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Reach for Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan. (Solaris, 978-1781082027, 384 pages).

Asimov’s, July.

Asimov’s, August.

 

I will be very surprised if Reach for Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, doesn’t turn out to be the strongest original SF anthology of 2014. Like its predecessors in this sequence of similarly themed anthologies, Engineering Infinity (2010) and Edge of Infinity (2012), Reach for Infinity is made up entirely of rock-solid core SF stories, most of them very good, some of them among the best stories of the year to date. If you like SF, believe me, you want this one.

Appropriately enough, most of the stories here deal with efforts to expand human society into space, to “reach for infinity”. As Strahan says, the idea of the anthology was to examine “how science fiction can address tomorrow, how we can respond to science itself, and how we might be able to retain an element of romance and optimism, without sacrificing the kind of realistic assessment our collective future needs from science fiction in the 21st Century.” In this, I think he succeeds admirably—nothing here is bad, and even the most minor of the stories would probably be the major stories in most other original SF anthologies.

The best stories here are probably Ian McDonald’s “The Fifth Dragon,” which tells a gripping story of love in the face of the harsh realities of life as immigrant workers on the Moon, and faces its characters with a heartbreaking choice, and Peter Watts’s “Hotshot,” an extended examination of the age-old debate between determinism and free will that attempts to resolve the question once and for all by plunging its protagonist into the face of the Sun.

Also excellent in Reach for Infinity, are Aliette de Bodard’s “The Dust Queen,” another in her long series of “Xuya” stories, taking place in the far-future of an Alternate World where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires, this one concerned with the morality and consequences of memory editing; Ellen Klages’s “Amicae Aeternum,” as eloquent an argument against setting forth for the stars on a generation ship as I’ve ever seen, one poignant enough to make me want to yell at the young protagonist to run away and hide until it was too late to go on board; Greg Egan’s “Break My Fall,” a classic rescue-in-space story that features both an extremely ingenious method of crossing the solar system and an equally ingenious method of affecting the rescue itself; Alastair Reynolds’s “In Babelsberg,” the tale of a robot/AI, newly returned from deep space, making a promotional tour on the talk-show circuit, who runs afoul of some unexpected competition; Pat Cadigan’s “Report Concerning the Presence of Seahorses on Mars,” which take a sly look at an unusual form of rebellion against Terran authority brewing amongst the colonists of Mars; Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “Wilder Still, the Stars,” an account of a woman’s dangerous struggle to rescue Artificial People who have been abandoned on the street after their usefulness is past, and who just may turn out to be the key to the future (a hint of Theodore Sturgeon’s “Baby Is Three” here; unlike the Klages, Goonan paints leaving on a generation ship as a desirable outcome, the way it’s most typically portrayed in science fiction); and Karl Schroeder’s “Khledyu,” about a superstructure that could help to alleviate some of the effects of global climate change, but which in the wrong hands has the potential to make things disastrously worse. Reach for Infinity also includes strong stories by Adam Roberts, Karen Lord, Linda Nagata, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Ken Macleod, most of which would have been standouts in weaker company.

Some good stuff in both the July and August issues of Asimov’s, although July is perhaps the strongest overall. The best stories in July are probably Karl Bunker’s melancholy “The Woman from the Ocean,” in which a woman crash-lands back on Earth after a long voyage out to the stars, to find that the human race has changed in subtle but profound ways while she was gone, and Robert Reed’s “Blood Wedding,” in which Reed visits territory that George R.R. Martin made famous with “The Red Wedding” sequence, as guests at a high-profile celebrity wedding in a high-tech future suffer a deadly attack to which they must respond in ways indicative of their various natures, all of which reveal something of the radical changes that have transformed human society. Also good in July is Allen M. Steele’s “The Legion of Tomorrow,” examining a fateful meeting between young fans that takes place at the first World Science Fiction Convention in the ‘30s, and its ultimate consequences in the present day. For those interested in the early history of science fiction and science fiction fandom, this will be a fascinating exercise in nostalgia; for those who aren’t interested in such, it may be a bit slow—I myself wondered why the Big Revelation couldn’t have been successfully made to the protagonist during her first meeting with the Legion, rather than dragging it out over a period of months. Although taking science fiction and science fiction writers as its subject matter, it would be possible to argue that “The Legion of Tomorrow” isn’t really SF itself, as it has no real fantastic element; most SF readers will probably enjoy reading it, though. Also fun in July is Sandra McDonald’s “Story of Our Lives,” told in a breezy, entertaining voice, about gag reviews of movies which don’t exist at the time of the review but that later actually come into existence, and the effect this seeming prophetic ability has on a group of friends; M. Bennardo’s “How Do I Get to Last Summer from Here?,” a light-hearted story about a wave of involuntary time-travel, not explained but apparently fueled by nostalgia, that sweeps society and causes people to disappear for brief periods into the past; and Alexander Jablokov’s “The Instructive Tale of the Archeologist and His Wife,” which investigates the courtship and academic career of an archeologist in what presumably is the distant future of our own world, although one from which all traces of our present and past seems to have been erased; how or why or by who is never revealed in the story, and since the archeologist himself only has the dimmest of intuitions that this might be the case, it’s somewhat frustrating that no answers to these questions, or even hints about them, are supplied in the course of the story, which makes it all seem a bit, er, academic.

The most entertaining story in the August Asimov’s is new writer Jay O’Connell’s “Of All Possible Worlds,” a story which has some points of similarity with the Allen Steele story in the July issue, evoking the old days of science fiction history, and even using one-time Analog editor John W. Campbell Jr. as an (off-screen) character. This one has a much stronger fantastic element, though, as a hapless tenant slowly becomes embroiled, step by step, in the affairs of his reclusive old landlord, who turns out to be much, much more than the semi-delusional drunken old hoarder he initially seems to be—a figure who, in fact, rewrites the history of multiple Alternate Worlds, and is engaged in a struggle to save our own timeline, which the protagonist of course gets dragged into. For anyone knowledgeable about 20th Century Pseudoscience, particularly of stuff championed by John W. Campbell, this is a delight, presenting us in due course with Orgone Boxes, Hieronymus Machines, and the Dean Drive—there’s even a scene dealing with an attempt to put the Dean Drive into a submarine to transform it into an instant spaceship, a notion ridiculed in a once well-known satirical fannish song rumored to have been written by Damon Knight. The protagonist, and the story, end up neck-deep in metaphysical realms of the most cosmic sort possible, and it gets a little blurry and hard to follow the action toward the end, but the story is exuberant and energetic and a lot of fun. Also good in the August issue is new writer Doug C. Souza’s “Mountain Screamers,” a straightforward YA story about a young boy helping his scientist Grandma (a tough, competent, and no-nonsense old bird, very much a Heinlein character) manage a program to transplant mountain lions to an alien world that’s to serve as a planet-wide Nature Reserve; Grandma’s hidden agenda in all this is also very Heinleinesque, as is the Corrupt Bureaucrat who attempts to foil their plans; familiar territory, but well-handled and entertaining.

The rest of the stories in the August issue all seem to either have something to do with animals, like the Souza story, or with artificially created companions, two sub-themes that run throughout the issue, but most of them are also less successful than the O’Conell and the Souza. Jeremiah Tolbert’s “Wet Fur” gives us an unconvincing tale about dogs who have somehow been absorbed into some sort of nanotech cloud and who thereafter haunt humans who are about to die as benign canine ghosts, waiting to welcome them into the cloud as well, where, it is implied, they will all play some ghostly game of Fetch together. Nick Wolven’s “Placebo” is about a man who, against his better judgment, allows himself to be persuaded to buy an artificially generated pet, with ultimately sad consequences that are easy enough to see coming, similar to the ones in Cat Rambo’s “All the Pretty Little Mermaids” from the March Asimov’s. Sarah Pinsker’s “The Low Hum of Her” is a variant of the Golem story, about a girl whose father builds a robot Grandmother for her to replace the real one who died, and the comfort and emotional support it provides her as the family flees the Holocaust and attempts to settle down in a scary New World; this is the best story of the three, although it tries just a little too hard to be poignant. Nancy Kress’s “Writer’s Block,” a reprint from my audio anthology Rip-Off! from last year, is a playfully metafictional story about a writer struggling to push through writer’s block who ends up with the ability to write the events of his own personal life; minor Kress, but amusing.