretty much everyone on Mars and the rest of the solar system. It's like the "Maltese Falcon" on Mars, which is something I can definitely get behind.

The House of Lost Souls, F.G. Cottam (Thomas Dunne)

After a psychic trauma visits itself on four students (causing one to commit suicide), a journalist investigates a home haunted by madness and strange occult happenings. The novel touches on many different eras of the house's history, eventually leading to a confrontation between our protagonist and an ancient evil.

1. Daniel Jackson (Stargate SG-1)
While pretty much the entire team has died and come back, Daniel wins the prize for doing it the most. He gets shot, he gets radiation poisoning, he gets killed, he gets killed again. And then again. And then again. You know, it's hardly any wonder he's gotten compared to Kenny from South Park.

2. Ellen Ripley (the Alien movies)
As far as resurrections go, Ellen doesn't totally adhere to the strictest definition. But when she's brought back as a clone in Alien Resurrection, it's in order to bring Sigourney Weaver back. This time with enhanced strength and acidic blood. So she's not only back, but she's also even more badass than she was before. (Which actually seems to be a trend with scifi resurrections.)

3. Captain Jack Harkness (Doctor Who and Torchwood)
In "The Parting of the Ways," the finale of Series 1, Jack is killed by the Daleks, but is brought back by Rose Tyler, who's essentially ingested the power of the time vortex, making her pretty much all-powerful. When she brings him back to life, however, she kind of overdoes it, and now Captain Jack cannot die.

4. Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
In the hundredth episode, "The Gift," Buffy sacrifices herself for her sister Dawn. After she's been dead for five months, she's brought back by her friends in "Bargaining." Whoever said you can't get by with a little help from your friends?

5. Charlotte "Chuck" Charles (Pushing Daisies)
Really, every single dead person Ned touches comes back to life. (Remember the Resurrection Glove in Torchwood? That's basically Ned, only Ned bakes pie too. And has a few more rules about how long he's allowed to keep the dead alive.) Well, he breaks those rules to let his dead childhood sweetheart, Chuck, remain in the land of the living, making her the most permanently resurrected character on the show.

6. Pretty Much Every Dead Superhero Ever
It would take forever to even tip the iceberg here. I figure it's a pretty fair assumption that if a superhero's died, they've also come back, maybe more than once. And if they haven't, you just have to wait a few years and they will. (Or they'll somehow manage to keep showing up in death. Exhibit A: The Dibnys.) Superman, Jean Grey, Batman, Jason Todd (Robin II), Hal Jordan (Green Lantern I), and on and on and on . . . No wonder they say death is a revolving door in comics.

7. The Iron Giant (The Iron Giant)
Now, once you open the list to robots, it gets a little messy. You can, after all, repair and rebuild them. (You have the technology.) In this case, however, the Giant sacrifices himself in order to prevent the entire town getting destroyed by a nuclear missile from the USS Nautilus sent to destroy the Giant. Several months pass, and everyone thinks the Iron Giant is dead, but we see him in pieces at Langjökull glacier in Iceland, slowly calling all his parts together, ostensibly to reassemble. (On top of that, I still hold that voicing the Iron Giant is Vin Diesel's greatest role to date.)

8. Sam and Dean Winchester (Supernatural)
In the finale episodes of Season 2, Sam is killed by Jake, another "special" kid ("special" being "potentially demonic"), who really does think he's doing the right thing. Dean, however, feels that killing Sam is decidedly the wrong thing, so he makes a deal with a Crossroads Demon: Sam back to life in exchange for one year left of life for Dean. That's Winchester Resurrection #1. Unfortunately, Dean only has a year left to live, so at the end of Season 3, he, er, dies. Lucky for him, however, he gets dragged back by an angel named Castiel. (Unlucky for him, it's because it's his job to stop the Apocalypse.) And that's Winchester Resurrection #2. (Actually, it's probably also the second or third time Dean's died. But still.)

9. Captain James T. Kirk (The Return, a novel by William Shatner)
While the canonicity is most definitely in question, The Return also most definitely has Kirk coming back from the dead. He's resurrected by the Borg and implanted with false memories designed to make him hate the Federation. The goal is, of course, to destroy Picard, but at the end of the day, Kirk sacrifices himself in Picard's place, thereby making it seem that he is once again dead. Spock, however, does not believe that.

10. Pat Henry "Hobbit" Hobbins (The Armageddon Rag by George R. R. Martin)
Pat Hobbins was the frontman for a rock band called The Nazgul, but was assassinated at a 1970 concert. When the band reunites with a young lookalike singer named Larry (who's even had the cosmetic surgery to look like Hobbins), they begin noticing a change in Larry at concerts, but only when they perform songs off their aptly named last album, Music to Wake the Dead. Larry, for all intents and purposes, becomes the once-dead Hobbins. Maybe it could be argued more as possession, but the novel's title is taken from one of the band's songs, the second half of which is "The Resurrection Rag."

11. Aslan (The Narnia series, C. S. Lewis)
Hey, what better way to end a post in honor of Easter with a little allegory? He's tortured, humiliated, and murdered by the White Witch and her followers, but come dawn and he's back in all his glory, which he explains thus:

"But if she could have looked a little further back, [...] She [the White Witch] would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

Talking to George R.R. Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin, NPR program To The Best Of Our Knowledge turned a discussion of genre boundaries. On the one hand, LeGuin talked about why science fiction and fantasy don't get the same respect as literary fiction:

To be labeled a genre writer, in the eyes of about 90 percent of readers, is to be labeled [as] second-rate. Face it. So obviously a lot of people bristle and say "Well, all right, I'm a scifi writer and I'm proud of it." I just wish they'd forget the darn labels. A lot of my books, they don't classify easily as scifi, or god help us, science fiction. They may be fantasy, but that may not be the important thing about them. These genre labels are marketing labels. They make it easy for readers who are addicted to a certain type of fiction to find it, in the library or the bookstore. They make it real, real easy for the publisher to sell it. Otherwise, they are useless. And they can be very useless, when you get writers like me, or like Michael Chabon.

People who say they don't like science fiction often haven't read it, adds Le Guin.

Martin, meanwhile, quoted Faulkner as saying the only stories worth telling are ones about a human heart in conflict with itself. But he was less concerned with tearing down the divide between science fiction and literary fiction than with merging SF and fantasy. He says SF, fantasy and horror all fit under an umbrella of "weird stuff," and really it's just the furniture that's different:

I'm 60 years old, and I come from a time where, at least, science fiction, fantasy and horror writers did move easily from one [subgenre] to another. That's not so true for new writers breaking in. When I was young, when I was just breaking into the field in the 1970s, science fiction was much more popular than fantasy. Today, the reverse is true. And there are some science fiction writers who seem threatened by this, and [they react by] drawing these hard distinctions between science fiction and fantasy, and saying that they're two totally opposite things. I don't think they are totally opposite things, and that's where my "furniture rule" comes in. I think they're basically the same thing, and what varies is the furniture. You have an elf in one and an alien in the other, and both of them perform the same literary function as a trope of the respective genres.

So maybe if we stop trying to draw such stark distinctions between fantasy and science fiction, the next step will be tearing down the distinctions between speculative fiction and "literature"? In any case, Martin feels sad when he sees a section in a bookstore labeled "literature" instead of just "fiction."

And why has science fiction been losing ground to fantasy? Martin says it's because we're no longer optimistic:

The social changes of the last 50 years [have] made the future someplace that we no longer want to visit the way we did when I was a kid. I mean, back in the Fifties and Sixties, when science fiction was perhaps as popular as it's ever been, we really had a lot of belief in the future. I mean, we couldn't wait to get to the future. The future was going to be much better than anything in the present. We were going to have robots and flying cars and all these labor-saving devices... Now, most people think their children are not going to have better lives than they do. They think their children are going to have worse lives.

[To The Best Of Our Knowledge]

The new series, called Wild Cards: The Hard Call is being brought to you by Dabel Brothers Productions, who've made a cottage industry of bringing fantasy and sci-fi properties — and their creators — into comics over the last couple of years (Some of their previous hits have included adaptations and original stories from the likes of Orson Scott Card, Laurell K. Hamilton and Wild Cards' daddy himself, George R.R. Martin). Unlike the majority of their line, this series by creators Daniel Abraham and former DC Comics and Image artist Eric Battle offers up a brand new story instead of an adaptation, although it's aimed squarely at the existing fanbase as the press release shows:

Over twenty years later, Wild Cards is returning to comic books, but this time, with a brand new story set in the present day where the Wild Card virus strikes again at a high school in Colorado. The survivors are rushed to New York City's clinic for those affected by the virus. And while one student has drawn the joker, two more have discovered that they are Aces — one with the power to release electricity from his body, and another with the ability to travel through mirrors. Meanwhile, Croyd Crenson, the ace known as "The Sleeper," has been framed for murder in the New York City slum known as Jokertown... and he's not going to rest until he clears his name.