Day 17 – Favorite story or collection of stories (short stories, novellas, novelettes, etc.)

New Space Opera 1, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, 2007

Discovering that there was a name for my favourite sort of sf was a major revelation. It turns out I adore good space opera. You get social drama and galaxy-spanning adventures and, usually, some awesome explosions. Winner! NSO brings together a whole bunch of very awesome writers with quite different takes on the genre, and it creates a rather heady mix of galactic civilisations, marvelous characters, and twisty crunchy plots.

Daughters of Earth, edited by Justine Larbalestier.
A collection of women’s science fiction from the twentieth century, basically one a decade from the 1920s, accompanied by a critical essay examining it in the context of its times and its impact on the field as a whole. It’s marvellous and introduced me to amazing stories, more writers I need to read, and incredibly interesting ways of thinking about science fiction as a field.