Tag: Space Opera

I found this nifty quiz over at Jason Bennion’s blog, and given its focus on books and sci-fi, it’s right up my alley. Without further adoo:

1. Science fiction, fantasy, or horror?

I enjoy all three. Right now I’m on a bit of a fantasy kick, but I tend to vacillate between F and SF. Horror tends to come and go; I’ll get into a horror mood which will last for a year or more and then I won’t read much horror for quite a while. But I love all three genres.

2. Hardback, trade paperback, or mass-market paperback?

For sheer reading pleasure, I prefer hardbacks. However, they’re expensive, obviously. Therefore, only a very few authors are on my list of persons whose books I buy for full-price in hardback (or whatever the Amazon discount happens to be). In fact, Guy Gavriel Kay is the only such author I can think of at the moment! Lots of Science Fiction Book Club volumes are hardbacks, so there’s those, but with that club I tend to limit myself to their reprint anthologies or omnibus volumes, thus maximizing the bang for my buck.

I used to hate mass-market PBs, but of late I’ve retaken a shine to them, and in my quest to build the World’s Zippiest Space Opera Collection, I’ve had to re-embrace the MMPB in a big way, since that’s the only way to get a lot of these books. Printing seems to have improved so that in fantasy MMPBs, the maps are more legible. I had a copy once of Lord of the Rings in MMPB in which the maps of Middle Earth were nearly illegible — and unforgivably, they omitted the detail map of Gondor and Mordor that’s in most copies of Return of the King.

Trades are nice, too. Hmmm…basically, I just like books.

3. Heinlein or Asimov?

Asimov. Although I frankly haven’t read nearly as much Heinlein as I should. What Heinlein I’ve read, I’ve liked. But with Asimov, I’m always a little sad that his stories and novels have seemingly fallen out of fashion. I thought he was a good writer. (of fiction, that is. Everybody agrees that his non-fic was always first-rate, and his essays on the SF world are sheer brilliance.)

4. Amazon or brick-and-mortar?

Brick-and-mortar. I want to pick up books, flex them in my hands, smell the pages (no, I don’t know why I do this, but it’s been a habit of mine for as long as I can remember); then I want to carry around a batch of books until I decide it’s time to go, whereupon I try to decide which of the stack I feel most justified in buying. I like the feeling of discovery; I like browsing. Amazon just isn’t built for browsing, although it does have tools that help in that regard.

However, Amazon’s got other benefits that make it indispensible. Its vast inventory, for example: if I want to order something for the day it’s released, I just go with Amazon, and they’re the bee’s knees if I know exactly what I want.

So it depends on what kind of shopping I’m doing. If I’m just in the mood to buy some books, it’s off to Borders with me.

5. Barnes & Noble or Borders?

(I suppose that Canadians answering this quiz should do Chapters or Indigo.)

Borders, although the margin is fairly small. The main reason that I don’t shop at B&N more is that at this point in time, the Buffalo region only has two B&Ns, and they’re both at least fifteen minutes of driving farther away from my apartment than Borders. Apparently two new B&Ns are due to open this year, both much closer; but then, a new Borders is also opening, close enough that if doing so didn’t involve crossing one of the busiest intersections in the entire region, I’d walk there.

One time I went to Borders when The Daughter was only one or so, and I bought a copy of the collected stories of HP Lovecraft. The sales clerk, who looked eerily like Otto the busdriver from The Simpsons, gives me this maniacal grin and says, “Oooooh, bedtime stories!”

As for B&N, there’s the guy eight years or so ago who once noted that I was buying some book or other about King Arthur, whereupon he got this sullen look on his face. This look remained on his visage until the transaction was complete, whereupon he says, “I see you’re interested in King Arthur. Well, I am too, and I just watched First Knight last night [the crappy 1995 movie with Richard Gere as Lancelot], and it sucked. When will we ever get a good Arthur movie?” I offered Excalibur, but he shook his head: “It tried to do too much, and all that Wagner on the soundtrack was distracting.” Me: “Camelot?” Him: “Vanessa Redgrave can’t sing, Franco Nero can’t act. Ugh. Someday somebody will make a good Arthur movie.”

But then, I bought a copy of Christopher Moore’s Bloodsucking Fiends as a Christmas gift for a friend last month at Borders, and that clerk fell over himself telling me how good the book was. As I’d read it, we then compared notes on the rest of Moore’s output.

So yeah, I like bookstores.

6. Hitchhiker or Discworld?

Haven’t read either. Should read both. Could someone familiar with Discworld suggest a good starting point? Ditto for Niven’s Ringworld, which I haven’t read, either.

7. Bookmark or dog-ear?

Bookmark! I own some nice ones, too. Dog-earing sucks.

8. Magazine: Asimov’s Science Fiction or Fantasy & Science Fiction?

Between these two, Asimov’s; F&SF’s stories tend to not excite me as much. But as for magazines, I prefer Realms of Fantasy to both, and I really need to start getting Black Gate again. Now that is a magazine. (For horror, Cemetery Dance is pretty good.)

9. Alphabetize by author, by title, or random?

I don’t alphabetize. I try to group books by author, but that’s it. Mostly, I’m all over the map, although my Space Opera collection is all on one set of shelves.

10. Keep, throw away, or sell?

I keep for an amazingly long time, after which period I maybe sell on eBay, but in most cases I give to the library for use in their quarterly used book sales. This brings up a conundrum: I have a lot of philosophy texts from my college years which I seriously doubt I shall ever read again, and which are simply taking up space. Stuff like this would go to the library, except for the fact that many of these books are filled with my various marginalia. I’m a little hesitant to have my marginalia in someone else’s library, at least while I’m alive! Hmmmmm.

(I do throw out books that are clearly outdated, like WordPerfect 6.0 for Dummies and the like, and I likewise toss if they become damaged in any way.)

11. Year’s Best Science Fiction series (edited by Gardner Dozois) or Years Best SF series (edited by David G. Hartwell)

I get both. The fiction in the Hartwell series tends to be more my speed, but the Dozois always includes longer fiction that the Hartwell series cannot accomodate, as well as the essays at the front of the book on the state of SF today (although Dozois maintains a pretty pessimistic tone, from what I’ve seen).

I also get both Year’s Best fantasy collections. The Datlow-Link series is essential reading, year in and year out, just for its introductory essays alone.

12. Keep dustjacket or toss it?

I always keep dustjackets, although I remove them and set them aside when I’m actually reading the book.

13. Read with dustjacket or remove it?

Oh. Didn’t see this question when I answered the previous one.

14. Short story or novel?

Both, but I’ve never read enough short fiction. There’s something uniquely pleasurable about reading a tale from the beginning, knowing that you’ll finish it the same evening.

15. Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?

Haven’t read Snicket, so it’s Potter all the way.

16. Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?

Depends on the book, of course. Some books have short chapters which therefore makes it easy to read that way, while others have quite lengthy chapters which make me rely on scene breaks (indicated by double-carriage returns in the books). At night, though, I’ll read until I’m tired, and then I go to the next available break.

17. “It was a dark and stormy night” or “Once upon a time”?

Both! Why can’t we have, “Once upon a time, on a dark and stormy night”?

(Of course, we all know that my true allegiance lies with, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….”)

18. Buy or borrow?

Both, with more emphasis these days on borrowing from the library. Like I’ve said before, limiting my reading to only those books I can afford to buy is a crazy notion up with which I shall not put.

19. Buying choice: book reviews, recommendation, or browse?

Browsing and recommendation, really. I read book reviews with some regularity, but I don’t often get the hankering to read something based on what a review says.

20. Lewis or Tolkien?

Tolkien. Duh.

(Well, I’ve never read the other six books in the Narnia sequence. I tried a number of times in my youth, and could never get into them.)

21. Hard SF or space opera?

Duh!

(But I do like the hard stuff now and again. One of my favorite books of all time, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, is pure hard-SF.

22. Collection (short stories by the same author) or anthology (short stories by different authors)?

Anthologies, mostly.

23. Hugo or Nebula?

I pay little attention to these awards, to be honest.

24. Golden Age SF or New Wave SF?

I don’t know much about the New Wave stuff, so Golden Age, I suppose.

25. Tidy ending or cliffhanger?

I don’t know. Cliffhangers that feel like tidy endings? Like the film version of The Two Towers, which ends on a satisfying note with very little resolved.

26. Morning, afternoon, or nighttime reading?

For fiction, mostly night-time. I’ve never been able to read fiction in short doses, which is what it has to be in the morning and afternoon (unless I’m off from work). Nonfiction I can read in short bursts just fine, but with fiction, I need to be able to immerse myself in the fictional world.

27. Standalone or series?

Standalones usually; with series, I like things shorter or comprised of standalones that still manage to collectively tell a story. I tend to be so all-over-the-map in my reading that I’ll rarely read two books of the same series back to back, and thus by the time I get round to reading more in a series, I’ve forgotten what happened before.

28. Urban fantasy or high fantasy?

Honestly, both. (Although “urban” is a bad descriptor, in my opinion — Gaiman’s American Gods isn’t really urban, but it’s not high fantasy, either.

29. New or used?

I don’t really care, as long as the book’s in pretty good shape.

30. Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?

The Complete Book of Marvels by Richard Halliburton

31. Top X favorite genre books read last year? (Where X is 5 or less)

Ensign Flandry, Poul Anderson
The Stupidest Angel, Christopher Moore
Galactic Patrol, E.E. “Doc” Smith
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds, Brian Daley

32. Top X favorite genre books of all time? (Where X is 5 or less)

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay
Fluke, Christopher Moore
Red/Green/Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke

33. X favorite genre series? (Where X is 5 or less)

The Prydain Chronicles, Lloyd Alexander
The Lewis Barnavelt novels, John Bellairs
The Lensmen sequence, E.E. “Doc” Smith

34. Top X favorite genre short stories? (Where X is 5 or less)

“The Nine Billion Names of God”, Arthur C. Clarke
“Nightfall”, Isaac Asimov
“The Secret Shih-Tan”, Graham Masterton
“That Feeling You Get, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, Stephen King
“Lamb to the Slaughter”, Roald Dahl (not really a “genre” tale, actually)

That’s it, folks! Tag yourself if you like the skiffy, move along if you don’t.

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Here’s an update on what I’ve been reading as part of my space opera obsession:

:: Galactic Patrol, by E.E. “Doc” Smith. I bought the entire Lensmen sequence five or six years ago when the Science Fiction Book Club had it in a two-volume set. At the time, I read Triplanetary, but never read farther into the series. Triplanetary is billed as the first book in the sequence, but it really isn’t: it may be set prior to the events of Galactic Patrol, and it might have been initially written prior to GP, but it was only reworked by Smith to take place in his Lensmen saga after the rest of the books were done.

When confronted by a series of books, folks, it’s almost always preferable to read them in the order in which they were written than in the order in which the events take place.

Galactic Patrol pretty much starts without any preamble: Kimball Kinison is “initiated” into the “order” of the Lensmen, fitted with his Lens, and then sent on his first assignment, which involves tracking space pirates who strike from a secret base, and returning to Earth with the information. Having already read Triplanetary and remembering the glacial pace of the opening in which Smith took his sweet time getting things going as he related millions of years of Galactic history, GP is refreshing in the way it gets things going almost immediately.

Smith also has quite an imagination for alien worlds: the planet Trenco, whose equatorial regions receive exactly forty-seven feet and five inches of rain every single night, comes off as a remarkably hellish environment. Plus, Smith’s universe feels nice and big, which is what I want in a space opera. GP tells a fairly tight story, but Smith still makes it clear that he’s only scratching the surface.

:: Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds, by Brian Daley. I remember seeing Daley’s books a lot on the shelves when I’d shop at various WaldenBooks or B. Dalton’s when I was a kid, and I read a few of his media tie-in books and film novelizations, but never his original work, until now. I made a mental note of this title a while back when Will Duquette mentioned it favorably; eventually I tracked it down on eBay (along with its sequels, Jinx on a Terran Inheritance and Fall of the White Ship Avatar. I read Requiem a month or so ago.

I hate to describe books as breezy fun reads, because that makes them sound like less than what they are. Truth is, Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds is as good an entertainment I’ve found in a book in a long while. No, this isn’t deep and insightful fiction, but it is SF adventure backed with lots of nifty ideas, such as Earth having turned away from the stars after they’ve been colonized. The book is a classic “buddy” story, pairing the stiff-laced Hobart Floyt (it can’t be coincidence that the name is so close to “Heywood Floyd”) and the rogueish Alacrity Fitzhugh as they travel across the galaxy to learn why Floyt has been named in the will of the ruler of a distant interstellar Empire. Hijinks, derring-do, and some actual hilarity ensue.

After tracking this book down, but before reading it, I decided to do a bit of research as to what Brian Daley’s been up to. Turns out he died ten years ago. Damn. All that time I’ve been following the SF genre, and I never knew. It’s amazing how we can be so in tune with something and out of touch with it as the same time.

The next two are shorter tales, either novelets or novellas depending on our definition, from the new anthology The Space Opera Renaissance, edited by david Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer (who may be the finest anthologist duo in the F&SF genre, possible excepting Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow). This anthology provides a historical overview of the entire space opera sub-genre, via thirty-two short selections. (The term “short” is something of a misnomer, actually, since this anthology weighs in at over nine hundred pages. Lots of space opera goodness here.) Since the book is arranged chronologically, I’m reading the tales in that order, although I won’t be reading the entire anthology at once. (Reading an anthology straight through is a different practice for me; I’m almost always one to just dip at will into anthologies. But I like the idea of the historical perspective afforded by this book, especially since I’m not making much of an effort to read space opera novels in historical order.)

:: The first story in this book, after a terrific preface on the history of the term “space opera”, is “The Star Stealers” by Edmond Hamilton. I’d never read anything by Hamilton before; indeed, I’m not certain I’ve heard of him before, which is odd since he was married to Leigh Brackett, whose work is essential to anyone wanting to learn about space opera in all its varieties. In the introductory piece to “The Star Stealers”, Hartwell and Kramer note that Hamilton’s work was influential in its day, but while E.E. Smith has achieved some kind of “classic” status, Hamilton’s work is mostly forgotten.

This story has its moments, but it reads more as a historical curiosity than as a good story. I can see why it’s included in this book, but reading it felt like a bit of duty. The idea of the tale is a wild and whacky space opera notion, that a race of aliens whose star has died will instead of trying to move to a different star literally attempt to steal another star, in this case, our own Sol. The rest of the tale depicts the efforts of a plucky band of human heroes to thwart this plot.

I always find that reading very old SF (“The Star Stealers” was published in 1929, right around the time H.P. Lovecraft was writing his Cthulhu tales) requires a lot of forced suspension of disbelief. Here we have the main interstellar spaceport of our Solar System being located on the surface of Neptune; here we have a star going dead and the aliens who call it home living on its surface, erecting cities on its cold stone. I’m usually able to get past things like this, but each successive hit of the “Huh-whuh?” button requires me to work to get back into the story. So does an infodump early on that actually uses the dreaded words of SF hack writing, “As you know….”. And the science isn’t all: there’s a moment of surely unintended sexism on Hamilton’s part, at the end of the story, when we’re informed that following the conclusion of the adventure, the tale’s sole female character decided to do what women do and open a beauty parlor. I couldn’t help laughing out loud at that one.

:: Next came Jack Williamson’s “The Prince of Space”. Williamson is probably the last living link to the Golden Age of SF; he was born in 1908 and as of this writing is still alive, and his most recent novel came out in 2005. Talk about longevity! “The Prince of Space” came out in 1931. The plot here is surprisingly convoluted, beginning with a mystery involving a pirate called “the Prince of Space” who may have murdered everyone aboard a spaceship, and ending in a war between Earth and Mars. There’s also a fairly ham-handed romance in there as well, of the “You cannot love me, so I shall wander off into the wastes and die!” variety.

The difficulties of early 20th century science come into play here as well; we have a Mars with a breathable atmosphere, for one thing. Again, that doesn’t bug me all that much, but it does take a little effort to remind oneself to go with the flow. Williamson’s storytelling is stronger than Hamilton’s, as is the general sense of place he’s able to capture. This is one of those art-deco futures so common to very old science fiction: in the opening scene, a character needs to get a newspaper, so he steps off the moving sidewalk and puts a coin into a vending machine, whereupon a newspaper freshly printed to order is whisked to his location via pneumatic tube. A society of moving sidewalks and pneumatic tubes, forecast for the year 2131.

:: Currently I’m starting Andre Norton’s Star Soldiers (which is a Baen Books repackaging of two separate Norton novels, Star Guard and Star Rangers). After that, I will probably leave off the space opera for a bit, as I have quite a few review books to read for GMR and then there’s some epic fantasy I’ve been leaving neglected for far too long (GRRM’s A Feast for Crows and Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series, chiefly). And although it’s still four months away, I still have to plan to have my reading decks cleared for the February 6 release (according to Amazon, anyway) of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel.

:: By the way, I’m not enforcing a rigid definition of “space opera” versus “planetary romance”. Just in case anyone’s wondering. As always, reading suggestions for space operas are welcome!

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I had a couple of book reviews run at GMR a while back:

:: Ensign Flandry, a space opera novel by Poul Anderson. Now I need to track down the other titles in the Flandry sequence. This book was quite a bit of fun.

(But as an aside, let’s talk about cover art for a moment. Apparently the book has been repackaged as part of a series called Flandry of Terra, and via Amazon, here’s the cover art for that repackaging:

That looks pretty dour, serious, and frankly, a little dull. My review copy of the book, though, sported this cover:

Frankly, if I see these two books adjacent one another on the shelf at Borders, I know which one I’m picking up, if I’m looking for an SF adventure yarn. That’s what that second cover indicates (and it’s actually pretty reflective of events in the story itself, too, which isn’t always the case with SF cover art). That first cover says to me “Serious Hard-SF here”, which isn’t what Ensign Flandry is, and it says it in fairly generic fashion, too. Lots of SF novels look like that, and the gleaming eye-thing actually makes me think that Locutus of Borg had kids. When did we decide that SF novels have to have cover art that’s so dull?)

:: A Chalice of Wind is the first book in a young-adult horror series. Not bad, if you like that sort of thing. Better characterization that most YA stuff I’ve read recently.

:: The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca is a wonderful read in a genre I’ve recently developed a fascination for. I’m not sure what you’d even call this particular genre, but it involves people who are unsatisfied with their current lives, so they uproot and move to someplace completely different. This fellow moved his family from London to Morocco, and his memoir of that year is by turns hilarious and harrowing. (This is also one of the few books about which I ever found myself thinking as I was reading, “This would make a great movie.)

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Here are a couple more answers to Ask Me Anything!. These ones are all related, so I’ll print them all first and then reply:

I want a space-opera-reading update: Have you read any yet? Are there any of the suggestions that you received that you refuse to read? In what order are you going to read the space opera books that you do read? Have you read any that you’re sorry you’ve read? Or that you’re really glad you’ve read?

For newer readers (hey, I can have newer readers!), this is in reference to the long-term project I announced here. I want to read lots and lots of space opera.

Now, my plan was never to spend months reading nothing but space opera, so I hope it won’t serve as a disappointment that I’ve so far read exactly one space opera book since I solicited titles. That book is Poul Anderson’s Ensign Flandry, of which I’m not going to say much in this space because I read it for review in GMR. I’m writing and submitting that review early next week, and then it’ll run at some point thereafter; I’ll link it when it appears. (But I can at least note that I liked the book a good deal.)

My aims on reading space opera is to make this basically an “over the next few years” kind of thing, and maybe even beyond. I’m the type of reader who rarely reads books of the same genre back-to-back, and who also jumps about from one book to the next, based sometimes on whim and other times on recommendation and other times on certain authors having new books out and other times on seeing some book mentioned on some blog or some such place. So I’m unlikely to plow through four or five consecutive space opera novels; it’s just not how I do things.

But what I have done is acquired quite a bit of the stuff through eBay booksellers and the like, and I’ve also rejoined the Science Fiction Book Club. Titles include The Man Who Wanted Stars, The Enchanted Planet, The Starmen of Llyrdis, Neverness, Assault on the Gods, and so on. I’m not just interested in the well-known names of SF, but also the lesser-known lights who may have left little veins of ore in those mountains for me to find. (God, what an awful metaphor….)

And I swear the SFBC is tailoring things specifically toward me as I rejoin them, and they’re scheming to have me part with as much of my money as they can get. (Well, duh!) I opened my latest mailing from them this morning, to find three omnibus editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Barsoom” novels. I’ll probably get the first one to start with — if memory serves, A Princess of Mars is Burroughs’s first Barsoom tale — and then pick up the other two at a later time. And in addition to the Barsoom books, there’s a big full-page advert for this collection from David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, who happen to be two of the best anthologists you’ll ever find. Sigh. Just what I need: more space opera to read!

(Oh, wait — that actually is just what I need! Bless you, SFBC!)

A commenter recommended H. Beam Piper in response to the earlier post; I’m keeping an eye on eBay for his work. I’d also love to read some space opera comics or manga, if anyone can suggest any. In terms of how I pick the books to read, well, I tend to kind of go at random. I briefly considered a chronological approach, but what if I missed something? Ditto a “reverse” chronological approach, as well — so I settled on what my usual modus operandi: no approach at all. I’ll just grab a space opera and read away. Some I’ll finish, some I will bounce off. The ones I bounce off, I will attempt again one day. (I tend to give books two chances to impress me, because I’ve too often had the experience of hating a book at first and then loving it when I returned to it a while later. But I am an experienced enough reader by now to be able to distinguish between bouncing off a book and just plain hating it. Case in point: I’m not ever going to return to The Celestine Prophecy on the off chance I may like it, because I’m willing to bet that I won’t.)

Finally, is there any book or author I refuse to read? Well, not so strongly as that, but I can say this: while I know that as long as Ender’s Game sits unread on my shelf there’s a hole in my SF-reading background, and eventually I’ll probably get tired of that hole and read the book in order to fill that hole in, it’ll be a good long while before I do. Maybe his books are just wonderful, but Orson Scott Card’s politics make me want to vomit. A strange position to stake, I know, coming from a guy who loves the music of Wagner despite that fact that had Wagner lived fifty years later he would have been happily composing scores to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films, but there it is. I’m large and I contain multitudes and yada yada yada.

So when do I plan to do some serious space opera reading? Soon, after I get a couple more GMR review books swept aside. I’ll be ready for a good dose of spaceships and action by then.

(BTW, if you were a commenter on that earlier thread, rest assured that I saved all the recommendations there before I removed the old commenting system.)

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My great space opera reading project has at last begun, with the Poul Anderson novel Ensign Flandry. This is actually a book I received for review from GMR, so my thoughts about it will appear in that venue as opposed to here.

I am still welcoming additional suggestions as to what to read in this SF subgenre. Feel free to e-mail me or leave comments in the original post (but use the Blogger comments, not the old system, please — even though there are quite a few comments in the old thread).

(As I progress into the wonderful world of space opera, this will become a posting series.)

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I’ve updated yesterday’s post about space opera books with some more titles suggested by readers. And I’m still soliciting, folks!

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I’ve made the decision, based on lots of soul-searching and careful consideration…ach, who am I kidding? It’s basically a whim. But I want to become the world’s preeminent expert on space opera. Now, I know, this is a goal that will take years to achieve and will neither yield riches nor fame, but it’ll make me Lord Emperor of All Geeks (Space opera Division). And really, who could want more than that?

What brought this on, you ask? (Ach, who am I kidding — nobody’s asking that.) But anyway, it’s a pretty obvious interest, since I’m one of the most faithful worshippers at the Church of Lucas. Space opera has always been my preferred SF subgenre, the bigger and vaster the better. And really: since mid-May of last year, life has seemed a tad directionless and unfocused. (Don’t take my word for it.) So in a way, I’m going to try to scratch an itch that won’t ever be scratched in the same way again. Or something like that. (Hey, it’s a whim, and whims are pretty hazy things. Who sits and thinks out a whim, anyway?)

I’m also seeking to give myself a broader background in space opera tropes, because after I finish The Promised King* I want to turn to a tale that’s been sitting in my head gestating for a few years now. I posted a kernel of this tale before; you can read it here, although I’m not at all certain how much of that little excerpt will remain when I get back to that story. Suffice it to say that stories of war and romance on a Galactic scale appeal to me; and if I had to name the single best piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard, it would be “Write the books you want to read.”

So, where to begin? Well, I’m not sure where exactly I’ll start. But I’m in the beginning of amassing a collection of space opera books. These I have already, in no particular order:

:: The Lensmen novels, by E.E. “Doc” Smith. I read Triplanetary a few years ago and enjoyed it, but still have yet to read the rest of this series. My understanding is that Triplanetary wasn’t actually the first of the Lensmen tales.

:: The Skylark of Space, also by Doc Smith. Hey, you gotta inspect the roots of the genre, right? This book came out in 1928.

:: Brian Daley: Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds, Jinx on a Terran Inheritance, Fall of the White Ship Avatar. I remember Will Duquette recommending these a while back. I remember reading some of Daley’s media tie-in novels as a kid, but never any of his own work.

:: Kevin J. Anderson’s Saga of Seven Suns. This series is still “in progress”, with three more volumes to go, apparently. The first book is kind of weak, being chapter after chapter after chapter of exposition; also, Smith’s tendency to throw in cute allusions gets a little off-putting at times. But things improve quite a bit in the second book. I wouldn’t recommend splurging on this series in hardcover, but they’re fun in softcover. Anderson’s really got a gift for conveying nifty visuals in descriptive prose, like the diamond-hulled warships of the Hydrogues.

:: Debra Doyle and James MacDonald’s Mageworlds series. I’ve got The Price of the Stars, Starpilot’s Grave, and By Honor Betray’d, which constitute the main Mageworlds trilogy, as well as a prequel novel called The Gathering Flame. I read Price of the Stars four or five years ago and thought it was just “Star Wars lite”, but enough folks have spoken well of the series since then that I suspect I may have judged it unfairly. It happens, folks — I wish I had a dime for every piece of classical music I hated the first time I listened to it. Heck, I hated Berlioz the first time I heard him.

:: The Liaden Universe novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. I’ve read the first three of these and enjoyed them, although they didn’t feel all that “space opera-ish” to me — more like romances set in space. But as fans of SF and fantasy well know, these genres and their little subgenres tend to stubbornly resist easy categorization.

:: Primary Inversion and The Radiant Seas by Catherine Asaro. I read Primary Inversion a few years back as well, but I don’t remember much about it. These are the first two books in a larger series called “The Saga of the Skolian Empire”. Well, that’s gotta be good, right? It’s got the words “Saga” and “Empire” in it.

:: Downbelow Station and The Faded Sun Trilogy by C.J. Cherryh. These are apparently set in “the Alliance-Union Universe”. Strange as it may seem, I have never read anything by Cherryh before.

:: Star Soldiers by Andre Norton. Equally strange, I don’t recall ever reading Norton before, either. What the hell have I been doing?!

:: Excession, by Iain M. Banks. This is one of Banks’s “Culture” novels. I started The Player of Games a while back, but never finished it for some reason. Perhaps someone can tell me if Excession is a good entry point into the “Culture” books, or if I should dig back farther. My understanding is that they’re all standalone novels, but that doesn’t mean that one book isn’t a better intro than another.

:: A Thousand Words for Stranger and Ties of Power, by Julie E. Czerneda. The first two books in Czerneda’s “Trade Pact Universe”. I liked Thousand Words a lot when I read it a few years back. In honesty, I completely forgot I had the second book in this series until I went through the shelves just now.

:: The Duke of Uranium and A Princess of the Aerie by John Barnes. Read the first and liked it a lot; never got around to the second. If there were any justice, “Toktru” would be as well-known a word in SF fandom as “Fnord!”

:: Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. Another one I started but didn’t finish. In truth, I do this a lot. I’ll be reading along, and get to about fifty or so pages in and just kind of say to myself, “Hmmmm, this really isn’t what I’m in the mood to read right now.” It’s kind of a capricious reading life, I’ll admit, but I think the upside is that I think I’m more fair to books when I come to them when I want to rather than forcing myself through them when I don’t, if that makes sense. (I was clearly reading this last summertime, because I discovered that I’d been marking my place with an old grocery list. Charcoal, beer, and Italian sausage topped the list. Oh, and a can of infant formula. Weird, the reminders that await us in the tall grass….)

:: Sunrunner and Startide Rising, by David Brin. Everybody says that the first Uplift trilogy is amazing, the second one less so. Guess I’ll find out eventually. I’m still mad at Brin for saying mean things about Star Wars a few years back, but I’ll try to be nice to his books.

:: Metaplanetary, by Tony Daniel. Not sure if this is space opera or just hard SF, but I just found it on my shelves. I don’t remember buying it, even. Anyone?

:: Jaran, by Kate Elliott. I don’t know squat about this one, save that the back cover refers to a mix of “interstellar empires and primitive cultures”. That works.

:: Lord Valentine’s Castle, by Robert Silverberg. I’m honestly not sure this counts as space opera; the cover copy reads more like a blend of SF and fantasy. But again, the pesky dividing line between space opera and something else is always fungible. Onto the stack it goes.

:: Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. First book in a franchise of sorts. I love this book’s cover art — simple, intriguing, and evocative.

:: In Conquest Born, by C.S. Friedman. I just bought this last week. I’d heard of Friedman, but knew nothing of her work. The cover has a guy on a starship, holding a sword. Yup!

:: Deathstalker, by Simon R. Green. Someone told me that this series probably went on two or even three books too long. This was another casualty of the “Hmmm, not really in the mood for this” malaise that sends me to the shelves for something else. Still, I absolutely adore that opening passage.

:: Pandora’s Star, by Peter F. Hamilton. Ahhhh, Hamilton. Tried him once before and didn’t make it — but not for the usual reasons. His Night’s Dawn Trilogy was so massive that when the books were issued in paperback, each volume had to be split in two. We’re talking a massive series here, folks. Well, I loved the first half of The Reality Dysfunction (the first book), but something went awry with the second half: my copy of it literally fell apart, some months after I had bought it. Bad glue, or what, I don’t recall. I never got around to replacing it. Anyway, I bought Pandora’s Star a few weeks ago.

:: Dread Empire’s Fall, by Walter Jon Williams. Trilogy about a fallen interstellar empire. Check.

:: Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross. I don’t know why, but I always feel stupid when I read Stross. Kind of like that episode of Friends when Joey, tired of feeling left out in conversations, buys a single volume of an encyclopedia (because that’s all he can afford), and thus keeps trying to steer the conversations to topics that start with the letter ‘V’. I haven’t read any of Stross’s novels, but his short fiction is so idea-packed that I may need to decompress after reading his novels.

:: A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge. I liked Fire, although I don’t think I understood the ending all that well. Still haven’t attemped Deepness.

These are works that I do not own yet but plan to acquire:

:: Scott Westerfeld’s Risen Empire duology. I checked the first half out of the library and loved it. Why didn’t I read the second half, then? Because I’m forgetful as hell, that’s why. Hence this list.

:: Timothy Zahn. Pretty much anything. I owned his “Conquerors Trilogy”, but lost it in the last move. He’s fairly prolific, too.

:: David Zindell’s Neverness and Requiem for Homo Sapiens trilogy. Never heard of Zindell until last night. Anyone?

:: The Book of Skaith, The Coming of the Terrans, and The Starmen of Llyrdis, by Leigh Brackett. I read her Sword of Rhiannon a while back, and once I aligned my reading-mind with the fact that Brackett had been writing with a 1950s author’s knowledge of the planet Mars, I found it a highly entertaining read. There was a reason that George Lucas brought in Leigh Brackett to take the first whack at a script for The Empire Strikes Back, and her reputation as a writer of space opera was that reason.

OK, that’s what I either own or plan to get in the near future. However, I know that this list isn’t close to being exhaustive. So, what say you, readers? What space operas am I missing here? I’d be especially interested in comics, and in those terms, I’d like to focus specifically space operas, and preferably closed series that have actual endings. There are times when lots of comics titles delve into space opera — the famous Dark Phoenix saga from The Uncanny X-Men, frex — but unless the tale has a specific ending point, I’m not really looking for “Well, Superman often has some space opera stuff in it”. (BTW, the series Six from Sirius, from which my Net handle “Jaquandor” is taken, is pure space opera!)

I’m also keenly interested in older SF authors, long out-of-print, who worked in the space opera form. Aside from Leigh Brackett and Doc Smith, I’m fairly ignorant of space opera as a literary subgenre before Star Wars came along, and we’re talking about roughly fifty years of space opera goodness. So let me know about those, as well.

This is obviously something of a long-term thing that I’m putting in motion here. Looking at the stacks of books I’ve just created next to my computer table, I’ve got enough space opera goodness to keep me busy for a few years at least, and I’ve no intention of foregoing my other interests along the way — horror and fantasy will still abound.

But space opera? That’s where I want to be!

* I’ve started working again on The Promised King in the last week, and I’m hoping to start serializing Book II: The Finest Deed either later this summer or in early fall. I’ll keep everyone posted.

UPDATE 5-1-01: Readers have suggested the following series and/or books, either in e-mail or in comments:

:: Dune, by Frank Herbert. I own the first one and started reading it once. I stopped a ways in because I frankly got tired of Herbert’s constant use of his own made-up vocabulary. Usually this doesn’t bother me much when authors do it, but Herbert had me flipping to the glossary every other sentence, or so it felt. Not sure if this is “space opera”, really — how much of it involves, well, “space”? Someone who’s read it, let me know. Also cited are Herbert’s The Whipping Star and Dosadi Experiment. I’ve never even heard of these, but I’ll seek them out eventually.

:: David Webber’s Honor Harrington series. I’ve read the first two books, and I enjoyed them. They’re space opera to an extent, although most readers would more consider them “Military SF”. I like the Honor Harrington character, but I’ve heard that farther on in the series, Honor’s seeming perfection gets more and more grating; I’m also told that Webber’s infodumps get more and more intrusive and cloying. That would be something to see, since in the very first book, Webber completely stops the action just as the climactic battle/chase is starting to heat up, so he can go into a lengthy explanation of the history of supralight drive in his universe. I’m not sure how much more Honor Harrington I really want to read.

Military SF, generally, isn’t my cup of tea. Admittedly, it’s hard to find the dividing line between space opera and Mil-SF. My own way of determining the difference has a flaw or two, but so far it seems to have worked. I’ve never been much of a Robert A. Heinlein fan, but it’s been years since I tried reading him.

:: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan books. Yup. I’ve read the first three. Pretty fun stuff thus far.

:: C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur books. Never heard of them. I’ll look them up.

:: Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai series. My familiarity with these extends about as far as the fact that I know they exist. I’ll have to check them out.

:: The Hitchhiker’s Guide series by Douglas Adams. Strangely, I’ve never read these.

Keep the recommendations coming, folks — I’m looking for all the space opera that can be read in a lifetime!

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I started Simon R. Green’s space-opera novel Deathstalker last night, and while I’m only a handful of pages into it, I want to note that I love the first two paragraphs. Really. These two paragraphs are just masterful in the way they set a mood and establish a setting that I hope the rest of the novel lives up to. Don’t believe me? Here are those two paragraphs:

It gets dark out on the Rim. Strange planets and stranger people can be found on the edge of Empire, where habitable worlds are few and civilization grows thin. Beyond the Rim lies uncharted darkness, where no stars shine and few ships go. It’s easy to get lost out there, far away from everything. Starcruisers patrol up to the Rim, but there are never enough ships to cover the vast areas of open space. The Empire is growing too large, too cumbersome, though no one will admit it, or at least, no one who matters. Every year more worlds are brought into the Empire, and the frontiers press hungrily outward. But not on the Rim. The Empire stops cold there, dwarfed by the unplummable depths of Darkvoid.

It gets dark out there. Ships disappear sometimes, and are never seen again. No one knows why. The colonized worlds make themselves as self-sufficient as they can and turn their eyes away from the endless dark. Crime flourishes on the Rim, unthinkable distances from the hub of the Empire’s strict laws; some transgressions as old as Humanity, others newly birthed by the Empire’s ever-growing sciences. For the moment the Empire’s starcruisers still keep a lid on things, dropping unannounced out of hyperspace to enforce the law with brutal efficiency, but they can’t be everywhere. Strange forces are at work on the Rim, patient and terrible, and all it will take to set them off is a simple clash between two starships off the backwater planet of Virimonde.

Now, if that’s not a killer beginning, I don’t know what is. True, the rest of the novel might blow chunks, but it’s been a long time since a book hooked me in the opening paragraphs like this. Bravo. This is the kind of opening that has me thinking, “Damn, where’s my popcorn?”

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