Category Archives: Jonathan Strahan

I Have Met Infinity

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Meeting InfinityMeeting Infinity
Johnathan Strahan, ed.
Solaris Books
Paperback $14.99, ebook $8.99

Before we get started, I’d like to thank Solaris books for the review copy of Meeting Infinity.  It’s the fourth volume in the series of anthologies entitled Infinity Project.  I’ve not read all of them yet, but for the most part I’ve liked the ones I have read.  (The inaugural volume Engineering Infinity is reviewed here.)  Strahan’s taste is close enough to mine that I know any anthology he edits is probably going to have more stories I like than dislike.

Having said that, Meeting Infinity probably diverges from my taste more than most of his anthologies, although I did find myself liking the majority of the stories (including a few that I thought went off the rails into heavy-handed sociopolitical messages at the end).  It contains 16 stories.  They range from near future dystopias to far future scenarios.  Here are some highlights: Continue reading →

A Sneak Peak at Eclipse Online: "The Contrary Gardener" by Christopher Rowe

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Over the last few years, Nightshade Books has published four volumes of an anthology series titled Eclipse, edited by Jonathan Strahan.  Now that series is going online, with new stories published on the second and fourth Mondays of every month.  (The press release says first and fourth, but an email from the editor to me said second and fourth.  Since the premier is on October 8, I’m inclined to go with the second and fourth.) 

Anyway, Mr. Strahan was kind enough to send me advance copies of the two stories he’ll be publishing in October.  One is a fantasy by K. J. Parker which I’ve reviewed over at Adventures Fantastic, and the other is a science fiction by Christopher Rowe, the subject of this review. These are short stories, so the review aren’t going to be as long as the ones I write for novels.

“The Contrary Gardener” is a quiet, thoughtful piece of relatively near future science fiction set in what appears to be Kentucky, although it’s somewhat hard to tell how near future it is since no dates are given.  It’s the story of a young woman, Kay Lynne, who is a gardener in a society in which genetically grown fruits and vegetables are the main source of not just food but ammunition.  All of this is strictly regulated by the government. As are most aspects of daily life, including how father and daughter greet each other.

Kay Lynne is something of a nonconformist and has a strained relationship with her father, who grows beans for the military.  There’s some sort of war going on, with the usual propaganda.  The beans are used as ammunition.

In addition to advanced bioengineering, there are advanced machines, which are taking the place of people in a number of jobs. 

As a consequence of her nonconformity, Kay Lynne is pretty apolitical.  At least until something happens that forces her to make some uncomfortable choices.

That’s all I’ll say about the plot.  The two principle characters, Kay Lynne and her father, are well drawn, especially for such a short tale.  The world they inhabit is well-thought out and detailed.  I’ve read somewhere (and don’t ask, because it’s been so long I have no idea where) that good world building is like an iceberg.  The reader only sees the tip of all the work that went into it.  I got that impression from reading this.  Rowe has definitely done his homework here, for his world is rich in detail.  I’d be open to seeing more of it.

This story in many ways had a pastoral feel to it, not unlike the work of Clifford D. Simak.  I consider Simak to be a neglected master, and it was nice to read something reminiscent of his work.

With the story and it’s companion, Strahan has set the bar high on his initial choices to launch Eclipse Online.  He’s going to have his work cut out for him to keep the quality this high.  If I were a betting man, I would lay my money on his being able to do it.  Check this publication out.  It’s going to be good, and I’ll be surprised if the stories we see here don’t pick up some award nominations as well as a few awards.

Engineering Infinity

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If you’ve been reading science fiction for any length of time, the name Jonathan Strahan should be familiar to you.  He’s edited or co-edited an number of successful  and critically acclaimed anthologies, such as The New Space Opera and The New Space Opera 2, both co-edited with Gardner Dozois, and the Eclipse series (the newest, Eclipse 4: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, has just been published) as well as a Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year series, now up to Volume 5.

The book at hand is Engineering Infinity, a collection of original stories that are clearly science fiction.  Not speculative fiction, not fantasy, not slipstream.  Pure science fiction, much but not all of it of the “hard” variety.  It’s been on my shelf for a while, something on the general order of about five or six months.  I recently decided to stop dipping into it and finish it.

Let’s take a quick scan of the contents, shall we?

There are 14 stories, plus an introduction by Strahan.  Peter Watts starts us off with the tale of “Malak”,  a self-aware attack craft in a future war.  Kristine Kathryn Rusch introduces us to a little girl to whom music really is her life in “Watching the Music Dance”.  Karl Schroeder takes us to a post Cold War Kazakhstan haunted by “Laika’s Ghhost” to see dreams reborn from the ashes of weapons.  Stephen Baxter gives us a ringside seat for “The Invasion of Venus.”.  Hannu Rajaniemi tells of an AI who plays God and discovers the serpent in the garden, so to speak, in “The Server and the Dragon”..  Charles Stross tells the tale of “Bit Rot” on a slower than light interstellar ship.  Kathleen Ann Goonan introduces us to “Creatures with Wings.”  “Walls of Bone, Bars of Flesh” is a quantum excursion into observation and time travel by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar.  Robert Reed questions what is real in “Mantis”.  John C. Wright takes us to the last night on Earth, on “Judgement Eve”  David Moles examines a far future space habitat and what happens to “A Soldier of the City” when terrorists strike.  In “Mercies”, Greg Benford introduces us to a time traveling serial killer who hunts, what else, notorious serial killers.  Gwyneth Jones gives us a very disturbing look inside a multispecies society that has a very ritualized form of cannibalism in “The Ki-anna”..  In the final entry, John Barnes examines new forms of life, such as “The Birds, and the Bees, and the Gasoline Trees.”

So how do the stories stack up?  Quite well.  I found three or four of them to be a little slow because they tended to focus on the internal lives of the characters more than the fantastic or futuristic elements of the story.  One story I should have read earlier in the evening rather than at bedtime.  But by and large, I though this was a solid anthology with a number of exceptionally strong pieces.  I tended to prefer the entries with a hard science and space opera slant, because that’s the way my tastes run.  But that doesn’t mean I didn’t like the character driven stories.  The Rusch, Benford, and Jones tales in particular were character driven and some of the best in the book.
This was a strong anthology, but that’s to be expected since Strahan usually puts together a top notch product.  Even if there are a few stories that don’t quite click for you, there’s enough here that most readers should find plenty that they like.

Don’t be surprised if you see some of the stories from this book on award ballots next year or showing up in the tables of contents of next year’s crop of annual best anthologies.