The New Space Opera 2: All-new stories of science fiction adventure
Language: English
Pages: 560
ISBN: 0061562351
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“An exceedingly fine set of stories written specifically for this collection by some of the best sf authors writing today.’
—Library Journal (starred review)
Following the success of their Locus Award-winning anthology The New Space Opera, editors Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan now up the ante with The New Space Opera 2, new stories from some of the biggest names in science fiction’s biggest genre. With contributions from Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Moon, Garth Nix, John Scalzi, Bruce Sterling, Tad Williams, and a host of other science fiction luminaries, The New Space Opera 2 is yet another “reminder of why science fiction captured the hearts and minds of generations of generations of readers” (Orson Scott Card).
spiral up the ladder of unification energies to a fiery new dawn. I have grown so large, girl, that I can fly down history like a bird over a prairie field. But I cannot remake what has already been made. That is one power I do not possess. I watch you get out of bed. I watch you dress. Blue jeans with tattered hems, a man’s lumberjack shirt, those thrift-shop Reeboks. I watch you go to the kitchen and fill your vinyl Bratz backpack with bottled water and Tootsie Rolls, which is all the cuisine
miss the gate by two million kilometers.” “Move the gate. Move the whole damn site. Move the refineries, move the factories, move the damn rocks. A couple hundred meters a second would be more than fast enough if we send the order now. We don’t even have to suspend construction, we can keep building on the fly.” “Every one of those vectors widens the nested confidence limits of the build. It would increase the risk of error beyond allowable margins, for no payoff.” “And what about the fact
small—not mountains, not flat, perhaps even with traits that are more personal. If your home is among the hills, then they seem well-known; if not, then they provoke suspicion.” They were trundling at high speed, balanced in their gyrobody between the capsule’s six legs, seeming to float like thistledown between the rocks of this region of Mars; Thorson’s Plot. Plot was something of a misnomer, as the area, already claimed by an Earth corporate, was some fifteen thousand square miles. The
what Bob Tucker had in 1941 contemptuously defined as “the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn” to one of the most popular forms of science fiction of the eighties, the nineties, and the oughts, and one where much of the cutting-edge work in today’s genre is being done. As we noted in the introduction to that book, starting in the early 1970s, writers on both sides of the Atlantic (Iain M. Banks, M. John Harrison, Barrington Bayley, Samuel R. Delany, Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge),
crew quarters.” Cannon grunted. Then: “Weapons?” “Nothing but ordinary tools. No withdrawals from the arms lockers in the past three ship-days.” Firearms could have been distributed long ago, or indeed, brought on board before they’d departed Ninnelil five ship-years earlier. Somebody had planned for this mutiny, or at least the possibility of it. That other damned Before was at the heart of this problem. “Where is Captain Siddiq?” Polyphemus paused an unusually long time before answering.