New Adventures in Space Opera

This had me from the description: “Are you tired of reading science fiction novels that feel like they’re taking literal eons to finish?” Dear reader, the answer to this question is YES.

To be honest, I think sci-fi in the short story format is harder to pull off than as novels. It's a genre accustomed to four 400-page books in a series, where the world building can be detailed down to the socioeconomic consequences of how the protagonists utilize currency. Short story is HARD. The writer has to simultaneously establish the world AND hook the reader, create a cohesive narrative that stands on its own, and land the ship (pun gloriously intended) — in fewer pages than some books dedicate to single chapters.

Truthfully, it's what I prefer in sci-fi. I care about character more than climate, and when you have so little to work with it's typically character that gets the most attention. So in a lot of ways, this collection was custom made for my tastes, which probably explains the 5 star review. Though to be fair, once I looked back on the entire collection, I noted that more of the stories tended towards the upper 4 stars, so averaging out at a 5 felt justified. Plus: this is fun. We should sign more things like this.

(Mostly) short spoiler free reviews of each story:

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance: A top tier title and a strong start! It's hard to pick an opener and this was a good one. I’m a huge fan of "what exactly does it mean to be human?" wearing a trench coat made of narrative plot. I got lost a little bit on the world building, but the formist/robot subplot was phenom and the ending packed such a punch I didn't care. 4.5 stars

Extracurricular Activities: I really enjoyed the characters, thought them well established for how many there are and how little time they have on the page. But I felt like this was a slice of a larger story, and not necessarily something that could exist on its own. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was legitimately lifted from a full length novel. There's still too much to unpack with Meng. 4 stars.

All the Colors You Thought Were Kings: Whew, second person AND present tense? I was predisposed against it, but this story was right hook after right hook. I couldn't breathe reading this one. 5 stars.

Belladonna Nights: way way way waaaaaaaay too much superfluous lore, but when it finally got down to it, it was a good story. Something to chew on, at least. If pared down, the concept could really shine. 3.7 stars

Metal like Blood in the Dark: Tense, but not as much as All The Colors. A good premise, well executed. Kept the world building tight, which I deeply appreciated. We often talk about "learning humanity" solely in terms of empathy, compassion, etc. Not treachery. Good stuff. 4.5 stars

A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime: the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. So ridiculous and fun that I looked up the author halfway through and tbr'd her work. This felt like Catherynne Valente wrote a Dr. Who episode, circa 10 or 11. Sometimes space is just for fun!! 4.20 stars

Immersion: If I had a nickel for every time I begrudgingly started a second person present tense story that ended up knocking me sideways, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. Right?
This is what Black Mirror should feel like, when the writers’ sole goal isn’t legitimately ruining your life. 4.7 stars

Morrigan in the Sunglare: “You have to go to sleep you have to go to sleep you HAVE TO GO TO SLEEP" I told myself over and over again. Still read this in one breathless sitting. It takes SOOO much talent to tell a story in such a nonlinear fashion, and the author smashed it. No notes. Discovered he writes the Destiny lore and this is the first thing that's ever tempted me into playing that series. 5 stars.

The Old Dispensation. This one threw me for a loop because I am such the right audience for this - above average understanding of the Torah and ancient Hebrew traditions, a person who likes stories about religion - but this was such a miss for me. I knew all the words and didn't get the picture. Maybe that was the problem? There was so much compounded lore. I liked the shape of it, but I just didn't love it. 3.7 stars.

The Good Heretic: So. I picked up this entire anthology for Becky Chambers, and had a rollercoaster of emotions when I saw the title.
Upside: Good Heretic is in her Wayfarers series, about a species I LOVE, but can be read as a standalone or introduction to the series.
Downside: this exists in other anthologies. Maybe that's the case with other stories in here! That's probably how anthologies work! But my heart's desire was to have more Becky Chambers content in the world, and I was a little sad to discover that isn’t the case.
Now, the story itself: flawless. Becky is a character writer like no other, and her world building is my favorite. Ten stories in, she is the first to center a narrative on a non-humanoid, non robot character. Full blown alien. Not even bipedal.
Chambers is one of the few authors I've ever encountered who actually gets creative with her aliens, and this is no exception. Sianats are fascinating. This whole story is fascinating. I wanted 30000 more pages. I wept for the hope of it all. It's the only tears I shed the whole anthology. I love her with all my heart. 500 stars.

A Voyage to Queensthroat: for a story that references so many events outside the narrative, this works so well as a short story. There's so many layers to unravel here, I'll think about this one for days. The perfect amount of lore to leave you hungry for more. A gut punch of an ending. 4.4 stars

The Justified: the lore almost lost me, but I’ll excuse a multitude of sins if you just give me a woman murdering the sh*t out of some privileged a-holes. Was Het a human? Who cares! We support women’s rights and women’s wrongs. 4.5 stars.

Planetstuck: This was some of the best character writing in the collection, with a story that got under my skin. Perfect amount of world building. Phenomenal combo of humor and humanity. Great ending. 4.8 stars

The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir: a sweet note to end on. The opener and closer of an anthology are tough picks, and this has just the right about of optimism, and melancholy, and adventure. It leaves a good taste in your mouth, which is how you want to finish this. 4.4 stars

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an unbiased review!

Fantastic collection of short stories! I scooped this up for Ann Leckie, T. Kingfisher, and Becky Chambers, some personal favorites. Chambers' "A Good Heretic" is functional as a stand alone story but is written about a character from her Wayfarers series, which I absolutely adore. and also highly recommend. In her short though, she's honestly written a powerful punch in such a few pages.

Now for the rest: these stories are everything I love about sci-fi! Snapshots of character profiles, rich new worlds, massive creativity... all super concentrated into a few pages. Right when you're settling in, the next story starts you over with something completely brand new and fresh. Space opera is so often hundreds of pages, and definitely several book series. I think compiling these short stories into one hefty tome, is exactly what the genre is missing!! 5 stars across the board for this stunning anthology.

NEW adventures? These are all reprints, so I skipped two stories I'd already read. (The T. Kingfisher, which was in a Hugo packet, and the Charlie Jane Anders, which is in her short story collection.) They're all varying degrees of good, starting from pretty good to excellent, and one made me straight up cry. (Curse you, Becky Chambers!)

An all-star line up of authors! A must-read for Space Opera fans!

It is hard to go wrong with award winning authors such as Arkady Martine, Alastair Reynolds, T. Kingfisher, Charlie Jane Anders, Aliette de Bodard, Becky Chambers, and Ann Leckie. (And as a bonus, Jonathan Strahan’s introduction also points the astute reader to other SF novels and authors, that I for one look forward to exploring.

I had previously read about half of these stories. I enjoyed reading and reading all of the stories in this collection. My personal highlights of the 14 stories are as follows (using the same order as the Table of Contents).

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance by Tobias S. Buckell
A space opera told from the perspective of a microbot ensouled by a downloaded human personality traveling the galaxy as a contracted maintenance worker. The society/milieu created by Buckell is entertaining and thought provoking. Interesting plot twists within!

Extracurricular Activities by Yoon Ha Lee
Having read stories/novels in this universe before helps a bit, but this is an entertaining standalone story including spy-craft, high technology, and creative new cultures. A fun adventure story.

All the Colors You Thought Were Kings by Arkady Martine
This story packs a lot of thought provoking world building, SF technology, and high risk intrigue into a small number of pages. Great reading!

Belladonna Nights by Alastair Reynolds
This story starts out with the premise of extremely long lived humans traveling the galaxy, and ends up in an unexpectedly dark place. Outstanding!

A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime by Charlie Jane Anders
I recommend this story for those who miss Scott Adams. An entertaining and humorous space opera.

A Good Heretic by Becky Chambers
This is a nice side story that provides background to other novels by Chambers. As such, once I realized what I was reading, I really appreciated this story.

I thank the publisher, editor, and all authors for sharing this wonderful anthology of space opera.

Thank you to Tachyon Publishing and Jonathan Strahan for an advanced copy of New Adventures in Space Opera (Via NetGalley) for an honest review.
This collection of 14 short stories were a varied mix of Universes and Beings tackling a vast array of politics, relationships, cultures and technology.
Whilst I enjoyed all the stories in this collection, these were my highlights:
Belladonna Nights by Alastair Reynolds. I loved the tension and the mystery, culminating in a twist that ends in sacrifice.
Metal Like Blood in the Dark by T. Kingfisher. An incredible story exploring the loss of innocence and protection of a loved one.
A Temporary Embarrassment in Space Time by Charlie Jane Anders. This was really funny, with a Hitchhiker’s Guide or Red Dwarf type humor.
A Good Heretic by Becky Chambers. An exploration of sense of self, isolation in wanting to belong and the courage to be yourself.
The Last Voyage of Skidbaldir By Karin Tidbek. Explores morality in using beasts for our own ends.

A really cool anthology of exciting and fun short sci-fi stories. Quite a curatorial achievements bringing together all these big names of contemporary sci-fi: Chambers, Anders, Martine, Leckie, and many others. Fourteen romps through beautifully created micro and macro universes. To capture the scale and detail of these expansive worlds without losing the individuals that inhabit them is what good sci-fi authors do. A fabulous collection. Highly recommended!

This is a book of short stories by some of my favourite sci-fi authors, including Becky Chambers, Ann Leckie, and Lavie Tidar. There are stories that are deeply serious, funny, touching, adventurous. I'm not going to do a story by story review, because I don't think that would be helpful. My 'problem' was that many of the stories are brilliant, but the effort it takes me to enter a whole new world,work out what's going in and then have it end so quickly is somewhat exhausting. Yes, I understand that I chose to read a book of short stories, and now I'm complaining that the stories are short! Also, I often read in certain circumstances - when having lunch, or in the bath and I don't want to leap from story to story - many of these need thinking over and considering, not just leaping to the next one. For me these rather wonderful stories were most enjoyable when I read them one at a time, with one or more other books between them. They are, on the whole, worth savouring.

You know space opera when you see it, but defining the boundaries is devilishly hard. This anthology tries a bit of both, with some stories in the center of the subgenere and some exploring the edges.

The list of authors is self-recommending, and they don't disappoint. The only story I'd read before was <i>Immersion</i> (Aliette de Godard), which was in her own collection [book:Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight|45429770]. It is well worth spreading to a larger audience and I was happy to re-read it.

Tachyon Publications was kind enough to provide me with an advanced reading copy via Netgalley for an honest review.

"Ann Leckie / Becky Chambers / Alastair Reynolds / T. Kingfisher / Charlie Jane Anders / Anya Johanna DeNiro / Yoon Ha Lee / Lavie Tidhar / Tobias S. Buckell / Arkady Martine / Aliette de Bodard / Seth Dickinson / Karin Tidbeck

Award-winning Australian science-fiction editor Jonathan Strahan (The Best Science Fiction of the Year series) presents the quintessential guide to the exciting New Space Opera. This skillfully curated, must-read volume gathers fifteen dramatic, newly classic interstellar adventures from some of the most highly acclaimed and popular speculative-fiction authors.

In "Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance," a cloud-based contractor finds a human war criminal clinging to the hull of the ship. The clones of "All the Colors You Thought Were Kings," about to attend their coming-of-age ceremony, are also plotting treason. During "A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime," two outlaws go on the run after stealing a device from a space cult.

Take a faster-than-light trip to the future. Discover where memes rise and fall in moments. Here are the new and adventurous takes on interplanetary battles, sentient starships, and galactic intrigue. This must-read volume gathers fifteen dramatic, newly classic stories from some of the most highly acclaimed speculative authors."

I mean, you have to buy it for the T. Kingfisher story alone.

There are lot of science fiction subgenres – from post-apocalypses to time travel to generation ships to first contact. But probably one of the longest lasting and most malleable is the space opera. In the introduction to this collection New Adventures in Space Opera Jonathan Strachan gives a primer on the development and features of this subgenre from its first appearance in the 1890s (!). Strachan considers a number of definitions of space opera but lands on this one: “romantic adventure set in space and told on a grand scale”.
To give more boundaries, Strachan chooses these rules for the stories that he has chosen for this collection. First, that they should take place on a ship or in space and only occasionally touch down on a planet. Second that the universe should be populated and there should be encounters. And thirdly, that the stakes should be high.
Strachan gives a quick history of space opera and the greats from the 1950s through to the 2000s. But his focus here is on modern space opera, a period he starts at 2011. His view is that these authors changed the nature of space opera in that the characters were becoming more diverse and they began to question the structure of the world around them. In Strachan’s view, this period began with James SA Corey’s Leviathan Wakes (first book of the 9 volume Expanse series) and moved through a range of exciting modern space opera authors like Anne Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, Arkady Martine and Tade Thompson.
This collection feature stories by many of these names and a few other recent stars of modern science fiction including Becky Chamber, Lacie Tidhar, Charlie Jane Anders and somewhat older timer (who was doing modern space opera well before 2011) Alistair Reynolds. Some of the stories are set within the universes that these authors are famous for – for example Yoon Ha Lee’s “Extracurricular Activities” is set in the universe of his fantastic Machineries of Empire trilogy and Becky Chambers’ “A Good Heretic” which is set in her award winning Wayfarers universe. Others deliver brand new ideas and manage to pack some fascinating characters and huge mind-bending ideas into some small spaces.
New Adventures in Space Opera is a great collection for lovers of this form of science fiction, featuring many of the greats of the modern canon. For others it will provide a good entrée into one of the most vibrant corners of current science fiction and a list of authors that readers cannot go wrong with.

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

New Adventures in Space Opera is an anthology featuring short stories from some of the biggest names in modern sci-fi, including Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, and T. Kingfisher. Jonathan Strahan, the anthology’s curator, goes into the history of space opera and common tropes and how the subgenre has moved into what it is today. I had a rough idea of space opera built on sci-fi shows from the 80s and pop culture references, so I really enjoyed seeing the evolution of the subgenre laid out.

My favorite story was ‘Immersion’ by Aliette de Bodard, told in both second and third person. Largely dealing with tourism and giving up who you are to blend in, ‘Immersion’ is ultimately about what we lose when we choose assimilation. Quy is a young Rong woman living on the Longevity Spaceport when she meets Agnes, another young Rong woman who is going to get married soon. Agnes has been wearing an immerser, a device that cloaks her in an avatar to make her look more white, for a long time and has retreated so far into herself that she barely speaks and has lost her connection to not only her culture but to everything around her.

Another story I liked was ‘All the Colors You Thought Were Kings’ by Arkady Martine. Told in second person, Elias is an Akhal geneset, either clones or a very limited set of genes that produce people very similar to each other, and would do anything for Tamar, who shares a geneset with the Empress. By right, Tamar can challenge the Empress for the throne if she believes the Empress is not fulfilling her duties. Loyal Elias and Petros, who was also raised with Tamar, will assist her, but it won't be easy.

‘A Good Heretic’ by Becky Chambers is a third person-POV space cozy with a bite to it. Mas is from a species that chooses to be infected so they can become a Paired with Whisperer and looks forward to her future. However, when Mas is infected, something goes wrong and the virus grants her the intelligence promised but not the peace. Mas spends years in hiding, convinced she must be a heretic, for something she cannot even control.

To my surprise, my two favorite short stories in this collection were in the second person, which is a POV I rarely gravitate to. De Bodard and Martine both show great mastery of prose and in injecting themes into a small space while making the story feel incredibly personal. Chambers and T. Kingfisher both have a fairy tale quality to their short stories that expands what space opera can be beyond space battles but also links back to the most famous space opera of all and fairy tale in space, Star Wars.

I would recommend this to fans of space opera, readers looking to dip their toes into the subgenre, and those who are fans of modern sci-fi and fantasy

Sooooo much fun! This is an absolute treat for science fiction fans, a collection from some of the best authors in the business today. Tobias S. Buckell’s Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance is a brilliant thought experiment on bodies and othering-in space, with robots, from a (kind of?) non-human perspective. Extracurricular Activities by Yoon Ha Lee is about spy-assassins and factions. In the profoundly sad Belladonna Nights by my personal fav, Alastair Reynolds, the world has ended, but not everyone realises it. T. Kingfisher’s Metal Like Blood in the Dark is a little like a space age Pinocchio story, and is also bittersweet—post-Edenic—on the loss of innocence. Lavie Tidhar’s The Old Dispensation is Jewish lore (and biblically-accurate angels, eek) on another planet. The deeply moving A Good Heretic by Becky Chambers is about not being the same as others, and learning to find yourself and your purpose in that. So is Anya Johanna DeNiro’s A Voyage to Queensthroat, while also evoking the US’s current cultural wars. Ann Leckie’s The Justified is gory and bloody and fun—not words I ever thought I’d use together in a sentence, and is about unjust rule and class stratification.

Arkady Martine’s All The Colours You Thought Were Kings, Charlie Jane Anders’s very wacky A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime, Aliette de Bodard’s Immersion, Seth Dickinson’s Morrigan in the Sunglare, Sam J. Miller’s Planetstuck, and Karin Tidbeck’s weird and wonderful, now classic The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir are the other stories rounding out this superb collection.

But that’s not all. In his excellent introduction, worth reading in itself, editor Jonathan Strahan takes readers through the definition and history of space opera, its evolution from its earliest days, through pulp and then sci-fi’s Golden Age, the rise of “hard” sci-fi with its scientific rigour, to today’s new socially conscious, diverse, politically aware stories. It’s excellent on things like the move away from fixation on, and new awareness of the consequences of, empire and colonization; increasing inclusivity, in representation both of characters and authors; and awareness of and commentary on today’s social problems. It’s an excellent overview. SF (and space opera with it) has some way to go, still, but it’s come a long way.

So, New Adventures in Space Opera is a fantastic, fun, and eye-opening read; very, very highly recommended. Many thanks to Tachyon Pubs and NetGalley for an early copy.

I will begin this a review with a plea to editors, publishers, and marketers: *please* include a list of authors when you publish an anthology. This one isn’t completely opaque, because they’re all listed on the cover, but you have to look at it enlarged and some of them are upside down, making it a bit of a pain. So to spare others this annoyance, the authors in order of appearance are:

* Tobias S. Buckell
* Yoon Ha Lee
* Arkady Martine
* Alistair Reynolds
* T. Kingfisher
* Charlie Jane Anders
* Aliette de Bodard
* Seth Dickinson
* Lavie Tidhar
* Becky Chambers
* Anya Johanna DeNiro
* Ann Leckie
* Sam J. Miller
* Karin Tidbeck

As for the anthology itself: this was great. I was familiar with some of the authors, and not others, as is usually the case. I got to visit some favorite universes and hopefully discover new ones. I read a few of the stories a few months ago as a palette cleanser between other books, and then when writing this review discovered (to my delight) that the T. Kingfisher book I read a few weeks ago was *not* in fact my first experience of her work; I’d read her story in this anthology, and loved it.

None of these stories were bad; there was nothing I had to force my way through. But to highlight my favorites:

* “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime” by Charlie Jane Anders. I don’t even know what to make of this story; it was a hilarious absurdist story about a heist & various other assorted hijinks, pleasure taken too far, and a solar-system-sized testicle and the cult that worships it.

* “Morrigan in the Sunglare” by Seth Dickinson. A few pilots are on a ship falling into a star, with insufficient power to pull out of it and no hope of rescue. This story is a reflection on dehumanization during war; both that which the pilots did to their enemies, and the price doing so inflicted on they themselves.

* “A Good Heretic” by Becky Chambers. Those who have read *The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet* (if you haven’t, go read it, it’s fantastic) might remember the navigator aboard the Wayfarer was a member of a species that had a symbiotic relationship with a virus that allowed them to navigate space-time. Somewhat unusually for Chambers, she revisits that species here.

* “Planetstuck” by Sam J. Miller. An interstellar sex worker has been cut off from his home planet, and his brother, after an isolationist sect destroyed all the FTL gates on the planet. He copes with the homesickness, the loneliness, and the simultaneously tantalizing and distressing possibility that there might still be a way to reach home.

* “The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir” by Karin Tidbeck. The engineers of a starship (which is basically a few crew quarters strapped to the back of a skyscraper-sized transdimensional hermit crab) work to help their ship, which is outgrowing its shell, find a new one.

* “Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher. My favorite of the anthology. An old man on a remote planet creates two AIs, and declares them to be brother and sister. But when the old man has to go for medical treatment and leaves them alone, they must struggle along on their own. When they encounter a third AI, they have to work out concepts like “lies” and “untrustworthy” and make decisions they were never prepared for.

This is an excellent collection with some great writers. There was one I particularly liked at the beginning that had action and mystery, and one with a character I'd grown to love who didn't realize she was going through the same cycle again and again. There were families and betrayals and grand schemes. i can't always define space opera, but I like to t because it brings so much emotion. Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this

Having enjoyed the The New Space Opera, co-edited with the late great Gardner Dozois, I was thrilled to read this newest installment in the series. I don't read as much SF these days as I used to when I was a teenager, but character-oriented Space Opera is my favourite subgenre. I love short story anthologies, as I find they're great for reading slumps - they provide a change of pace, near-instant satisfaction, and are a wonderful way to discover new-to-you authors! And they are perfect for that perennial Mood Reader problem of not being sure what you want to read next 😉

Like every anthology, there were some stories that didn't work well for me but overall this was an very enjoyable reading experience.

Of the eight stories I loved, five were written by authors who were completely new to me (and all were so fabulous that I would love to read a whole novel about that world) and I can't wait to check out more of their work!

Total stories: 15
Ratings breakdown:
5 ⭐ 6
4 ⭐ 2
3 ⭐ 6
2 ⭐ 1
1 ⭐ 0

The standout stories for me were:

4. Belladonna Nights
Alastair Reynolds 5 ⭐
A meeting of memories.

5. Metal Like Blood in the Dark
T. Kingfisher 5 ⭐
Two AIs learn how to survive, the hard way.

6. A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime
Charlie Jane Anders 5 ⭐
Goofy galactic hijinks. Perhaps takes a little inspiration from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

7. Immersion
Aliette de Bodard 5 ⭐
Technology and the consequences of cultural reductivism and appropriation.

10. A Good Heretic
Becky Chambers 4 ⭐
An alien hosting technology is imperfect and raises ethical questions.

12. The Justified
Ann Leckie 5 ⭐
An Ancient Egypt-inspired world rife with godly intrigue. The little banner standards were adorable!

13. Planetstruck
Sam J. Miller 4 ⭐
A planet-hopper gets a chance to return to their long-lost home, but is it worth the cost?

14. The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir
Karen Tidbeck 5 ⭐
HERMIT CRAB SPACE SHIPS!!! A lowly engineer learns to be Captain of her own Destiny.

Hoping for another installment to this unofficial series in the future!

Thanks to NetGalley and Tachyon Publications for the eARC and chance to review

Space is so wide and endless. This is why stories set there can go wherever they like, or so I like to think. In New Adventures in Space Opera editor Jonathan Strahan brings together fifteen stunning stories by fifteen brilliant authors, thereby completely redefining the possibilities of space for me. Thanks to Tachyon Publications and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I will have to admit that, while I consider my Sci-Fi reading quite broad, I had never fully considered how "Space Opera" might differ, as a sub-genre. as such, I found Jonathan Strahan's introduction very insightful. There he argues that, in short space opera is a 'romantic adventure set in space and told on a grand scale'. What "romantic" here means is, I believe, up to the author but what I found was true in each of the stories in the collection was that they contained a deep yearning for something. Sometimes another person, sometimes a way of life, sometimes a place. Adventures abound, however, in this collection, and each does reach an impressive scale within the limits of a short story. Another interesting element of the introduction is how Strahan tracks the development of this sub-genre, how it took on the galactic-empire framework in the '50s, but then built upon this and began to become more diverse and actively critical of imperialism and colonialism in the decades that followed. The diversity of the stories included in New Adventures also supports this and in almost all you can find the traces of this deconstructing of empire and its influences, as well as LGBTQIA elements. Besides that, however, there is also the sheer inventiveness which blew me away. Some stories in this collection are irreverent, in a "Guardians of the Galaxy" way, while others are almost mythical, some never touch down on a planet while others hop between moons and worlds like there's no tomorrow. I can honestly say that this edition has made me a Space Opera-convert.

'Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance' by Tobias S. Buckell is a delightful start, about a robot, a stowaway, and the question of what makes us us. 'Extracurricular Activities' by Yoon Ha Lee is a heist story, with surprises and twists and insights into the oddities of cultures and sexualities. 'All the Colours You Thought Were Kings' by Arkady Martine, whose inclusion alongside T. Kingfisher and Lavie Tidhar first attracted me to the collection, is also stunning and ends in a way that had me on the edge of my seat. It is about empire, love, treason, and all things in between. 'Belladonna Nights' by Alastair Reynolds is a surprisingly tragic tale about endless travels through space, memory, and communion. 'Metal Like Blood in the Dark' by T. Kingfisher was a very surprising story to me, almost a fairy tale about a robot brother and sister who find themselves alone in space. 'A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime' by Charlie Jane Anders, meanwhile, is utterly delightful as well as gross as well as sweet. It surprised me from the first page, until I found myself oddly touched by the end. 'Immersion' by Aliette de Bodard is potentially my favourite story from the entire collection. It is a stark tale about identity, colonialism, and technology which made my heart ache. 'Morrigan in the Sunglare' by Seth Dickinson suffered a little from coming directly after 'Immersion', but its discussion of war and comradeship was also strong. 'The Old Dispensation' by Lavie Tidhar was mind-expanding, depicting a galactic empire grounded in Jewish theology and story telling. This one also had me on the edge of my seat as it explored faith and identity. 'A Good Heretic' by Becky Chambers is a very touching story about who you truly are, the potential pressure of traditions, and daring to be one's self. 'A Voyage to Queensthroat' by Anya Johanna DeNiro made me a fan of this author, because it was not only a delightful mix of Fantasy and Sci-Fi, but also very inventive in its structure. 'The Justified' by Ann Leckie was another favourite, combining the divine with bloody vengeance and Egyptian mythology! 'Planetstuck' by Sam J. Miller focuses on a sex worker in a universe that is truly endless, full of star gates, except to where our main character truly wants to go. It is an intriguing, warm, and heart-breaking story about not being able to go home. 'The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir' by Karin Tidbeck is an excellent closer to this collection, focusing on a space ship that is an office building that is also a sentient life form.

Usually my go-to caveat with short story collections is that not every story will be a hit and that one should expect this, going in. For New Adventures, however, I have to say that I enjoyed each story. Naturally, some did affect me a little more than others. As I said, 'Immersion' by Aliette de Bodard was heartbreaking and will remain with me for quite a while. Arkady Martin'es 'All the Colours You Thought Were Kings' was gorgeously descriptive and made me determined to reread A Memory Called Empire ASAP and then get onto the second. Karin Tidbeck's 'The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir' and Anya Johanan DeNiro's 'A Voyage to Queensthroat' were also very intriguing from their structure, the way the authors played with genre and format, alongside crafting beautiful stories. 'Morrigan in the Sunglare' by Seth Dickinson and 'A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime' by Charlie Jane Anders, while not entirely my cup of tea, were still excellent reads that made me curious to read more by both. Overall, I think New Adventures is a perfect example of a well-curated collection, because it made me want to explore even further, find more stories that fall under Space Opera, and give each of these authors money for more of their works.

New Adventures in Space Opera is a delightful collection in which I took something away from each story. While some stuck with me more than others, each served to more fully fill in my idea of what Space Opera can be. The possibilities are endless in space!