102

Infinity Wars, ed. Jonathan Strahan (Solaris, 361 pages)

Infinite Stars: The Definitive Anthology of Space Opera and Military SF, ed. Bryan Thomas Schmidt. (Titan Books, 9781785655937, 674 pages.)

Tor.com, August 9.

Tor.com, July 19.

Tor.com, August 2.

Tor.com, May 17.

F&SF, September/October.

Stories from the Stratosphere, ed. Michael G. Bennett, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn.

 

There were a number of original SF anthologies this year that presented themselves as offering a mix of Space Opera and Military SF, among them the two anthologies under consideration here, Infinity Wars, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Infinite Stars: The Definitive Anthology of Space Opera and Military SF, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies, edited by John Joseph Adams, reviewed here a couple of months back, would fit nicely into this category, and even an anthology of galactic exploration such as Nick Gevers’s Extrasolar, also reviewed here awhile back, contains a few stories such as Alastair Reynold’s “Holdfast” and Aliette de Bodard’s “A Game of Three Generals” that could easily be considered to be Military SF.

I’ll leave it to critics more astute than I am to try to rigorously parse and define the differences between Space Opera and Military SF. For myself, I’ll say that I can sort of instinctively and arbitrarily tell the difference, out on the edges of either subgenre, although things get a lot cloudier and more uncertain in the middle borderline where the two meet. It may be an oversimplification to say that just as all Space Opera is science fiction, all Military SF is Space Opera, but not all Space Opera is Military SF. I think the difference between the two forms depends on how strong the Military aspect is to a story, and how central the actual combat itself is to the story, since many Space Operas have ongoing interstellar wars as part of their background and the infrastructure of their settings without actually depicting the combat itself, where as core Military SF usually plunges you into the fighting on an individual level, sometimes in space battles, more often as we follow “boots on the ground” grunts on military engagements on alien planets. Each of the anthologies in question mix the proportions of those two elements somewhat differently.

In terms of literary quality, although both the Strahan and the Schmidt are good, Infinity Wars is the stronger of the two anthologies, containing several of the years best stories; in fact, barring the sudden last minute appearance of another SF anthology that’s better between now and the end of the year, something I find unlikely, I’d have to say at this point that Jonathan Strahan has once again managed to edit the best original SF anthology of the year, as he has done for a number of years in a row now. However, though, it may not appeal to hardcore fans of Military SF as much as the Schmidt. Although there are a few stories here which plunge you right into battle, such as David D. Levine’s “Command and Control,” Rich Larson’s “Heavies,” and Peter Watts’s “ZeroS,” many others instead skirt the periphery of the typical Military SF story, telling their tales from perspectives not often explored. In Carrie Vaughn’s “Evening of the Span of Their Days,” a maintenance supervisor in charge of a repair dock for spaceships scurries desperately about trying to gather enough supplies to repair the flood of ships likely to come out of battle damaged in the war that everyone knows is coming but nobody likes to talk about; in Eleanor Arnason’s “Mines,” settlers on a colony planet deal with the aftermath of war, with their daily lives threatened by the thousands of mines scattered across the landscape by the enemy; in An Owomoyela’s “The Last Broadcasts,” a computer technician charged to conceal all knowledge from the public of an ongoing war that humans are losing wrestles with her conscience over the morality of what she’s been told to do. In the two best stories here, Indrapramit Das’s “The Moon Is Not a Battlefield” and Nancy Kress’s “Dear Sarah,” the Das deals with an injured soldier, hurt in combat on the Moon, who lives in poverty in a cardboard slum, his service seemingly forgotten by just about everybody, including the force he served, while the Kress depicts a woman who faces lifelong ostracism and even possible deadly retribution from her survivalist family for daring to join the Army. In some ways, Infinity Wars is a kind of stealth anti-war anthology, with character after character wrestling with doubts about the morality of the war and the orders they’ve been given and whether or not they should comply with them, sickening of the slaughter involved, particularly of civilians; even the high-tech “zombie,” raised from the dead to fight again, in Peter Watts’s ultraviolent “ZeroS” eventually begins to question the morality of the missions he’s sent on, and in Elizabeth Bear’s “Perfect Gun,” even a sentient spaceship grows sick of the killing and decides that it’s not going to co-operate in dealing it out anymore.

Infinite Stars is much more centrally a Military SF anthology, although even here there are stories that deal with the periphery and preparation for war rather than with combat itself, such as Jack Campbell’s “Shore Patrol,” David Drake’s “Cadet Cruise,” and Dave Bara’s “Last Day of Training.” The best stories here are Alastair Reynolds’s “Night Passage,” in which the crew of a ship who blunder into a strange cosmic phenomenon in Deep Space are faced with mutiny, betrayal, and double-cross piled upon double-cross, and Linda Nagata’s “Region Five,” in which a squad of high-tech-equipped foot soldiers trapped in a high-rise building must fight their way to escape through mobs of fanatical rebels during a civil war. There’s also good work here by Charles E. Gannon, David Weber, Jody Lynn Nye, and Elizabeth Moon. Adding substantially to the value of Infinite Stars is a strong list of reprint stories by Lois McMaster Bujold, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Nnedi Okorafor, A.C. Crispin, and Anne McCaffrey, including harder-to-find stories such as “Stark and the Star Kings,” by Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton, “Duel on Syris,” by Poul Anderson. “The Iron Star,” by Robert Silverberg, and “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” by Cordwainer Smith.

Tor.com has had a run of strong stories in the past couple of months. Best of them is Greg Egan’s “Uncanny Valley,” posted on August 9, which deals shrewdly and poignantly with the question of whether the “copy” of a dead man is synonymous with the once-living man himself or a totally new personality, and which of the man’s memories have been left out of the creation of the copy, and why. Linda Nagata’s “The Martian Obelisk,” posted on July 19, shows us how the project of building a bittersweet memorial to humanity’s now-failed attempt to spread beyond the Earth is interrupted by an unexpected emergency that may change everything. Stephen Baxter’s “The Martian in the Woods,” posted on August 2, an unlikely but surprisingly effective blend of H.P. Lovecraft-style horror with H.G. Wells, gives us a forest in England grown haunted and strange by the presence within of one of the surviving Martians from the invasion depicted in Wells’s The War of the Worlds. “Sanctuary,” by Allen M. Steele, in what is pretty obviously the first installment of a de facto serialization, describes a mission to another planet that goes completely and catastrophically wrong, stranding the human crew on a world where anything made of plastic or metal is quickly eaten by ravenous microrganisms, and leaving them about to face First Contact with natives who have developed technologies which use wood and ceramics instead.

The September/October issue of F&SF is a strong one. Best story here is “Starlight Express,” by Michael Swanwick, a melancholy and evocative story about a man in a far-future Rome who encounters a mysterious woman, only to, inevitably, lose her again. Also substantial here, although it probably won’t satisfy some readers, is Samuel R. Delany’s first story for F&SF in forty years (since 1977), “The Hermit of Houston.” Those looking for a strongly plotted or action-filled tale are not going to find it here; instead, this is an old man’s rambling, discursive reminiscence, jumping back and forth in time, of his long life in a world that has been shattered and reshaped by some unspecified disaster or series of disasters (probably climate change-related), with national boundaries redrawn and society’s views on sexual identity rethought, so that both men and women as we define them today have been sorted into many different genders, “natural” procreation is sternly discouraged, and much of the rearing of children is left to youth gangs and armies. The story can be hard to chew in some spots, at its most discursive, but if you stick with it, will reward the reader with some fascinating social speculation about a different kind of future society and some compelling imagery. (Warning: the story is also much more sexually explicit than is usual for F&SF.) Also good in September/October is Naomi Kritzer’s “Evil Opposite,” in which a graduate student who invents a “quantum spyglass” must learn to navigate through the infinite possible versions of his own life, and perhaps learn some lessons from the mistakes other versions of himself are making.

Robert Reed’s “Leash on a Man,” in which a high-security prison—and, in particular, one Neanderthal prison guard—must rise to the challenges involved in housing a new super-smart prisoner who had murdered an entire world; and in a broadly satiric mode, in “Hollywood Squid,” Oliver Buckram offers a zany farce with a few good laughs in it about a squid-like alien who wants to become a movie star.

The other type of anthology common this year features what Jonathan Strahan has aptly called “Think Tank Fiction,” consisting of futurology-based speculation about what the near-future is going to be like, often shading into catastrophic climate-change fiction, often sponsored by some major corporation, and frequently available only online with no actual physical book existing. We’ve already seen and reviewed two good examples of this kind of non-print anthology, A Flight to the Future, edited by Kathryn Cramer and Wired: The Fiction Issue—Tales from an Uncertain Future, editor unknown, both available only online (or in the November issue of Wired Magazine, in the case of the later), and now we have another one, Stories in the Stratosphere, from Arizonia State University, edited by Michael G. Bennett, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn. The fiction part of the anthology consists of four very short stories by Carter Scholz, Brenda Cooper, Karl Schroeder, and David Brin and Tobias Buckell, all dealing with the use of “stratollites,” enormous balloons designed to hover in the stratosphere, the outermost layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, just before outer space, showing the many uses to which they can be put—and some of the things that might go wrong as well. None of these stories is likely to end up being considered to be among the year’s best stories, but they’re entertaining and fun to read. No print edition is available, but Stories in the Stratosphere can be downloaded in various formats from csi.asu.edu/books/overview/