There are no doubt dozens of different possible definitions for the subfield of science fiction known as “space opera,” and in his introduction to this collection, editor Jonathan Strahan offers a few. Space opera has been called the “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, starship yarn,” “colorful action-adventure stories of interplanetary or interstellar conflict,” or perhaps just “straight fantasy in science fiction drag” (p. i). Ultimately, Strahan settles for “romantic adventure set in space and told on a grand scale.” With scale and adventure in mind, Strahan explains he has selected the fourteen stories forming this enjoyable volume using three additional criteria: that the story be set primarily in space (either in ship or on a space station), in a populated universe, and possess high stakes. “It should,” Strahan says, “feel like the world might, emotionally or physically, be about to end” (p. ii).

The idea that scale can do something to the emotional register of a story goes back at least to Edmund Burke, the British politician and philosopher who outlined a theory of beauty in the 1700s. Beauty, according to Burke, was the aesthetic sensation of the small and familiar: a person’s face, a flower, something you could hold in your hands or take in your arms. The emotional response that came with the nearness of a beautiful thing involved warmth, pleasure, and delight.

Burke contrasted this with the impression that came from observing things of a different scale, like mountains, towering thunderheads, or the sea. These were not small and familiar; therefore they could not be beautiful. Instead, Burke called the aesthetic response to these vast realities the feeling of the sublime. The brain’s response was more akin to terror and awe. Regarding them gave the observer a psychic thrill. Space opera, I would argue, is a literature of the sublime.

Lavie Tidhar illustrates this well in his story, “The Old Dispensation”:

It is always a shock, the first time one encounters a new sky, no matter how often one visits new planets. It provokes the strongest sense of dislocation, almost of loss.

Wonder, too, though the sense of wonder soon fades, and one is left mostly with unease at the alien stars. (p. 193)

All stories are human-scale, certainly, but space opera—with its planets, galactic empires, and huge starships—provides the sort of vast vistas Burke had in mind, lending a sense of awe tinged with terror.

Of course, size is simply one register of scale. There are other ways in which space opera presents sublime vistas, and Strahan touches on these with his three criteria. Take, for example, the scale of emotional stakes. In Alastair Reynolds’s “Belladonna Nights,” for instance, a character slowly realizes that the reality she thinks she inhabits no longer exists. She’s a digital ghost in a world long vanished. A similar sense of loss provides the plot for hundreds of stories, but what space opera adds to this is an almost overwhelming sense of scale. The character has not just lost a human life. They are part of a group of humans who have been traveling throughout the galaxy for hundreds of thousands of years, and who rendezvous each time they complete a galactic circuit:

Across the thousand nights of our celebration a few dozen guests would mingle with us, sharing in the uploading of our consensus memories, the individual experiences gathered during our two-hundred-thousand-year circuits of the galaxy. (p. 79)

The loss here, though told on a poignantly human scale—communicated character to character through multiple nights of loaded conversation—gains a new dimension when translated into the immense scope and scale of space opera.

The ships burst into that blueness like a hundred opening flowers, in all the colours and geometries of their hulls and fields. They were arcing overhead in a raggedy chain, sliding slowly from one horizon to the other, daggers and wedges and spheres, blocks and cylinders and delicate lattices, some more sea-dragon than machine, and for the hundred that I presently saw there had to be nine hundred and more still to tick into view …

Then Campion said: “Most of them aren’t real.” (p. 90)

In other words, space opera provides scale that ratchets up the sense of loss to the size of the galaxy itself.

There is also a consideration of scale in Strahan’s criterion that the selected stories take place in a “populated” universe. That one initially gave me pause. Couldn’t space opera be written about a lone ship venturing out into the void? Perhaps. But the strongest stories in this collection play on the theme of scale not in terms of space alone but also with regard to human history and society. “Morrigan in the Sunglare,” by Seth Dickinson, does this especially well. In just a handful of sentences, we get a sharp and clear future history in sweeps of civilizations, invasions, and battle fronts:

Noemi Laporte, call sign Morrigan, grew up in a sealed peace. The firewall defense that saved the solar system from alien annihilation fifty years ago also collapsed the Sol-Serpentis wormhole, leaving the interstellar colonies out in the cold—a fistful of sparks scattered to catch fire or gutter out. Weary, walled in, the people of Sol abandoned starflight and built a cozy nest out of the wreckage … (p. 172)

Dickenson, like Reynolds, is telling a story of particular people against this space operatic backdrop, and he drills this scale down with a diamond-point tip:

The Alliance flagship, feared by Federation pilot and admiral alike, is Atreus. Her missile batteries fire GTM-36 Block 2 Eos munitions (memorize that name, pilot. Memorize these capabilities). The Atreus’ dawn-bringers have a fearsome gift: given targeting data, they can perform their own jumps. Strike targets far across the solar system. The euphemism is “over the horizon.” (p. 174)

It’s the crackling tension between vast conflicts and specific science fictional details—to say nothing of interpersonal drama as Morrigan’s ship falls sunward—that makes this space opera sparkle. One might argue, however, that all this is nothing new for the subgenre. This volume is, after all, titled “New Adventures in Space Opera.” What’s new here?

As Strahan acknowledges, science fiction is a “literature of work,” by which I think he means science fiction has always been a place where new ideas and their social implications are worked out. Likewise “new space opera,” Strahan explains, is characterized by being “more open, more diverse” and presenting different points of view (p. vi). An important part of what is new here, then, is putting “new” protagonists against that sublime background of scale and scope, seeing it all through the eyes and experiences of queer or minority characters. In some instances this means humans. In others, such as Tobias S. Buckell’s “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance” and Becky Chambers’s “A Good Heretic,” it means nonhuman persons who find themselves outside of the norms of the majority:

Robot.

That was a formist word. I never liked it. (p. 4)

But minority and even imagined transhuman perspectives are not unique to space opera. Is there work that only the “starship yarn” can do? Aliette de Bodard’s story “Immersion” provides an example of what this unique work can look like. The story centers around a science fictional concept: immersive devices that feed a person translations and cultural cues, and the cognitive repercussions that arise from this. The setting is a multiethnic space station where an extended family works together running a restaurant. The space operatic aspect comes in what bleeds off the edges of the story and makes it so effective: a larger tragedy of cultural appropriation unfolding on a grand scale. The struggles of the characters in “Immersion”—the main character bristling as she navigates dealing with customers and the social expectations of a dominant society, while the woman imprisoned within the augmented reality of her “immerser” tries to reach across that cultural divide—exist as a microcosm in a much larger saga of colonialism.

Strahan notes in his introduction that recent space opera has seen “the fascination with empire faded and its terrible impact … more deeply interrogated.” This allows room to examine “the political underpinnings of its stories,” like de Bodard’s work in “Immersion” (p. vi). It seems that, for as long as we’ve imagined colonizing the galaxy, we’ve imagined galaxy-spanning empires. As the scale of the story-form expands, however, the imagined hubris of humanity expands to fill it. New space opera, in this excellent collection and elsewhere, provides a compelling means of post-colonial critique.