★★★ (2.5 of 5)

• Full Title: Space Opera
• Author: [various]
• Editor: Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
• Year: 1996
• Pages: 400
• Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy
• Publisher: Daw
• ISBN 978-0-88677-714-2 (mass market paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• McCaffrey’s Wikipedia page
• Scarborough’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

This collection of 20 stories is centered around music and musicians — topics dear to the hearts of editors (and authors) McCaffrey and Scarborough. I found it at a local library’s book sale for $0.50. It should not be confused with the 2018 book Space Opera, which I reviewed in July (which also heavily features music).

Notes on McCaffrey: first woman to win a Hugo for fiction (1968), and first woman to win a Nebula award (1969).

Notes on Scarborough: served five years as a registered nurse in the U.S. Army during Vietnam; also won a Nebula award (1989).

Like most anthologies, this one is hit-or-miss; the stories vary widely in quality and in their ability to interest or entertain me.

 

Commentary Per Story

★ Bluesberry Jam, by Gene Wolfe (pg. 13-40)

The story of a musician named Aldo who, apparently, just walks through a permanent traffic jam most of his life, playing music.

★★★ To Drive The Cold Winter Away, by Marion Zimmer Bradley (pg. 41-53)

In which a traveling minstrel defies a Duke’s anti-music ordinance in order to remove an evil winter from the land. While I found the premise absurd, the writing was sharp and descriptive and the story moved briskly.

★★★★ The Last Song Of The Sirit Byar, by Peter S. Beagle (pg. 54-95)

I enjoyed this one very much — it was touching and painful and joyful and wistful, as the first-person narrator describes her former journeys with a well-known but long-dead bard as he fulfilled his final task with a final powerful song.

★ Roundelay, by Mary C. Pangborn (pg. 96-105)

A third-grade teacher observes as her students make a holiday paper-chain out of Mobius strips, and then somehow it opens a portal to both the Pied Piper and the devil. But no one else saw it except the teacher and her boyfriend. The whole thing seemed like nonsense to me.

★★★ Space Station Annie, by Cynthia McQuillin (pg. 106-125)

A formerly famous singer about to consider herself washed-up, singing in lounges on space stations, gets one last chance at her dream. World-building was evident in this one, enough that I became curious about the wider universe the author has constructed.

★★ Swan Song, by Lyn McConchie (pg. 126-143)

A furry ET from a species that honors singing above else cannot sing. She makes a bargain with a secret mountain clan to sacrifice everything in exchange for the ability to sing amazingly. Then, after a few years of singing amazingly, she goes to die in the desert as agreed (it is unexplained what the secret clan gets out of this bargain), but doesn't die and is in fact rescued by her human girlfriend and leaves the planet.

★★★ Heavenside Song, by Warren C. Norwood (pg. 144-156)

In a world ruled strictly by men, one woman’s blasphemous decision to sing somehow overturns the patriarchy. I was enjoying the story up until the end, which wasn’t clear (and what was clear didn’t make sense).

★★★★★ Drift, by Steven Brust (pg. 157-177)

Twenty pages of a contest between a human percussionist and a computer percussionist, which sounds ridiculous but it’s very well-written and engaging. One of the few five-star stories in this book.

★★ A Hole In The Sky, by Margaret Ball (pg. 178-192)

An American lady named Melissa studying an obscure dialect on the (fictional?) island of Linganya (somewhere near Mombasa, off the coast of east Africa) discovers that a particular song played by the natives is what holds the universe together and she must help sing it after all the natives die of some futuristic disease. This one didn’t resonate (ha) with me.

★★ The Impossible Place, by Alan Dean Foster (pg. 193-206)

Set in West Africa, a white dude wonders off at night and meets a naked singing native along the Skeleton Coast, and their magical song makes cave paintings come alive. They are never seen again. Seemed overtly colonial and filled with exoticization to me.

★★★ Ever After, by Paula Lalish (pg. 207-224)

One of those “she got three wishes but messed them up” stories, with enough twists and unusual additions to make it fun and funny, but with a disappointing ending.

★ Soulfedge Rock, by Suzette Haden Elgin (pg. 225-237)

A women who uses music therapy for patients with aphasia tries to explain the process to her granddaughters, but then (apparently?) goes insane and schedules a trip to the Grand Canyon.

★★ Scarborough Fair, by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (pg. 238-262)

In an odd twist, the author uses her own name for her first-person narrator, a story set in a town called Scarborough with frequent discussions of a particular Simon & Garfunkel song. It turns out to be a magic song, if I understand the ending correctly, and can raise the dead.

★★★ Thunderbird Road, by Leslie Fish (pg. 263-293)

This one was written well enough that I enjoyed it, despite the nonsensical elements — a woman must climb a mountain and sing a song in order to bring rain to drought-stricken Arizona, and along the way fights with an enemy shaman. Points off for what felt like racism and pro-colonialism, and for the absurd premise.

★★★★ Our Father’s Gold, by Elisabeth Waters (pg. 294-316)

Something of a sequel to Richard Wagner’s epic operas collectively known as Der Ring Des Nibelungen, this story depicts a teenage girl in a spacefaring future who turns out to be half river-nymph, the descendant of some of the characters in Wagner’s operas. It was cute and interesting.

★ A Song Of Strange Revenge, by Josepha Sherman (pg. 317-322)

This was short. The ghost of a murdered woman haunts her still-alive lover and the woman who murdered her — until her lover dies too and they can be together as ghosts. I think the idea had potential, but was poorly executed.

★★ Songchild, by Robin Wayne Bailey (pg. 323-337)

A feathered woman who previously used magic music to kill all life on her world and mortally wound the gods now tries to use magic music to bring life back to the world but fails until a new baby god helps her out.

★★ Saskia, by Charles de Lint (pg. 338-368)

A guy falls in love with a magical woman who was apparently accidentally created by a sentient online database, and he hears music in his head. While it contained a few cogent insights about relationships, the premise was too much for my suspension of disbelief.

★★★★ Calling Them Home, by Jody Lynn Nye (pg. 369-384)

This was enjoyable. A woman operates a deep space beach identified by musical notes (for reasons well explained) and uses it as a kind of “radio station” in the outer solar system to entertain/comfort the folks who live or work out there. She ends up using her talents to save a ship from an ion storm. It felt like it could be the first chapter in an excellent novel along the same lines.

★★ Bird In The Hand, by Anne McCaffrey (pg. 385-400)

A voice-and-song expert turned detective has to find a smuggler of sentient birds from Antares IV. This premise sounded fun, but most of the story was exposition, and the author kept mentioning how “unlikely” it was that a detective would be “small and dumpy” — which was a weird thing to focus on, given how many real-life detectives probably fit that description. Then she went on to say another woman didn’t look like a security officer because she was tall and “Eurasian”. These bits smacked of some weird body-type bigotry.

 

Points Off For...

Though I was pleased to see so many women authors represented, and also at the number of female characters/protagonists, I was surprised that so many of them required men for validation, help, assistance, self-esteem, protection, and even explanations — the same tired, misogynist tropes from the olden days. I would have expected a bit more equality in a 1996 book of new stories edited by two women.

In most all the stories, music wasn’t appreciated purely as music, a resonant art, an evocative vibration, but rather as some portal to magic or spells or special powers. Even if this was meant as metaphor, it got tired quickly.

Both the front cover and the back cover (pictured) used the noun “science fiction” (but not “fantasy”) to describe the stories in this book. Yet I counted only five stories that would (by most standards) classify as something other than fantasy. All the rest were replete with magic, gods, fairies, and other mythical beasts. Which is fine for readers who enjoy that sort of thing, but why mislead on the cover?

This, I’m not taking off points for, but it’s a weird thing I noticed. Almost all the music mentioned was either classical or “folk” (or medieval, in at least one case). While modern popular music was mentioned in a handful of stories, and featured in at least one, those stuck out as outliers. I don’t know if this is an indicator of the authors’ ages or something else, but given the year (1996), I would have expected more mentions of something other than orchestras, acoustic guitars, and fiddles. (Especially given the music usually chosen for science fiction movies.)

 

Conclusion

As with most anthologies, especially in science fiction/fantasy, the quality varied greatly from story to story. I rated each story separately above, finding only four stories that rated four or five stars for me — the overall average at exactly 2.5.

If nothing else, it broadened my horizons a bit (many of the authors were new to me).

(Note: This is my ninth consecutive review of works written [or edited by] women; in fact 14 of my last 16 reviews have been works by women. Of the 60 reviews I’ve written in 2019, 32 have been for women authors/editors.)

 

 

---

---

comments powered by Disqus