Infinite Stars

Starred review from September 4, 2017
Space opera is celebrated in this capacious anthology with stories from a stellar lineup of its best contemporary practitioners. The 24 selections—which include classics from luminaries such as Robert Silverberg (who also contributes an informative historical introduction), Anne McCaffrey, Poul Anderson, and Cordwainer Smith, as well as 15 works original to this volume—illustrate the wide variety of themes that space opera can accommodate: galactic empire building across space and time in Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton’s “Stark and the Star Kings”; the peculiar lives of extraterrestrial fauna in Orson Scott Card’s “Renegat” (a new episode in his long-running Ender saga); interstellar piracy in Elizabeth Moon’s “All in a Day’s Work”; cultural identity in Nnedi Okorafor’s Hugo-winning “Binti”; and military adventures (a staple of the subgenre) in stories by Lois McMaster Bujold, David Drake, and Bennett R. Coles. Although these short stories don’t always have the sweep and scope of novel-length works, the new episodes of several series—among them “The Waters of Kanly” by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, set amid the events of Frank Herbert’s landmark novel Dune—will make this book irresistible to space opera enthusiasts.