Maybe the story that most characterizes this book is John Kessel's "Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance." The story seems to want to wink at the conventions and pretensions of Space Opera, while at the same time it uses them to tell a bang up story. And it all works -- I had lots of fun following the monk Adlan in his attempt to steal a play and thereby bring down the Empire. In so doing, he activates a soldier who had been hidden away for decades in a nine-dimensional pouch. All goes as we might expect -- the two face dangers, question each other's motivations, and eventually both succeed and fall in love. But Kessel undercuts traditional Space Operatic assumptions in several ways -- the main characters's back stories, the ambiguous decision the hero makes at the end, and the quiet denouement. I should add that the furniture of the story is effective as well -- the clever supertech like the nine-dimensional pouch, the truly exciting action, and the hints of neat long history preceding the story, including the extinction and the restoration of humankind.

Kessel's story is one of my favorites here. The other is Peter Watts's "The Island." This is less pure Space Opera than a piece of very far future hard SF. The narrator is a woman on a slower-than-light ship which has spent millennia upon millennia placing "stargates" -- as such they lay the foundation for civilizations that don't even know of them. She has been woken again for another construction job, but this one comes with complications. It seems that if they place the stargate where planned, they will wipe out a nearby alien society. She -- in company with the enemy AI that runs the ship, and with a naïve young man who seems to be her son -- must decide if the risk of moving the stargate is necessary to take. The story has plenty of SFnal cool -- the far reaches of time, the strange alien society they encounter, the weirdness of the more or less contemporary humans who have lived so far to the future -- and it closes with a bitter twist.

There's a lot more in the book, of course. Robert Charles Wilson's "Utriusque Cosmi" is a cool story about a woman snatched from the Earth just before it is destroyed -- and eventually, of course, it is about why Earth is destroyed, which turns out to be a story about a much larger civilization, in both a temporal and spatial sense. "Cracklegrackle," by Justina Robson, is also strong, about a man trying to learn what happened to his daughter on Mars, and thus having to cooperate with one of the "Forged" -- a greatly altered posthuman. The story moves from Mars to Jupiter, and concerns slavery and what makes one human.

Other stories include a John C. Wright story, set in his Golden Age future, "The Far End of History," which plays with the Odysseus/Penelope story as a romance between a planet and a moon; a solid YA-ish adventure story "Chameleons" from Elizabeth Moon; strong cynical work from Bruce Sterling, "Join the Navy and See the Worlds", about an American space hero adrift in a newly ascendant India; and a clever John Barnes piece, "The Lost Princess Man," about a conman who likes the "lost princess" scam: convincing a woman she's a lost member of the royal family as a pretext to selling her... with twist upon twist resulting.

The rest of the book is mostly quite entertaining as well -- save just a couple of disappointments. Many of the stories are, truth be told, a bit routine, or a bit too arch in their attitude towards the genre, but for all that they held my interest. And given the quality of the best stories, the book as a whole is another winner.