Oh, and here's a spoiler warning, although I'll try not to spoil anything too much.

Eclipse Three should be required reading among anyone who wants to write short stories — or, for that matter, among anybody who still clings to the hope that short fiction can be enriching. The storytelling in this volume is, for the most part, both polished and bumpy — that is, it gives you the assurance from the first sentence that you're in the hands of a storyteller who knows what s/he is doing, but it also contains lots of irregularities and odd surprises. These are almost all stories by people who know how to set up, and subvert, expectations without seeming manipulative or crass.

I had high hopes for Eclipse Three already — the first two volumes from editor Jonathan Strahan were superb (you can read my review of volume two here.) And the list of contributors for the third volume is pretty awe-inspiring, including Karen Joy Fowler, Peter S. Beagle, Maureen McHugh, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Nicola Griffith and Paul Di Filippo. (Not to mention a lovely, previously unpublished cover by the late Richard Powers.)

But it's actually better than I'd hoped. Pretty much all I need to say about the quality of the stories in this volume is that the Peter S. Beagle entry does not stand out. By which I mean, it's as rich and clever and epic-feeling as any Peter Beagle short story — but you don't feel as though you've stumbled on the one standout story in the book. A number of the other stories in the book are just as instantly engrossing, and have that "personal but also huge and world-encompassing" feeling that Beagle does so well.

A lot of the best stories in this volume follow a main character who encounters a stranger who opens up a bizarre world. In Beagle's story, it's a magician who meets a woman whose husband and little girl have died, and shows her how to play a trick on death. In Molly Gloss' "The Visited Man," it's a weird (and not very good) painter who befriends a man whose wife and son have also died, forcing the widower to adopt more and more animals and go in search of night ghosts. In Nnedi Okorafor's "On The Road," it's a little boy who shows up at a woman's door in Nigeria, carrying with him some kind of terrible hunger that hollows you out from the inside.

There are also a lot of stories about people's relationships with odd communities, including Fowler's opening piece, where a rebellious teenage girl gets sent to a nightmarish kind of "boot camp" where her spirit is broken (and the camp turns out to have a weird secret). Or Di Filippo's "Yes, We Have No Bananas," in which a guy gets evicted and goes to live on a houseboat in a world that we (and he) gradually realize is an alternate universe. In Pat Cadigan's "Don't Mention Madagascar," a woman gets caught up in a world of travelers who are being forever being shuttled around impossible destinations — is it the spirit world? Alternate universes? — and they form an odd sort of community.

A lot of the stories have to do with creativity and the life of the artist, including Maureen McHugh's "Useless Things," the story of a sculptor who gets robbed and finds herself hardening against the world, and Elizabeth Bear's mermaid-meets-guitarist tale. Most of all, many of these stories deal with loneliness and loss, and the strange discoveries that come to people who've given up on finding themselves in this world.

The best story in the book, though, is Nicola Griffith's "It Takes Two," the jaw-dropping story of freakish biochemistry experiments, venture capital, and a lesbian lapdance that goes much further than anyone expects. It's reminiscent of the thrilling leap-in-the-dark feeling of her novel Slow River, but feels even more intense and weird, maybe because nothing could be weirder than a strip club in Marietta, Georgia.

Though a few stories in the book didn't thrill me quite as much as the rest, and purists may protest that a few of these stories are more literary than speculative, Eclipse Three is almost entirely a great prize. I didn't realize how much my faith in the short stories had dwindled, after reading dozens of unsustaining tales, until I read these stories. It made me want to go back to writing short fiction myself, something I've been neglecting, in the vain hope that I can write something half as engrossing as the tales in this collection. [Borders]

We were blown away by the second volume of Strahan's Eclipse series, not least because of Ted Chiang's Hugo-winning story "Exhalation." (At WisCon, I'm afraid I cornered Chiang and babbled inanely at him for five minutes about how great that story was.) But the table of contents for volume three actually sounds even more fantastic:

• The Pelican Bar, Karen Joy Fowler
• Lotion, Ellen Klages
• Don't Mention Madagascar, Pat Cadigan
• On the Road, Nnedi Okorafor
• Swell, Elizabeth Bear
• Useless Things, Maureen F. McHugh
• The Coral Heart, Jeffrey Ford
• It Takes Two, Nicola Griffith
• Sleight of Hand, Peter S. Beagle
• The Pretender's Tourney, Daniel Abraham
• Yes We Have No Bananas, Paul Di Filippo
• Mesopotamian Fire, Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple
• The Visited Man, Molly Gloss
• Galápagos, Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Dolce Domum, Ellen Kushner

That's a pretty incredible list of names right there. And yes, there do happen to be a lot of women on that list, including Karen Joy Fowler and Nicola Griffith — two authors we were just imploring to come back to science fiction.

Meanwhile, io9 contributors Jeff and Ann VanderMeer announced the table of contents for Last Drink Bird Head, their new anthology of flash fiction raising money for literacy charities, which will be available in time for the World Fantasy Convention. And befitting a book of flash fiction, there's a huge list of contributors, but it includes Gene Wolfe, Leslie What, Keith Brooke, Paul Di Filippo, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tanith Lee, Jay Lake, and many others.

And finally, if you're tired of anthologies about vampires or zombies, then rejoice! Ekaterina Sedia, author of the masterful Alchemy Of Stone, is putting out an anthology of werewolf tales called Running With The Pack.

Here's the back cover blurb:

Remember the werewolves of old stories and films, those bloodthirsty monsters that transformed under the full moon, reminding us of the terrible nature that lives within all of us? Today's werewolves are much more suave and even sexy, and they moved from British moors to New York City lofts, shaved, and got jobs. But as the tales of these writers will show you, they remained no less wild and passionate, and they still tug at the part of our being where a wild animal used to be. RUNNING WITH THE PACK includes stories from Carrie Vaughn, Laura Anne Gilman and C.E. Murphy, and they will convince you that despite their newfound gentility, werewolves remain as fascinating and terrifying as ever.

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.

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.

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]