INTRODUCTION

 

 

THE CORE MYTH of science fiction, for as long as I have been reading it and probably since the days of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, is that humanity will, at some point, leave Earth and move outward, first into the solar system, and then on to the stars. Probably no assumption was more essential to the science fiction of the 20th century, and none is being as heavily questioned today.

Science fiction of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s imagined a period of triumphant stellar colonialism not unlike the imperial expansion of European powers across our own world during the 17th and 18th centuries, often with clear parallels to events from maritime history, where humanity would first reach its moon, then soon after colonise the planets of this solar system, and inevitably head to the stars, to Tau Ceti and beyond, encountering other forms of life and taking a place among the stars.

This dream of manifest destiny among the stars, with endless growth and expansion and characterised by a deep technological optimism, reflected a 20th-century experience that must have made it seem that technology could solve all of humanity’s problems, science could answer any of our questions, and that we could go anywhere and do anything. It was, though, predominantly a white middle-class American dream of the future, something that can be clearly seen in the pages of books like Robert A. Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy or Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, two science fiction novels of the 1950s that feature somewhat similar-seeming projections of life in a solar system colonised by the people you might have met at a Manhattan cocktail party of the time.

As the 20th century continued, though, and as our scientific knowledge of the solar system around us changed and evolved, that dream changed. Dreams of colonisation became dreams of terraforming and change, of centuries spent claiming land and slowly making it more like home. The science fiction of the early 1990s, heavily influenced by information provided by Voyager and other NASA probes, imagined how Mars could go from a red frontier to a green and ultimately blue home, as it did in Kim Stanley Robinson’s influential Red Mars trilogy, or in Greg Bear’s Moving Mars and a handful of similar novels.

Of course, science fiction never abandoned its classic dream of expansion—not in the 1970s as SF began to move into bestseller territory, not in the 1980s as cyberpunk became the dominant mode of the day, not in the 1990s when it was confronted by more and more evidence of the difficulty of its task, and not today. Vastly popular series of novels and stories from beloved writers like Lois McMaster Bujold, David Weber and many others were read around the world and won major awards, but the assumptions they made felt less and less like the projections of hard (or science-based) science fiction and more and more like a kind of fantasy. Enjoyable, rewarding, and definitely entertaining, but not projections of likely futures.

Those projects continued to change, and the stories being told continued to evolve. During the first decade of the 21st century, as science fiction slowly began to imagine a more inclusive future, it also seemed to lose faith in the dream of the stars. It seemed harder to believe that the vast gulfs between stars would be crossed, or at least be crossed easily. Writers like Greg Egan imagined sending unimaginably tiny probes between stars containing scans or uploads of humanity and then downloading them in distant places. Time and relativity deemed interstellar expansion would never be easy, though it might still be possible. For a brief period, this notion, and notions like it, occupied science fiction, and for a while colonising the solar system, sometimes portrayed as too small and too fragile to hold all of humanity’s dreams and futures, was set aside.

It may simply reflect this one reader’s experience, but Kim Stanley Robinson’s magisterial 2312 showed the lack of imagination in that notion. His novel showed a fully colonised solar system once again, one big enough and diverse enough and exciting enough to hold and occupy any possible future we might dream of. And it was a vision we responded to, one that allowed for recognising real problems while giving us space to dream. It also, perhaps, filled in so many of the gaps that it also began to make the solar system look small. If Robinson’s next novel, Aurora, would controversially question the dream of interstellar travel, 2312 still gave us something about which we could dream.

When I started work on Engineering Infinity in the early days of 2009, none of this was on my mind. I had the simple and enviable task of assembling an unthemed anthology of hard science fiction stories. By the time I was asked to follow it up with what would become Edge of Infinity, though, it had begun to occupy my attention. I wanted to build on the vision of a colonised solar system, to show how it might be lived in. Reach for Infinity attempted to show what the experience of trying to leave Earth might be like, telling tales set during that period of expansion. Bridging Infinity looked at how we might leave our solar system entirely and move out to the stars. The other two books in the Infinity Project, Meeting Infinity and Infinity Wars, collected stories of what would happen when humanity turned inward and focussed on its own physicality and on tales of military conflict respectively.

When it became clear that the book you’re holding, Infinity’s End, might be the final volume in the Infinity Project, at least for now, I wanted to do something a little different. I asked the writers creating new stories for this book to try to open up the solar system, to look again at its vastness, its incredible scale, and at how humanity in different ways might fit successfully and happily into its nooks and crannies. And being writers who take a challenge where their imaginations will, they did just that and more. They told tales of a humanity that turned back to Earth, leaving the solar system empty; tales that looked out into the depths of interstellar space; and tales of a bustling, occupied, but still huge stage for humanity’s future. Some I’d be delighted to live in and some I would not, but they captured a few of the many different ways we might dream of tomorrow, and I genuinely hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.

Because this is the final volume in this project, I’d like to take a moment here to thank everyone who has been a part of it: from Christian Dunn and Jonathan Oliver, who in a Canadian bar one snowy November day started all of this, and to everyone at Abaddon/Rebellion/Solaris who worked on the books; to each and every one of the dozens and dozens of writers who shared their dreams with us; to cover artists Adam Tredowski and Stephan Martiniere, who made the books so strikingly lovely; and finally to each and every reader who picked up an Infinity book and enjoyed it—thank you. It’s been a joy to do this. I hope to return to infinity someday, but till then I hope that you enjoy this book and ask you to keep an eye out for something new next year around this time, when the Solaris team and I will be bringing you Mission Critical. Till then, good reading!

 

 

Jonathan Strahan

Perth, Australia

March 2018