New Adventures in Space Opera

These previously published stories from the last decade come from authors at the top of their game. The standouts in this excellent collection are Becky Chambers’s “A Good Heretic” and T. Kingfisher’s Hugo-winning novelette “Metal Like Blood in the Dark.” Other stories that make this collection worth diving into include Arkady Martine’s “All the Colors You Thought Were Kings,” which manages to combine a coming-of-age story with political assassination, cultural upheaval, and the rueful knowledge that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Aliette de Bodard’s Hugo-nominated “Immersion” is a heartbreaker about the tools of empire, the price of cultural appropriation, and fighting back with a little help from friends. Rounding out the collection are stories by Ann Leckie, Alastair Reynolds, Yoon Ha Lee, Lavie Tidhar, and Seth Dickinson, among others, including Charlie Jane Anders’s utterly over-the-top, absolutely riotous and humorous romp, “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime.”