It's the story of a plant biologist who flies into a remote northern area to research a new discovery: A field of grass. Perhaps the only one left on Earth. With just a few spare descriptions of ocean farms and arctic settlement, Millet manages to evoke a world that has been completely transformed both by climate change and overpopulation. And, like I said, it has a kind of bittersweet hopefulness to it that you rarely find in ecopocalypse fiction. It reminds me a bit of Douglas Coupland's new novel (which I'll be reviewing soon!), Generation A, which is also an oddly hopeful tale of a near-future ecological collapse.

You can listen to Martha Plimpton read Millet's roughly 5-minute story via Studio 360.

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.

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.

Wilson is known for his funny science writing about robots and general science, always packed with tons of pop culture references. So it makes sense that he would eventually turn to writing fiction. Especially fiction about robots.

Set in a kind of Bladerunner-esque world of implants and synthetic creatures, the story captures a scary, melancholy moment in the relationship between a man and his grandson. With a very cool twist. Here's how it starts:

He was an old man who lived in a modest gonfab, and over the last eighty hours his Eyes™ and Ears™ had begun to fail. In the first forty hours, he had ignored the increasingly strident sounds of the city of Vanille and focused on teaching the boy who lived with him. But after another forty hours the old man could no longer stand the Doppler-affected murmur of travelers on the slidewalks outside, and the sight of the boy's familiar deformities became overwhelming. It made the boy sad to see the old man's stifled revulsion, so he busied himself by sliding the hanging plastic sheets of the inflatable dwelling into layers that dampened the street noise. The semitransparent veils were stiff with grime and they hung still and useless like furled, ruined sails.

The old man was gnarled and bent, and his tendons were like taut cords beneath the skin of his arms. He wore a soiled white undershirt and his sagging chest bristled with gray hairs. A smooth patch of pink skin occupied a hollow under his left collar bone, marking the place where a rifle slug had passed cleanly through many decades before. He had been a father, an engineer, and a war-fighter, but for many years now he had lived peacefully with the boy.

Everything about the old man was natural and wrinkled except for his Eyes™ and Ears™, thick glasses resting on the creased bridge of his nose and two flesh-colored buds nestled in his ears. They were battered technological artifacts that captured sights and sounds and sanitized every visual and auditory experience. The old man sometimes wondered whether he could bear to live without these artifacts. He did not think so.

You know you want more. You can read the whole story for free online, thanks to Tor.com!

Illustration by Sam Weber.

Compared to the Civil War or World War II, the American Revolution has, for whatever reason, been largely neglected by alternate history writers. While books like Bring the Jubilee and The Man in the High Castle stand as iconic works that imagine Confederate and Nazi victories respectively, there is no such defining work detailing the particulars of the British maintaining control of their wayward colonies. Still, there are a number of more obscure short stories and essays (plus a couple of novels) that do consider just such a scenario, and they generally take one of the four following forms...

1. Different historical circumstances prevented the American Revolution completely.

Technically speaking, I could include in this category almost any alternate history where the divergence occurs long before July 4, 1776. For instance, a story about the Roman Empire surviving into the present day would undoubtedly mean European contact with and subsequent colonization of the Americas would have happened far, far differently. Instead, let's just focus on stories that explicitly explain how changing history would avert the Revolution.

J.C.D. Clark's essay "British America: What if there had been no American Revolution?" argues that increased representation for the colonists, much like the Scottish and Irish parliaments prior to the Act of Union in 1707, might well have given the Americans a satisfactory level of self-government and made rebellion unnecessary. The short story "Cops and Robbers" by S.M. Stirling is set in modern times, but it uses as its setup a world where Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder led Britain to a far more decisive victory in the French and Indian War (also known as the Seven Years War). This then allowed the British to maintain control over their colonies for a considerably longer period.

Writing just over a hundred years ago, Joseph Edgar Chamberlain imagined a plethora of alternate scenarios in his book The Ifs of History. He imagined a French colonization of Plymouth Bay that would have allowed the Dutch settlements of New Holland to survive, preventing the colonial unity that made the success of the Revolution possible. He wondered what might have happened if Columbus had not slightly altered course while crossing the Atlantic in 1492, which would have led to landfall on what is now Florida, likely shifting Spanish colonial interest towards North America.

He also looked at the possibility of Elizabeth I marrying and giving birth to an heir, which he believed would have prevented the rise of Puritanism and thus likely averted the Revolution. Not all of the changes he described would have appeared quite so momentous at the time, as he considered the tale of a colonial mother deciding in 1746 whether or not to enlist her son in the British navy. The mother was Mary Washington, the son was George Washington, and if the decision had been "yes" then the rest would have been a very different history than what we know.

2. Diplomacy prevailed.

This category focuses on situations where the colonies were on the brink of war, but ultimately were pacified thanks to brilliant diplomacy. Caleb Carr's essay "William Pitt the Elder and the Avoidance of the American Revolution" argues Pitt could have prevented the American Revolution if he had refused his ennoblement as the Earl of Chatham in 1766, which would have allowed him to stay in the House of Commons. Carr feels Pitt stood the best chance of preventing the various oppressive acts and exorbitant taxes that so angered the colonists, and in doing so might have prevented the rebellion.

In a similar vein, Roger Thompson imagined in his essay what might have happened "If I had been…the Earl of Shelburne in 1762-5." The crux of Thompson's argument holds that, if the Earl of Shelburne had been in charge of the peace negotiations following the Seven Years' War, he might have allowed France to regain control of Canada, which would have in turn removed the need for much of the taxation of the colonies.

One of the few full-fledged novels to tackle the subject, The Two Georges was cowritten by alternate history grandmaster Harry Turtledove and, for some awesome reason, Jaws actor Richard Dreyfuss. The titular Georges are, naturally enough, King George III and George Washington, who managed to negotiate a peaceful redress to American grievances that allowed the colonies to remain part of the British Empire. The theft two centuries later of a painting recording their legendary meeting sets the book's plot in motion, which takes the detective protagonist from New Liverpool (or, as we would call it, Los Angeles) on a winding tour throughout the North American Union all the way to their version of Washington D.C., the colonial capital Victoria.

3. The British won the war.

This really should be the easiest kind of alternate American Revolution story to write, considering just how unlikely the colonial victory arguably was. Beyond the superior military might of the British Empire, there was also the fact that not all Americans supported the cause of independence (although a majority of them did), and even then not all of the patriots were properly trained to fight. But beyond these general advantages the British had, there were several specific instances where the British could have triumphed and, in the process, likely ended the rebellion.

A major turning point recognized by multiple alternate history authors is the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. The month-long series of skirmishes, bookended by two bloody battles, saw the decisive defeat of British General John Burgoyne's army. Burgoyne had previously boasted that his troops would be able to split the colonies in half and effectively end the revolt. He was defeated largely due to the tactical brilliance and bold action of a brilliant young general by the name of Benedict Arnold. In H. Beam Piper's "He Walked Around the Horses", Burgoyne's victory at Saratoga is credited at the effective end of the American Revolution. A similar result is seen in Robert Sobel's For Want of a Nail…; If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga, which takes the form of an alternate history textbook detailing the duel histories of the Confederation of North America and the United States of Mexico.

Speaking of Benedict Arnold, Robert Cowley looked at how Arnold might have acted differently slightly later in his notorious career, as he detailed in his essay "Benedict Arnold Wins the Revolutionary War for Britain." Paul Park's "The Blood of Peter Francisco" takes place in the early 20th century in a world where the British routed the Continental Army at Yorktown in 1781, which in our history was the battle that signaled the inevitability of American victory.

Thomas Fleming is even more ambitious in his piece "Unlikely Victory: Thirteen Ways the Americans Could have Lost the Revolution", which examines the entire chain of events that made American success possible and then pulls out thirteen of the weakest links. This includes how the Patriots expertly turned the Boston Massacre into a rallying cry for anti-British sentiment, how a fortunate fog covered the American retreat from the Battle of Long Island and prevented their capture at the hands of the British, and how George Washington's charisma was all that stopped the disgruntled Continental Army from marching on Congress to demand their pay, all of which Fleming considers the results if these had played out differently.

Perhaps the most interesting sub-sub-sub-genre in this category concerns the ultimate fate of George Washington. In 1974, Robert Wallace Russell wrote and staged the play Washington Shall Hang: A Drama of Lost Revolution, which imagines the general being put on trial for treason. Roland J. Green's vignette "Exile's Greeting" looks at the HMS Bellerophon as it prepares to transport an important political prisoner to the infamous island of St. Helena, which in our history was the final home of the defeated Napoleon Bonaparte. I suppose my inclusion of that story in this particular paragraph pretty much gives away the big twist as to which mysterious general is being exiled to St. Helena.

4. Something utterly crazy happened.

Let's be honest here. (And, by "honest", I of course mean "borderline jingoistic in a tongue-in-cheek manner.") The American Revolution was a historical inevitability and no amount of expert political maneuvering by Pitt the Elder or brilliant strategizing by General Burgoyne could have prevented or defeated it. So how, exactly, could you plausibly write a story where the Revolution turned out differently? With magic and dragons, that's how!

Orson Scott Card preferred the former option in his Tales of Alvin Maker series, in which almost everybody has a "knack", or ability to do at least one thing absolutely perfectly, and a few people have particularly powerful knacks, including the title character. The existence of such powers has greatly altered the course of human history, and what would have been the United States is divided into a colonial New England controlled by the heirs of Oliver Cromwell's English Republic, a monarchy on the east coast ruled by the exiled House of Stuart, and a much smaller independent America where Native Americans play a far greater role.

Mike Resnick upped the ante considerably in terms of awesomeness when he titled his alternate history book Dragon America: Revolution. The book is set in a world where the ecology of the Americas is greatly different from that of the Old World, as it is dominated by, well, dragons. For some reason, the Revolution is close to failure in this universe, which forces George Washington to send Daniel Boone westward in search of the legendary dragons that could be their last hope for victory against the British.

I'll admit I'm probably cheating a little bit by including this book, as the American Revolution does ultimately succeed thanks to the dragons, but I have one very simple rule in life - I will never pass up an opportunity to talk about team-ups between George Washington and dragons to defeat the British. I can't think of anything that better encapsulates the American way.

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.

“Willpower” takes place in a post-scarcity future where people who are unable to find steady work can take “willfare” jobs, taking odd jobs posted on a Craigslist-like bulletin board for daily credits and enjoying taxpayer-funded room and board. Michael Delgado is a perpetual willfarer who finds himself cruising the job boards, in need of a willfare job before he breeches his contract with the taxpayers. Most of the jobs are along the lines of dog walking, construction, and medical guinea pig, but Michael spots one willfare job that looks too good to be true: replacing a crew member on a Mars mission:

Michael pounded a fist into his cheap plastic kitchen table. Fucking keywords! Fucking Vesper! Fucking Kon-Ye BMI! What had he gotten himself into this time?

Because it had to be a joke. Nobody would willfare a Mars mission job. It had to be a cover for something that involved Hershey’s syrup and chickens and octogenarians.

And now he was screwed. He’d ACCEPTED, and that was that.

Michael sighed, and started looking up bus routes out to Edwards. The last vestiges of Vesper’s adrenaline rush made him smile, as if in anticipation.

The future Stoddard envisions is an optimistic one, but ironically not one his protagonist fits comfortably into. Instead, he longs for the vision of an Edgar Rice Burroughs video game he used to play, and he spends the story trying to recapture the astronaut dreams of his youth. And, in his own way, so is Jason Stoddard.

Willpower [Futurismic]

Here's a great scene where Ong talks to his editor, who is upset because our hero refuses to write about celebrities and "news you can use." Instead, he focuses entirely on environmental issues:

I try to protest. “But you hired me to write the important stories. The stories about politics and the government, to continue the traditions of the old newspapers. I remember what you said when you hired me.”

“Yeah, well.” She looks away. “I was thinking more about a good scandal.”

“The checkerspot is a scandal. That butterfly is now gone.”

She sighs. “No, it’s not a scandal. It’s just a depressing story. No one reads a depressing story, at least, not more than once. And no one subscribes to a depressing byline feed.”

“A thousand people do.”

“A thousand people.” She laughs. “We aren’t some Laotian community weblog, we’re Milestone, and we’re competing for clicks with them.” She waves outside, indicating the maelstrom. “Your stories don’t last longer than half a day; they never get social-poked by anyone except a fringe.” She shakes her head. “Christ, I don’t even know who your demographic is. Centenarian hippies? Some federal bureaucrats? The numbers just don’t justify the amount of time you spend on stories.”

“What stories do you wish me to write?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Product reviews. News you can use. Just not any more of this ‘we regret to inform you of bad news’ stuff. If there isn’t something a reader can do about the damn butterfly, then there’s no point in telling them about it. It just depresses people, and it depresses your numbers.”

There's a lot of good stuff in Bacigalupi's story, and he offers a pretty accurate sense of how it feels to try to write good stories while tracking audience attention at a micro-level. Interestingly he doesn't take the easy route and set up the Gawker-esque new media companies as the bad guys. The celebrity stalkers and gadget hounds aren't craven idiots - they're good reporters, too, in their own way. One even tries to help Ong get his numbers back up.

But Ong only wants to focus on stories that are beloved by scientists and policy wonks, and they don't represent a demographic the advertisers care about. Interwoven throughout Ong's tale of his struggle to stay competitive in the newsroom are his memories of his father, kidnapped by the secret police during a future Laotian revolution that puts a conservative monarchy in power. Ong's past and political interests are about to propel him into the biggest celebrity gossip news story to hit the feeds in hours . . .

You can now read "The Gambler" for free online here, or pick up a copy of the awesome anthology Fast Forward 2 where it first appeared in print.

The feud appears to have started with science fiction scholar and urban fantasy novelist Justine Larbalestier. Although Larbalestier’s young adult novels feature magic and fairies, she detests all things unicorn. In praising Simon Pegg’s discussion on zombies as metaphor, she notes that the unicorn metaphor hasn’t successfully been brought into the 21st Century:

Maybe in the olden days, Diana. But I don’t know if you noticed: this isn’t the olden days. No one allegories or alchemises no more. Unicorns are metaphorically as dead as the dodo.

Although Larbalestier has found some support on this matter (fellow young adult novelist John Green described unicorns as “the horned beasts of suck”), Holly Black, author of The Spiderwick Chronicles, believes that the failure of writers to explore unicorns with a modern eye is exactly what gives them potential:

1. Justine says that zombies are so chilling because they represent inescapable death and that unicorns have no resonance. This is massively untrue. Unicorns symbolize eternal life, hence their healing powers and their association with both religious figures and kings. Eternal life can be pretty chilling.

2. For example, but also as a separate point, the photoshopping and painting of Obama with unicorns and McCain with (or into) zombies as a means to make a political argument. Unfair? Maybe, but resonant. (I did find a single McCain unicorn picture, for anyone who's interested in that kind of thing.)

3. Unicorns are interesting because there is something to subvert, something to transgress. No one wants to see the zombie transgressed. Well, only crazy people.

So, with that in mind, the pair conceived of Zombies vs. Unicorns, an anthology that will be half zombie stories and half unicorn stories, with Larbalestier editing the former and Black the latter. It’s an interesting idea, but I think the unicorn folks have their work cut out for them. While it’s a challenge to keep zombies fresh and interesting, I’m hard pressed to think of instances of unicorns being successfully brought into the science fiction or urban fantasy sphere. But, perhaps knowing that the stories will be published with zombie tales will push unicorn writers farther outside the high fantasy conventions.

Simon & Schuster will publish the anthology in 2010.

Zombie unicorn from jawboneradio.

[Justine Larbalestier and Holly Black via Shaken & Stirred]

James Tiptree Jr.
Given Name: Alice “Alli” Sheldon
Works: Numerous short stories, including “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
James Tiptree Jr. was an elusive figure, giving only one interview in “his” career, which was condcted by mail. He had a post office box and his own back account, but no one had ever met him in person. In 1976, they learned why: Tiptree was actually Alice Bradley, a one-time CIA agent who had adopted the Tiptree pseudonym while finishing her doctorate in psychology. Bradley said that when she started writing science fiction, she wanted to create a persona who would be sufficiently removed from her previous writing – which had focused largely on women and the nature of girlhood – and she wanted to submit her stories with a name that no editor would remember rejecting. She took the name “Tiptree” from a jam jar and the name “James” because male names were more common in science fiction than female ones.

When Tiptree was revealed as a woman, it caused quite a stir among the science fiction community. Tiptree’s followers recognized the name as a pseudonym, but Bradley’s frequent travels and intelligence background led many to believe he was a high-ranking government official, but few had considered he might be a woman. Sheldon would later say that she was “ashamed” of taking a male pseudonym because she had taken the easy path into the male-dominated field.

CJ Cherryh
Given Name: Carolyn Janice Cherry
Works: Over 60 novels and short story collections, including Downbelow Station, Cyteen, and Cuckoo’s Egg.
Carolyn Cherry submitted her first two novels, Gate of Ivrel and Brothers of Earth to DAW Books in 1975. Donald Wollheim, DAW’s founder, purchased both manuscripts, but, for marketability, suggested she go with a different name. The initials CJ disguised the fact that she was a woman and adding an “h” to her last name made it look less like a romance novelist’s.

Vernon Lee
Given Name: Violet Paget
Works: Several ghost stories, notably “Oke of Okehurst: or the Phantom Lover”
Vernon Lee wrote not only supernatural fiction, but also papers the theory of philosopher and aesthetics, subjects women were not considered intellectually suited for. Lee herself once said, “I don’t care that Vernon Lee should be known to be myself or any other young woman, as I am sure no one reads a woman’s writings on art, history or aesthetics with anything but mitigated contempt.” But she quickly became known as one of the premiere scholars in aesthetics and her fiction continues to be republished today.

Paul Ash(well)
Given Name: Pauline Ashwell
Works: “Invasion from Venus,” “The Winds of a Bat,”
The short story “Invasion from Venus” appeared in Yankee Science Fiction in 1942 under the name “Paul Ashwell.” But the real author was a fourteen year-old girl by the name of Pauline Ashwell. John W. Campbell would eventually publish “Unwillingly to School,” Pauline’s “debut” (now under her real name) in Analog magazine in 1958. She would continue to publish stories from time to time under the truncated name “Paul Ash,” including the Nebula-nominated “Wings of a Bat.” In the 1990s, Ashwell would publish two novels, Unwillingly to Earth and Project Farcry.

CL Moore
Given Name: Catherine Lucille Moore
Works: Numerous short stories, including “The Code” “Promised Land,” and “Heir Apparent”
Although claims that CL Moore tried to conceal her gender are in dispute, Astounding editor and fellow scifi writer Frederik Pohl once said that Moore “felt a need to tinker with” her name to appeal to her overwhelmingly male readers. It apparently worked, as in 1936, Moore received a letter of admiration from science fiction writer Henry Kuttner, who believed Moore was a man. They married in 1940. The pair would go on to collaborate on many short stories, signing each work with a single pseudonym – one that was invariably male.

L. Taylor Hansen
Given Name: Lucile Taylor Hansen
Works: A handful of short stories and 57 science articles in Amazing Stories from 1941-1949.
L. Taylor Hansen, who was better known for her science articles than her fiction, didn’t merely attempt to obscure her gender; she denied it entirely. Hansen once titled a letter in Amazing “L. Taylor Hansen Defends Himself” and once included a photo of a man with one of her stories, claiming it was a photo of herself.

Tarpé Mills
Given Name: June Mills
Works: Miss Fury
Comic book artist June Mills dropped her first name in favor of her more gender ambiguous middle name when she started making action comics. She created Miss Fury, one of the early female action characters in comics, and the first created by a woman. When Miss Fury proved a commercial success, she couldn’t hide her gender from interviewers, who realized that the comic creator was not only a woman, but bore a close resemblance to her character.

Andre Norton
Given Name: Alice Norton
Works: Over 300 titles, including Star Born, Merlin’s Mirror, and Star Man’s Son
Alice Mary Norton went beyond pseudonym to increase her marketability. The year she published her first short story, she legally changed her name to Andre Alice Norton, figuring the male name would fit better with the boys her were her primary market. Over the years, she also published under the names Andrew North and Allen Weston.

Murray Constantine
Given Name: Katharine Burdekin
Works: The Devil, Poor Devil, Proud Man, Swastika Night, and Venus in Scorpio
Katharine Burdekin’s novels dealt primarily with fascist dystopias, and as her work grew more critical of fascism, she adopted a pseudonym to protect her family in the event of a German invasion of England. But her choice of a male pseudonym was likely linked to her feminist approach to the subject, and she frequently linked fascism to a “cult of masculinity” and “reduction of women.” Although the feminist overtones led many critics to believe that Constantine was a woman writing under a pseudonym, it wasn’t until two decades after her death that a scholar identified Constantine as Burdekin.

JK Rowling
Given Name: Joanne Rowling
Works: The Harry Potter Series
These days, people will wait in line hours to purchase something from Ms. Joanne Rowling. But when she first submitted her tale of a boy wizard to Bloomsbury, the publisher suggested that she use two initials instead of her first name, so as not to turn off the young boys (Rowling doesn’t actually have a middle name, and took the K for her grandmother, Kathleen). If children care that the creator of Hogwarts is a woman, it certainly doesn’t show.

As our main character's point of view skips from his own and into Cipher's, we are subjected to a speed-freakish barrage of weird details from the man's memory as he goes to a dinner party. Mostly he remembers having sex with random women, but his memory aid also makes him the hit of the evening:

To the Wasserfiends’ party at last. Just on time. Everybody well dressed. Champagne flowing. Cocktail pianist. “Avalon.” Same song playing that night in Vineyard Haven with Lillian Waterfowl. Slipped out of her bathing suit. Naked goddess. Tore off my clothes with her long nails. Our two bodies straining with desire. Moved in on her like a panther. About to consummate passion, when suddenly my leg cramped. Left calf? No, right . . . Thank you for a wonderful evening, Mrs. Wasserfiend. Oh, and the name you were trying to think of when we were discussing the life of Emily Dickinson before was Bronko Nagurski. Out of there just in time. Cranial Pops starting to wear off. Still, no question I was the hit of the party. Came up with Gouda cheese. Lava soap. Got Leo Gorcey and Julien Sorel. Managed to recite the Philippics verbatim. Recalled the Schrafft’s on Fifty-seventh and Third. Hummed Mousie Powell’s theme song. Got Menachem Schneerson, the Sons of the Pioneers. Gyp the Blood.

Now if only Woody would turn this story into a flick. Think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in reverse — a demented tale of a world addicted to Cranial Pops, remembering everything. Instead of making us into intellectual gods, it just makes us irritating cocktail chatterers who can't stop replaying cheesy sex scenes in our minds. Jim Carrey and Sarah Silverman co-star.

Think Hard — It'll Come Back to You [via New Yorker]

As Associated Content revealed, the author is none other than socially-conservative group Focus on the Family, a very influential activist organization that pushes for traditional marriage and against issues like gay rights and abortion for women. Most of their scifi tale is focused on these social issues, detailing the way Obama's agenda has turned the nation pro-gay and anti-Christian. Associated Content summarizes the "Letter" scenario:

Under an Obama Presidency, homosexuality will be legalized as a constitutional right, the Boy Scouts will disband when they refuse to let homosexual tent masters sleep in young boy's tents, the far Left will control the Supreme Court, a few U.S. cities will be attacked by terrorists and Israel will be nuked, Russia will invade Europe, and the Bible will be classified as hate speech.

Interestingly, it's already looking very unlikely that the Obama Regime will usher in an era of gay supremacy. Several states passed laws banning gay marriage last night, and Arkansas banned gay couples from adopting children.

Still, "Letter" makes one thing clear: One of the most potent weapons that any political advocacy organization has is science fiction. As conservatives try to re-imagine themselves over the next few years, I think we can expect to see a lot of creative and intriguing right-wing scifi protest literature.

"Letter from Obama's America" [PDF]

You'll find larger archives of the two series in a number of places online, but the problem is the quality of the broadcasts:

While tens of thousands mp3's of OTR radio shows exist out there on the internet, more than half of them are unlistenable. X-Minus 1 has some of the poorer audio quality of the any of the series that circulate. Unfortunate, as it is one of the best [shows].

If you can brave the occasionally shoddy audio, there's much to love about the Internet Archive's index of X Minus 1 broadcasts. If you're going to start someplace, a good starting point might be Robert Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll," which was awarded a retrospective Nebula Award in 1970 and has the perfect structure for radio (It's also about a world without cars, if you want to start getting used to that ahead of time).

The archives of Dimension X and X Minus 1 also feature a number of astonishing Philip K. Dick stories, including "The Defenders." There's also an insanely worthwhile, if melodramatic, adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Nightfall that you'll want to throw on your iPod right about now.

Sadly, Counter Clock hasn't updated in awhile, but there's enough in the archives to satisfy your earholes for some time.

Counter Clock [CCFTPD.blogspot.com]

From the story:

When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else.

I've heard many webbish futurists speculate that A.I. is going to come from search algorithms and user-generated content, but this is the first time I've ever seen anybody explain it in a plausible way. Excellent read. Image via Modern Life is Rubbish.

Engineers' Dreams [Edge via BoingBoing]

McHugh, who won accolades for her novel China Mountain Zhang, has written a funny, thoughtful story about what would happen if the middleware you ran on your giant UNIX network achieved a form of consciousness on the level of a shark. How would you debug it when it started behaving in a shark-like manner and randomly messing with your data? Would it be unethical to revert the system?

And Duchamp, whose Marq'ssan Cycle earned praise from Samuel Delaney, writes about the first man to be fitted with a wearable artificial womb that feeds nutrients to his baby via a placenta-like filter that siphons his blood into the baby's body. It's a really weird story, in part because it deals mostly with how this fairly manly guy deals with being pregnant — and with his wife's ambivalence about having children at all. This is not at all your usual gender-role-switching story. Highly recommended.

Plugged In [via Aqueduct Press]

Now you can read about Xenu's evil plan and his nefarious dealings with psychiatrists in this excerpt from the story's climax, below. Watch out for nuclear lava!

Apparently, Xenu was fond of dark suits. He also had dark hair and liked classical music, as well as cold drinks. He's a pretty bitter guy, and when he rounded up the people he would later bring to Earth and blow up with atomics placed inside volcanoes, he picked psychiatrists to help him weed out these undesirables. Those undesirables included "motion picture producers," as well as "writers" and "blacks." Also, "salesmen." Interesting mix.

Other interesting things of note: apparently the aliens from millions of years ago who hung out with Xenu used "felt tip pens." Makes sense. Felt-tips are pretty advanced technology. Want to know more? Check out the whole story. It's full of awesome adjectives, moody generals, and tragic esplosions. Of course, if you need the full Scientology back story, check out our handy chart.

"Revolt in the Stars" [PDF via Wikileaks — or, if you can't get that one, we are hosting our own PDF]

The book leads off with Kress' story "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls," which was originally published via scifi podcast Escape Pod. The tale of a single mother coping with what happens when her small town, Clifford Falls, gets several nano-fabricators sparked a great deal of controversy online, in part because nobody could figure out if Kress was for or against nanotech. And that's part of what appeals about this tale: Kress shows the dark side of being liberated from the need to work, showing us people in Clifford Falls who quit their awful factory jobs and spend all day getting drunk on nano-whiskey or primping in their nano-fashions. Her heroine refuses to use the nano-fabricators, preferring to farm and sew her own clothes as a way of not giving up on work. One of the strongest stories in the book, this tale exhibits Kress' allure as a writer: she manages to explore hard science while also looking at its social consequences among ordinary people rather than scientists or elite space explorers.

A similarly strong story is "Computer Virus," about a woman trapped inside her computer-secured fortress by an invading A.I. who wants to escape being killed by the government agency that made him. While our hero figures out an ingenious way to use her skills with proteomics to fight the A.I., she also struggles with a sense that her biology skills are inferior to those of her dead husband. And in "Savior," we follow several generations of mostly-humble Minnesota families as they struggle to understand why a strange alien craft landed on a patch of farmland and never moved or transmitted any information to Earth for over two centuries.

Kress has a way of making the vast reaches of the galaxy and the tiniest nanomachines seem familiar and comprehensible — while also making the Earth itself into a creepy alternate world. At times her depressed single mothers, dysfunctional siblings, and cruelly condescending male authority figures feel like figures out of a Dorothy Allison novel. Until they grow new bodies in nano-vats, or blast themselves into the heart of a black hole. Or destroy an entire solar system by merging with a universe-spanning synthetic intelligence that's slowly being tortured to death by a similar intelligence from another universe. At her best, Nancy Kress evokes the surreal unhappiness of Katherine Dunn's mutant-family novel Geek Love.

But many of the stories in this volume, such as "Shiva in Shadow," suffer from a kind of overly-ambitious metaphorical symmetry in which science becomes a fancy symbol for human psychology. In that story, three characters studying anomalous gravitational artifacts at the center of the galaxy find their own relationships haunted by (you guessed it) anomalous, unseen forces that cause them to get sucked slowly into a swirling pit of hellish destruction — just like a black hole. "The Most Famous Little Girl in the World" has the same problem. A girl who is abducted by aliens becomes (wait for it) alienated from her little cousin, and the story tracks the two women for their whole lives as their alienation from each other too-perfectly reflects the humans' growing relationship with the aliens who once abducted the girl.

Despite these moments when Kress bashes the reader over the head with simple allegories, the collection is generally strong and worth a read. I was especially impressed with Kress' ability to quickly invoke posthuman worlds with just a few deft paragraphs, and bring us deeply into the emotional lives of her sometimes quite alien characters. And her heaping doses of bio-geekery, usually based in extrapolations from today's state-of-the-art science, give these stories a grounding in realism that a lot of great science fiction lacks.

Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories [Amazon]

I love how "Rasmussen and Heartley" manage to evoke and satirize the whole forced marriage plot here:

Andrinara knew that her marriage to Crown Prince Alistair would not forestall the conquest of her beloved planet, Neridan, for long. Emperor Jakrung clearly intended to bring Neridan into his empire, and had simply chosen her marriage to his only surviving son as the most expedient method. But Andrinara would not give up her planet without a fight! Yes, she would go docilely to the altar, and yes, she would seem to perform her duties as a wife to the Crown Prince, but when the time was right...!

She had more than enough of the oki venom to dispose of two men. And as an Empress, she could protect not only her beloved Neridan, but all of the many other planets that had fallen under the despotic rule of the rapacious and cruel Jakrung of the House of Dorg . . .

Andrinara, for her part, was calm. She tuned out much of the ceremony, and used the time to study her soon-to-be husband, finding little fault with what she saw, though she tried. Crown Prince Alistair was tall and well-proportioned, with broad shoulders that tapered to narrow hips, and the outlines of his lean muscles were visible even through the heavy cloth of his ceremonial tunic. His eyes were a piercing blue, and his aquiline nose was set above full, sensuous lips. His golden hair curled slightly, and brushed the collar of his tunic, making a soft contrast to his firm jaw. Andrinara observed that the tawny skin of his hand made a pleasing contrast against her own pale fingers, bound to his now by the golden rope of matrimony.

The Crown Prince obviously took after his mother, a common woman who had been the Emperor's fourth wife, prized for her beauty even though her lineage was of no account. Jakrung himself, squat and as well-favored as a gargoyle, had little in common with his golden son, Andrinara thought. Despite herself, she felt a stirring of attraction to the handsome man who would be her husband.

Crown Prince Alistair felt something similar, if the hungry look in his eyes when Andrinara pushed back her triple veils was any indication. He clasped her hands warmly, and leaned forward to give his bride the customary kiss with an unexpected heat that made Andrinara blush. Emperor Jakrung chuckled at her discomfiture, and she pressed her lips together in annoyance before remembering the role she must play.

Of course, you can read the whole story for free on LiveJournal. Or you can buy it, along with "other tales of the Dorgian Galaxy" on Lulu.com.