Meeting Infinity, ed. by Jonathan Strahan. (Solaris, 978-1-78108-380-2, 441 pages.)
Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired By Microsoft, ed. by Jennifer Henshaw and Allison Linn. (Microsoft & Melcher Media, Inc., 978-1-59591-091-3, 239 pages.)
The Atlantic Council Art of Future Warfare Project: War Stories from the Future, ed. by August Cole. (Atlantic Council, 978-1-61977-960-0, 74 pages.) Cover art by Spiros Karkavelas.
Stories For Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, ed. by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell. (Rosarium Publishing, 978-0-9903191-7-7, hardcover $28.95, paperback $19.99. 345 pages.)
The End Has Come: The Apocalypse Triptych, Volume 3, ed. by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. (Broad Reach Publishing, 978-149-748-440-5, 326 pages.) Cover art by Julian Aguilar Faylona.
Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. by Andrew Leon Hudson. (SFFworld.com)
As he has managed to do for several years in a row now, Jonathan Strahan has produced the year’s best original SF anthology, Meeting Infinity. This is the fourth in the series of “Infinity” anthologies produced by Strahan, and, like the others, contains only core science fiction, rare in a day when even anthologies that are ostensibly all SF manage to sneak some stories in that are actually unjustifiable as SF, being really stealth fantasies instead. Unlike the other “Infinity” anthologies, which ranged widely through the solar system and beyond to the stars, the stories in Meeting Infinity mostly stick close to home, typically being set on Earth in the relatively near future, and exploring “how humanity might have to change physically and psychologically, to meet the challenges that may be thrown at us in the next fifty, the next hundred, and the next five hundred years and beyond.” I miss the color of the exotic locales to be found in some of the previous anthologies, but Meeting Infinity does an excellent job of exploring its stated theme, producing ingenious and occasionally unsettling visions of how the consensus vision of what it means to “be human” may be changed almost beyond recognition by future technologies and cultural developments, demonstrating the audacity and breath of imagination that was largely lacking in the year’s other major futurology-oriented anthology, Twelve Tomorrows.
There’s really nothing bad here, almost everything written to a high level of craft, but the best stories include “Emergence,” by Gwyneth Jones, “Rates of Change,” by James S.A. Corey, and “The Falls: A Luna Story,” by Ian McDonald, with the Jones and the Corey doing perhaps the best job in the book of dealing with physical changes in what it mean to be human, and the McDonald dealing with the cultural and psychological changes generated in society by living in a Lunar colony. But the anthology also features first-rate work by Aliette de Bodard, John Barnes, Nancy Kress, Sean Williams, An Owomoyela, and others. If your local bookstore doesn’t have it, it can be ordered through Amazon, or direct from the publisher at www.solaris.com.
He’s unlikely to get one, as fewer people see the work of anthologists as opposed to the work of magazine editors, but Jonathan Strahan really is overdue for a Hugo, having produced a large proportion of the really strong short core SF of the last five or six years.
Another of the year’s best science fiction anthologies appeared suddenly, almost without warning, toward the tag-end of 2015, an anthology that has been made available as a free ebook from all major eBook platforms, called Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft, edited by Jennifer Henshaw and Allison Linn. This is another futurology-oriented anthology, most of the stories taking place in the relatively near-future (although at least one takes us out of the solar system altogether to a distant colony planet), and was created in a rather eccentric way, with Microsoft inviting leading SF writers to make in-person visits to Microsoft’s research labs, where they talked to scientists and received “inside access to leading-edge work” in fields such as prediction science, quantum computing, machine learning, and real-time translation; then, ostensibly inspired by all this new input, the authors went home and wrote stories about those things. I’ve heard this anthology grumpily dismissed as nothing but a giant commercial for Microsoft, which is hard to deny—but the editors at Microsoft were shrewd in their selection of authors to tap for the project, and without exception the writers invited have done a good job of investing their stories with drama, conflict, and human interest, breathing life into subjects that might have otherwise been somewhat abstract and academic. (And you get an anthology of first-rate stories for free—it’s hard to argue with free, as far as the average reader is concerned. So let Microsoft have their commercial. At least it’s an intelligently planned and executed one.)
As with Meeting Infinity, there’s nothing here that’s bad or even mediocre, but the best stories are “Another Word for World,” by Ann Leckie, “Machine Learning,” by Nancy Kress, “Hello, Hello,” by Seanan McGuire, and “The Machine Starts,” by Greg Bear—but there’s also good work here by Elizabeth Bear, Jack McDevitt, Robert Sawyer, and David Brin, a short graphic story by Blue Delliquanti and Michele Rosenthal, a forward by Harry Shum, and an introduction by Rick Rashid.
Yet another futurology-oriented original SF anthology, less successful overall than the two above, yet with a couple of good stories in it, is The Atlantic Council Art of Future Warfare Project: War Stories from the Future, edited by August Cole. Produced by the Atlantic Council, a self-described “think-tank,” the emphasis here is on future warfare rather than futurology per se, and yet most of the innovations described are either already here or not very far off at all, remote-directed combat operations, drones, cyberattacks, which for the most part makes the stories in War Stories from the Future seem like they’re describing the present rather than the future, a problem shared by some of the stuff in Twelve Tomorrows as well. The best stories here are “A Stopped Clock,” by Madeline Ashby, a poignant look at what happens when the communication systems that tie modern civilization together just stop working, and Ken Liu’s “Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11,” although there’s also a good reprint story by Linda Nagata, “Codename: Delphi,” and a novel excerpt from David Brin. This is available through Amazon, and probably other eBook platforms, or you could try going to the Atlantic Council site, www.atlanticcouncil.com.
Much more eclectic than these futurology-oriented anthologies, containing fantasy stories, mainstream stories, and critical articles about Delany’s work and its effect on the arts and on society, and yet still containing several of the year’s strongest science fiction stories, a few of which handle the future with as much flair and audacious imagination as the best of the stories from the anthologies above, is Stories For Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, edited by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell. The strongest stories here are the hard-edged “Capitalism in the 22nd Century,” by Geoff Ryman, the very strange coming-of-age story “The First Gate of Logic,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum, and the flamboyantly pyrotechnic “Billy Tumult,” by Nick Harkaway, but there is also good work by Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl, Chris Brown, Anil Menon, Junot Diaz, Alex Jennings, Sheree Renée Thomas, Fabio Fernandes, and others, critical studies of Delany’s work by Walidah Imarisha, Isiah Caliender, III, L. Timmel Duchamp, Michael Swanwick, and Kathryn Cramer, a reprint of Eileen Gunn’s droll “Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005,” other strong reprint stories by Ellen Kushner and Thomas M. Disch, and an introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson.
There were a fair number of stories this year in magazines, anthologies, and online markets about the Apocalypse, generally caused by catastrophic climate change (not surprising considering the headlines on the nightly news and the extreme weather the globe suffered this year), but there was also a dedicated anthology of Apocalyptic and post-Apocalyptic stories that was another of the year’s good SF anthologies, The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, the concluding volume in the Apocalypse Triptych, a three-anthology series that started with The End Is Nigh and The End Is Now last year. This volume, which focuses on the aftermaths of various sorts of Apocalypses, is not quite as strong overall as Meeting Infinity or Future Visions, but there’s still a good deal of strong work in it, making it a good reading value for the money. The best story here is probably “Bannerless,” by Carrie Vaughn, a believable look at a society struggling to put itself back together, in a better and more just form, after a climate-driven catastrophe that almost wipes out the human race. Also first-rate is “Goodnight Earth,” by Annie Bellet, a sort of harder-edged version of Huck Finn’s river raft trip down the Mississippi, through a war-ravaged and dangerous landscape. The book also contains good stuff by Nancy Kress, Tananarive Due, Ken Liu, Sarah Langan, Elizabeth Bear, Jake Kerr, and others.
There was another, less successful, anthology dedicated to the exploring the aftermaths of climate-change generated disasters this year, Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Andrew Leon Hudson, a Kickstarter-funded project that is only available in eBook form. This one makes the rather odd choice to publish fantasy stories about extreme climate-change, but rising sea levels and elves make for an uneasy mixture, in my opinion. There are good SF reprint stories here, though, by Lauren Beukes and Tobias S. Buckell.