Space Opera: An Anthology of Way-Back-When Futures

edited by Brian W. Aldiss
Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York, 1974

This is one of the best anthologies I've ever read. Editor Brian Aldiss's is intelligent and thoughtful in his selections, organization, and commentary. The pieces fit into a coherent, overarching whole with unifying themes other than 'these writers are young and pushing the envelope of printed decency and are predicted to make a whole lot of money' (ok, that's a bit harsh, but definitely a 'they don't make em like they used to' moment).

So Space Opera. Before this I thought of space opera as being something like the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie - sprawling, epic, graceful, and literally grand operatic in theme and scope. But it turns out space opera is 'opera' more in the sense of 'soap opera':

Science Fiction is a big muscular horny creature, with a mass of bristling antennae and propioceptors on its skull. It has a small sister, a gentle creature with red lips and a dash of stardust in her hair. Her name is Space Opera. This volume is dedicated to her.
Science fiction is for real. Space opera is for fun. Generally.

- from Aldiss's introduction. And here he writes of the common themes found in the subgenre:

Ideally, the Earth must be in peril, there must be a quest and a man to match the mighty hour. That man must confront aliens and exotic creatures. Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher. Blood must run down the palace steps, and ships launch out into the louring dark. There must be a woman fairer than the skies and a villain darker than a Black Hole. And all must come right in the end.

There were some extraordinary stories here, all categorized into four sections, each devoted to a different fundamental element/theme of space opera. The first section, "Is Everything an Illusion," is all about escapism. The highlight here is Daniel Galouye's Tonight the Sky Will Fall - a masterful, masterful, spiritual and philosophical epic of a work. It begins with the everyday, and a slight case of paranoia, which balloons to include strange and clandestine scientists and organizations, solipsistic revelations (the entirety of existence is actually just imagined in a single individual's mind), the origin of the universe and nature of God, the end of the world, an awakening to god-like powers, and finally, a full circle back to the everyday. The first, crescendo portion of this arc was repeated in the first (and best, yes?) Matrix movie. The entire dramatic circle is also encapsulated in Algernon Blackwood's The Adventure of Tornado Smith, which is not surprisingly also one of my favorite short stories.

The second section, "Precipices of Light That Went Forever Up..." deals with immensity, of space and otherwise. Jeff Sutton's After Ixmal has a superintelligent computer dominating the post-apocalypse Earth... only, it is surprisingly human in its behavior when it discovers another computer entity in the solar system and feels threatened, leading eventually to mutual destruction. A parable.

Section 3, "Exile Is Our Lot," opens with the biting Colony by Philip K Dick. A slight jab of an ending which can be seen from a mile away, but still a great little gem.

4, "The Godlike Machines," opens with the mini-epic The Storm, by A E Van Vogt. Amazing and beautiful. The majestic starcruiser splitting into a thousand pieces in the belly of a magnetic storm; a couple lost at sea, marooned for the rest of their lives on a foreign planet; a wedding between woman and machine man; it's just filled with far-reaching and grand sights. After this, Randall Garrett's Time Fuze is a short cautionary tale about the accidental end of the world, and finally The Last Question, by Isaac Asimov, is the perfect closer: man invents a computer to answer the question of how to reverse entropy and thereby avoid the death of the universe. The computer evolves into larger and larger forms, occupying first a warehouse-size space, then a continent, later a moon, a planet, then hyperspace, becoming galactic, and finally a cosmic computer, which manages to solve the question, but only after all the universe is dead and dark. Then it starts over with "Let There Be Light!" A clever, thoughtful adventure - a brighter companion to the fatalistic After Ixmal.

All in all a terrific compendium. Thought-provoking, fun, romantic, tragic! Hopefully it exists in print somewhere, because it certainly deserves a place among and perhaps above all of our modern anthologies....