Just finished reading this monster, (940-plus pages), and all I can say is "Wow!" After 50-plus years of reading SF I would have thought at least one of these stories would be a re-read. No way! They were all new to me and I give a big, "two thumbs UP" for nearly every one. The editors are to be commended for an excellent job with their introductions to the stories and lots of eclectic info on the authors. I honestly can't...
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I'm working my way through the Hartwell & Cramer SPACE OPERA RENAISSANCE anthology, and finding it well-done and to my taste -- I think it's Hartwell's best BIG review-anthology yet. Truly a doorstop: 940+ pages!, with a surprisingly large number of new-to-me stories. Space Opera, as Hartwell points out in his nicely-done introductory essay and story notes, is a flexible concept. And when you get to New Space Opera, or...
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As someone whose own work has been describe as intelligent space opera, I love this book just for the statment on the dust jacket that: Space Opera, once a derisive term for cheap pulp adventure, has come to mean something more in modern SF: compelling adventure stories told against a broad canvas and written to the highest level of skill. Indeed, it can be argued that the "new space opera" is one of the defining streams...
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Presents stories from the entire history of space opera (although heavily biased toward more recent stories), with scholarly comments on each entry and a long, informative introduction. A good selection of enjoyable stories from some of the major writers of the form (although Vernor Vinge is inexplicably absent). The copyediting is uneven in spots, with missing or misspelled words.
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In the Introduction to this superb anthology, space opera was coined by Bob Tucker in 1941: "In these hectic days of phrase coning, 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." By 1959 the connotation remained "A hack science fiction story,...
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