“They don’t write ’em like that anymore,” you often hear people say, talking about fast-paced, no-holds-barred, flat-out adventure stories, stories drenched with color, wonder, and action, stories that take us to far worlds for adventures of a sort that could not be encountered on our familiar, present-day Earth, stories that bring us face-to-face with strange dangers and even stranger wonders—but, actually, they do still write stories like that!
Yes, they really do. Don’t listen to the voices that say you can’t find anything like that anymore—they’re the voices of people so lost in nostalgia for the stories of their youth that they can’t look around them and see what’s happening right in front of their own eyes. If they did look around, they’d find that the space adventure story is not only alive and well here at the end of the nineties, it’s flourishing.
As I hope to demonstrate in this anthology, you can still find science fiction adventure stories today every bit as wild and woolly and mind-blowing as anything from the old pulp days, stories as full of swashbuckling action, dash, and élan as any of the Planetary Romances from the old Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, stories just as full of cosmic sweep and scale and grandeur and the immense, sun-shattering, planet-busting clash of titanic forces in conflict as anything from the old “Superscience” days of the thirties when Edmond Hamilton was earning his nickname of “World-Wrecker Hamilton” (except with much more accurate, up-to-date, cutting-edge science!).
Adventure writing is not the only sort of science fiction there is, of course, or the only thing science fiction does well, and never has been. Science fiction can be serious-minded and substantial and profound; it can be a window on worlds we’d never otherwise see and people and creatures we’d never otherwise know; it can provide us with insights into the inner workings of our society that are difficult to gain in any other way, grant us perspectives into social mores and human nature itself mostly otherwise unreachable; it can be an invaluable tool with which to take preconceived notions and received wisdom to pieces and reassemble them into something new; it can prepare us for the inevitable and sometimes dismaying changes ahead of us, helping to buffer us against the winds of Future Shock—but sometimes it’s just fun. Sometimes it’s “just” pure entertainment (with any more serious implications or troubling social issues—and they do get raised, even in the most seemingly insubstantial of stories—largely left to be dealt with in the subtext), adventure writing as vivid and entertaining as any that has ever been written in any genre anywhere.
Although adventure writing is often looked down on by critics (it’s hard even to think of the phrase adventure writing without automatically adding
the prefix mere, since that’s the way it’s almost always referred to) or ignored completely, it’s no more but certainly no less valid and valuable than any other kind of science fiction. It’s something that’s always been part of the palette of the science fiction genre as well, ever since the days of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in the late twenties, when the specific science fiction adventure story began to precipitate out from the larger and older tradition of the generalized pulp adventure story—often Lost World/Lost Race tales—that goes all the way back into the middle of the nineteenth century. (Although the SF adventure story has always had—and still has—other branches as well, the Space Adventure story or the Space Opera, of one subvariety or another, remains to this day probably the most characteristic sort of SF adventure tale, the form that slowly emerged as being most specific to science fiction, and that’s the kind of story I’ve primarily stuck with for this anthology.)
The previous anthology in this series, The Good Old Stuff, published in 1998, traced the development of the genre space adventure tale, from its beginnings in the Gernsback magazines through the “Superscience” era of the thirties and early forties (the First Great Age of the Space Opera, when writers such as E. E. “Doc” Smith, Ray Cummings, Raymond Z. Gallun, Edmond Hamilton, John W. Campbell Jr., Jack Williamson, Clifford D. Simak, and others developed and refined a form of adventure tale specific to science fiction), and on through the years from the mid-forties to the mid-sixties, the Second Great Age of the Space Opera, when writers such as A. E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, James H. Schmitz, Murray Leinster, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson, and H. Beam Piper would add an increased social-political sophistication and an increase in line-by-line writing craft to the form, a trend taken to new heights of complexity, flamboyance, and vividness by writers such as Cordwainer Smith, Alfred Bester, Frank Herbert, Robert A. Heinlein, Brian W. Aldiss, Larry Niven, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, James Tiptree, Jr., and many others.
By the late sixties and early seventies, however, perhaps because of the prominence of the “New Wave” revolution in SF, which concentrated both on introspective, stylistically “experimental” work and work with more immediate sociological and political “relevance” to the tempestuous social scene of the day, perhaps because of scientific proof that the other planets of the solar system were not likely abodes for life (and so, it seemed, not interesting settings for adventure stories), perhaps because the now more widely understood limitations of Einsteinian relativity had come to make the idea of far-flung interstellar empires seem improbable at best, science fiction as a genre was tending to turn away from the Space Adventure tale. Although it would never disappear completely, it had become widely regarded as outmoded and déclassé; the radical new writers of the generation just about to rise to prominence would collectively produce less adventure SF, particularly Space Opera, than any other comparable generational group
of authors, and there would be less Space Adventure stuff written in the following ten years or so than in any other comparable period in SF history. By far the majority of work published during this period would be set on Earth, often in the near future—even the solar system had been largely deserted as a setting for stories, let alone the distant stars. Although stalwarts such as Poul Anderson and Jack Vance and Larry Niven continued to soldier on throughout those years, it was a common—and frequently expressed—opinion that Space Opera was dead.
But by the late seventies and early eighties, new writers such as John Varley, George R.R. Martin, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick, Vernor Vinge, and others would begin to become interested in the Space Adventure again, reinvented to better fit the aesthetic style and tastes of the day. And by the nineties, a whole new boom in Baroque Space Opera would be underway, on both sides of the Atlantic (there are some slight but perceptible differences in flavor between the New British Space Opera and the New American Space Opera, although they clearly are responses to the same evolutionary impetus—and, as was also true of the New Wave, which also manifested itself in slightly different forms on either side of the ocean, the similarities are far more significant than the differences are), fueled by authors such as Iain M. Banks, Dan Simmons, Orson Scott Card, C. J. Cherryh, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Colin Greenland, Paul J. McAuley, Alexander Jablokov, Stephen Baxter, Walter Jon Williams, Stephen R. Donaldson, John Barnes, Lois McMaster Bujold, Charles Sheffield, Eleanor Arnason, Peter F. Hamilton, and a dozen others, ushering in the Third Great Age of Space Opera.
Which brings us into the territory of the book you hold in your hands, The Good New Stuff.
Even having decided on the territory that I would cover in this volume, though (the mid-seventies to the present day), I found, as is usually the case with these retrospective anthologies, that there were many more stories that I would have liked to use than I had room to use. Some arbitrary decisions clearly needed to be made to winnow the mass of potential stories down to a usable number, and, arbitrarily, I made them.
Most of these judgment calls are subjective, again as always. While there’s often plenty of action in a William Gibson story, for instance, action alone is not the only criterion, and somehow Cyberpunk doesn’t feel like adventure writing to me—too intense, too noir-ish, too gloomy (plus the fact that almost all cyberpunk writing, or the bulk of it, anyway, takes place on Earth in the relatively near future). So, arbitrarily, I decided to omit Cyberpunk stories from consideration, although it cost me first-rate authors from Gibson to Pat Cadigan to Lewis Shiner (Bruce Sterling gets in, but for his earlier, more Space Opera-ish work, not his later cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk stuff). Similarly, Military SF, although concerned largely with the exploits of Space Mercenaries and usually chockablock with battle
scenes, doesn’t feel right to me either—too narrowly specialized, and too often easily recognized as only Horatio Hornblower stories “translated” into science fiction terms, or thinly disguised recastings of Vietnam War or World War II scenarios. Lucius Shepard’s stuff always has strong action elements, but it’s usually on the borderland of horror fiction as well, or at least partakes of that aesthetic tone, and again that was not the “flavor” I was subjectively groping for (and again, the vast majority of Shepard’s stories take place on Earth, or in interconnecting fantasy realms). So all of that was out as well.
The last major judgment call I made was even more subjective. Parallel with the new boom in Space Opera has been a boom in the “Hard Science” story, also reinvented to fit the styles and prejudices of the times better, and although there are many similarities between the two forms, and the reader who likes one is at least fairly likely to like the other, and although the situation is complicated by the fact that many authors have a foot in both camps, sometimes producing one kind of thing and sometimes another, I still thought that I could discern enough differences between the two styles to assign writers, arbitrarily, to one camp or the other. Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, Greg Benford, Brian Stableford, and Paul J. McAuley, for instance, all write some of the hardest SF around, but somehow some of what Baxter and Benford and McAuley are doing strikes me as being legitimately classifiable as Space Opera, while what Egan and Stableford are doing does not. So no Egan or Stableford, even though they’re excellent writers, and Egan in particular may be one of the best new writers of the nineties. (It’s hard to articulate exactly what I’m instinctively basing this decision on, except perhaps a vague feeling that Space Opera or Space Adventure needs a quality of flamboyance, exaggeration, scope, swagger, outrageousness, overheatedness, perhaps even lurid excess—an over-the-top quality that the cool, mannered, cerebral, tightly controlled work of Egan and Stableford doesn’t have.)
Some other decisions made themselves for me. Some of the major players in the current subgenre of the New Space Opera, such as Iain M. Banks and Colin Greenland, for instance, write almost no short fiction at all, and while others, such as Orson Scott Card, Dan Simmons, Stephen Donaldson, and C. J. Cherryh, do occasionally write short fiction, almost none of it is in the Space Adventure mode (almost all of Cherryh’s short work is fantasy, for instance, as is the bulk of Donaldson’s, while most of Simmons’s is horror, and so on). And the practical difficulties involved in the assembling of an anthology necessitated the omission of still other stories, those, say, which had recently appeared in a competing anthology, or those for which the reprint rights were either encumbered or priced too high for me to be able to afford them on the limited budget I had to work with.
Even with all of those winnowing screens in place, I was still left with a mass of material too large to use. The constraints of a technically feasible book length dictated the omission of other stories, but I could easily have
produced an anthology twice the length of this one, with little or no discernable letdown in quality, and I would have if I could have.
There are a lot of good new stories of this sort out there, and if you like this book, I urge you to go and seek them out on your own. They’re not hard to find, believe me, in spite of what “they” say. All you have to do is open your eyes and look around you.
So, then, this is the Good New Stuff. Enjoy!