After finishing Reach for Infinity, I said I’d check out the other anthologies in the series and here I am with the first of them. Edited by Jonathan Strahan, it includes fifteen stories by a host of familiar names. I’m pleased to see that it opens with a story by Peter Watts, one of my current favorite writers. None of the other authors I especially like though I’ve read their stuff here and there.

The previous volume I’d read had a clear focus on science-fiction set in the near future and in near-Earth space. Unfortunately, seeing as I’m a big fan of hard science-fiction, this isn’t the case here. As Strahan notes in his introduction, this collection is about expanding the range of what the genre encompasses, resulting in stories that often feel fantastical. A good example of this is The Server and the Dragon by Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi which is literally about the server of a virtual world making friends with a fantasy dragon. John C. Wright’s Judgment Eve about a conflict between aliens who are called angels and powered up humans who resemble demons is even more explicit about evoking an imagery that wouldn’t be out of place in World of Warcraft, though the armor are nanotech creations and the weapons are missiles, cannons and lasers. I’m little skeptical of the latter because it seems unlikely to me that any civilizations with access to such technologies will really find it most effective to fight in this manner, but imaginative and vivid flights of fancy, they make for pretty great reads. A Soldier of the City by David Moles is a little similar about gods, probably genetically enhanced beings, being leaders of cities which are orbital habitats.

Then there are the stories which invoke a sort of dream-like fantasy. Creatures with Wings by Kathleen Ann Goonan is literally about a man who attempts to achieve enlightenment through zen meditation while what is stake is seemingly all life in the universe. As for Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar, I’m still not exactly sure what happened at the end but I do know it’s something about quantum uncertainty breaking down the walls of reality. I’m usually not a big fan of these kinds of stories but these two are well written and I love how the second one opens with what looks like either a very extensive gaslighting effort or a mysterious rewriting of history. At least a couple of other stories are pure horror and both coincidentally enough involve a kind of cannibalism. They are The Ki-Anna by Gwyneth Jones and Bit Rot by Charles Stross.

There are still stories that fit my preferences. The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter is a great one in which humans notice incoming extraterrestrials but the aliens seemingly just ignore Earth. It’s well grounded, plausible and makes a good point. Watts’ Malak is good too, how an AI driven drone can come to behave in ways its designers didn’t expect but it’s very predictable. Watching the Music Dance by Kristine Kathryn Rusch about a child raised with music implants and Mantis by Robert Reed about live video of real people being processed by an AI and presented as entertainment both have great premises but don’t do enough to turn a good idea into a good story.

Once again this is a solid collection but there’s nothing in it that particularly stands out for me. I’d even rate this a little lower than Reach for Infinity as that one at least had stories with genuinely mind-blowing ideas and this one seems less coherent as a collection. I suspect that I will like the next book in the series more which seemingly is centered around early forays into near-Earth space.