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ALBEDO ONE REVIEWS
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Albedo One's issue 38 |
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If you're in a hurry: just go buy it. You won't be sorry. If you have a bit more time, read on. Award-winning editor Strahan was approached by some people from Solaris at a convention in Canada with a proposal for a hard science fiction anthology. WAIT! DON'T RUN! I can explain everything! I too have a heap of cheap-rate subscription copies of mid-80s Analog, mostly unread, gathering dust on the top shelf. The deficiencies of that type of hard SF were legion so let me reassure you that this wonderful Strahan collection is something entirely different. Sure, they wanted it to be a definitive hard SF anthology but time passed and mission creep set in and the anthology morphed into what he describes as “part of the ongoing discussion about what science fiction is in the 21st century.” There are 14 original stories here by top-class writers, nary a dud among them. There is a short and insightful introduction, "Beyond the Gernsback Continuum...". Some of the stories are more-or-less hard SF while some of them have only a bit of science. They are all superbly-written, the book is very well produced and not even I could find a single typo in it. "Malak" opens the anthology; a short apparently archetypal hard SF piece about an advanced military drone operating in some Middle-Eastern theatre. Malak can stay aloft for a long time, has a basic computer chip with simple algorithms to sort out friend from foe from neutral and is controlled by some US/Arab joint force. I say "apparently" because you could write a PhD thesis on the psycho-socio-cultural phenomena underlying the use of Malak and its ilk but the author, Hugo winner Peter Watts, provides a superb example of show-don't-tell with all that stuff. Basically Malak is getting on fine blowing the hell out of the “enemy” until it gets new software to help it predict the amount of collateral damage. And with the new software comes - unintended consequences? deliberate tampering? plain stupidity? - some kind of executive function. It tries to abort missions where predicted collateral is high but central command over-rules it, every time. And then the new software's output clashes with its old algorithms leading to actions never intended by its masters. A knockout of a story. I'm gonna hit the high points now; I enjoyed every single story but some really hit me. "Laika's Ghost" by Karl Schroeder is one. Arms control, mysterious earth-like things photographed on Mars, US hacker on the run, old Russians popping up and doing god knows what, a decent lad called Gennady trying hard to make the world a safer place and even if you spot the Laika reference right off, it won't help you because this is really a good detective piece and like all great writers Schroeder drip-feeds us clues and laughs softly off the page when we are slow on the uptake. "The Invasion of Venus" by Stephen Baxter drew me back a few times. Very English in some ways, this story shows us the face of a universe which cares not one quark about humanity and suggests a few ways to cope with it. "Creatures With Wings" by Kathleen Ann Goonan deserves a few re-reads. Kyo is a drunk, guilt-ridden over his wife's suicide, hiding out in some kind of zen monastery. A dying race of aliens come seeking transcendence - because otherwise they will all die - and basically zap Kyo and the others away to their miserable dying home planet before they waste Earth. Nice bunch, eh? And it comes to pass that Kyo emerges as the alien's last best hope for finding transcendence but Kyo takes a long time to see what he must do. And even then, what he does, what seems to work, is something fairly unexpected. I won't spoil it on you! "Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone" by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar also features a drunk, an academic chasing tenure, who somehow gets involved in a massive romp through quantum theory. Most of us will need to read this story a few times to get it all. The anthology's title comes from this story; do you think it is massive hubris to talk about "engineering infinity"? You'll enjoy their take on that phrase! "Mantis" by Robert Reed. Ahhh!! Do we exist at all or do we live only in someone's imagination? Or, God forbid, as output from an AI to a story-telling device which looks like a window? It's a good piece with a few faults but still thought-provoking. And then there is "Judgment Eve" by John C. Wright who has also written a novel continuing the famous Null-A series. This is a tour de force set in the last days of a future Earth; the fair-but-hard-SOBs of angels are setting up to wipe out most of humanity but a few humans have other ideas... and no, it is nothing like any SF movie you have ever seen. "A Soldier of the City" by David Moles is a pretty subversive piece. Actually that's what it's about, a massive subversion of a whole system's dominant religion. The telling of it is quite tangential but I doubt if it would have worked any other way. There are eerie parallels with the fall from power of the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. So all in all, an excellent collection, well worth your time and money. Engineering Infinity: An Anthology of Original SF Stories (2010) Review by Declan Fox |
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