It’s been a while since I last read a proper anthology of science-fiction short stories. I came across this book quite by accident while browsing through Amazon Kindle recommendations and discovered that editor Jonathan Strahan has a whole series of these books. I bought this one because it’s first story is by Greg Egan and the last one is by Peter Watts. After finishing this, I wondered why I ever stopped buying anthologies.

As Strahan notes in his foreword, the general theme of this whole series of anthologies is about humanity, or its heirs, striving past their limits to reach towards the stars. Not all of the stories are in-theme but some feel close enough in spirit to belong here, such as Karl Schroeder’s Kheldyu about geoengineering Earth to survive climate change. The lead story, Egan’s Break My Fall, sets the tone for the rest of the book with a hard science-fiction about an ingenious system for interplanetary travel within the solar system that seems obvious if you understand how orbital mechanics work but I’m never seen the idea in fiction before. I also love how it might have been patterned after the classic story The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin though this being Egan, he wants to demonstrate that there are always options given sufficient human ingenuity.

Watts’ Hotshot is great as well though as usual for him, the story is more a musing about free will than anything else as it follows a character who has been engineered from birth to lead a space mission that could take thousands of years. My personal favorite story of the bunch however might be Ellen Klages’ very emotive Amicae Aeternum about two young girls saying goodbye to each other forever. It would rather spoil the effect to say what it’s about but it offers fresh and touching insights on a very common element in science-fiction that I’ve never seen anywhere else before. Another story that I quite liked is Ian McDonald’s The Fifth Dragon about adapting to life on the moon. It does however read like a prologue for his Luna series of novels.

While there aren’t any stories that are downright terrible, some are only average such as Linda Nagata’s Attitude, a story about a sports league based on an orbital station, which leaves you wondering what’s the point. Other stories feel incomplete such as Ken MacLeod’s extravagantly titled The Entire Immense Superstructure’: An Installation which doesn’t offer enough information on what the wikithings in it are and how they came to be. Adam Roberts’
Trademark Bugs: A Legal History about pharmaceutical companies being legally allowed to spread engineered viruses in order to sell remedies for them is ingenious but feels somewhat out of place in this volume.

I don’t think there are any stories in here that are truly great, ones that can truly blow you away. But overall this is solid collection of science-fiction stories and the general theme of expansion across the Solar system fits in well with the episodes of The Expanse that I’ve been watching. I really need to get back into the habit of reading short stories as I’ve always felt that they are the true heart and soul of science-fiction so I will definitely be checking out the other anthologies in this series.