Edge of Infinity, ed. by Jonathan Strahan

A wild book review appears!

Edge of Infinity is a SF anthology that aims to tackle the exploration of the solar system that we now know we actually have, one sadly short of Martian canals and Venusian jungles. This is harder science fiction than I generally read, with the science taking more of a starring role, so while not all of these stories were exactly to my tastes, they were all worth reading and seemed like good examples of a subgenre I don't explore very much. And a lot of them were purely enjoyable even for a humanities person like me.

Pat Cadigan starts the anthology off with the brilliant "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi," which was possibly my favorite--it's immensely clever, multifaceted, and playful in its prose. Set on a mining enterprise orbiting Jupiter, it's about, in essence, the layered conflicts between humans (a.k.a. dirtsiders, two-steppers, and featherless bipeds) and "sushi," who are humans who have been surgically and genetically altered into a variety of transhuman oceanic forms more fitting for the environment--octopi, cephalopods, etc. The narrator, Arkae, an octopus, relates what happens when Fry, the one human "girl-thing" on the crew, finally decides to "go out for sushi," a decision complicated by the fact that she's a former Earth beauty queen whose image and life are licensed and tied up in various ways. Cadigan gets into politics, cultural differences, and interpersonal relationships, and all with a light hand.

"The Deeps of the Sky," by Elizabeth Bear, shows a system of cloud-mining on a gas planet, and the male alien who hopes to get rich enough from it to buy his way into a marriage with the most prestigious "Mother"--a marriage which will mean him attaching himself to her physically and withering away--and what happens when his quest is complicated by first contact with humans.

There are a couple of very traditional, meat-and-potatoes SF stories, all of which I liked because I have a taste for straightforward, no-frills storytelling. "Drive," by James S. A. Corey, is set in the Expanse universe, and gives a combination of a relationship story and the invention of a new spaceship drive. I've only read the first two Expanse books, and this stood alone well enough that I didn't feel like I was missing anything. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, always reliable, turns up with the DMV-in-space story "Safety Tests," about one of the people who has to make sure starship pilots are as good as they're supposed to be--a very dangerous job. Rusch just gives us one day on the job, and while it has some drama, it's mostly just interesting for the value of people doing work in space, and I'm a sucker for stories about people just doing their jobs. "The Road to NPS" is a kind of riff on "The Cold Equations," a much kinder variation where the stowaway turns out to actually be useful to the man attempting a risky endeavor--in this case, a drive across the icy surface of Europa, in which speed is key.

Then there's a duo of stories that I'll group together as the "what price glory?" tales. Stephen Baxter's "Obelisk" is about a risky engineering project on Mars, one with a usefulness that's mostly tied up in how it can stimulate hope and industry. The construction of the enormous obelisk is spurred on by a captain who feels like he's fallen from glory and a kind of disgraced-but-genuinely-innovative huckster from Earth; the two of them wind up in a kind of decades-long tragic entanglement that has a horrible effect on the young girl (and later woman) who is played back and forth between them like a trump card. There's kind of a point at the end about how the men have never genuinely taken her into account as a person, but I feel, perhaps mean-spiritedly, that this is partly to cover for her near-total lack of characterization. I think there would have been more moving ways to invoke this particular tragedy. Alistair Reynolds's "Vainglory" involves a kind of art project gone horribly wrong/right, as a PI tracks down a sculptor, now in her eighties, who once crafted the head of Michelangelo's David out of an asteroid, only to have it meet with a surprise--and tragic--end. There's kind of a moral dilemma here, but I didn't find the emotional stakes as high as I'd like.

There's also a handful of more ambitious, unusual stories, all of which I liked. I always feel like I've only understood about a quarter of any given Hannu Rajaniemi story, but I understood maybe a whole half of "Tyche and the Ants," about a little girl on the moon, living a life that is half-storybook and half-aftermath-of-galactic-conflict; this has some good ideas in it. An Owomoyela's "Water Rights" looks at the political and personal questions raised by a seemingly catastrophic loss of a space station's water supply from Earth, in terms of everything from how it will affect the protagonist's attempt to mend fences with her sister to how it will have huge ramifications for future colonial independence and Earth-station relationships. This has a nice, refreshingly optimistic ending, too. "Bricks, Sticks, Straw," by Gwyneth Jones, deals with what--immensely weird--things happen when three AI/software copies of real people are stranded in the orbital machinery they're operating when a solar storm divorces them from their handlers. The systems face data rot (acting as a form of insanity, with varying results), and one AI in particular remains loyal to her human origins and fights to get a connection restored. An interesting story with real stakes that could only be told as SF.

John Barnes's “Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh” continues the ambitious streak, although it's more awkwardly constructed. Set in a future where AI psychologists are so sophisticated that they can run through hundreds of books' worth of text and dozens of projected future outcomes in between questions to their clients, this, like "Obelisk," is a kind of tragedy, exploring what happens when an AI gives all-too-calculated advice to a couple struggling to decide if they want to stay together. The couples' fight is caused when the man gets irate at being manipulated by a robotic ant who has learned to play on his emotions, and I think part of my problem is that we spend too much time with the ants when the story isn't actually about that. And also that I don't think being pissed at a robot ant for manipulating you automatically means you'll be a bad parent, which is the idea here. The moral crux of the story--should the AI lead the couple to reunite despite thinking they're a bad match, given that humanity is in need of repopulation? What responsibility does it have when that marriage has consequences for the child that results?--is a real and good one, but it develops too rapidly and on too big of a scale. This would actually be a shade better if it were less ambitious.

And a side-note: what the hell is with all the ants? There are two separate stories in this collection with robot ants.

Paul McAuley's “Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, the Potter's Garden” is set in his Quiet War universe, which I am totally unfamiliar with--but I didn't need to know it in order to enjoy this story, which is a lovely, quiet, elegiac look at a woman traveling to effectively scatter the ashes of her estranged father. On the way, she learns more about him and the colony on which he made his home, with all its particular local legends, and the whole thing has a beautiful sense of place.

The anthology closes with Bruce Sterling's "The Peak of Eternal Light," which is about a married couple on a Mercury colony that has always maintained strict gender segregation. This sounds like exactly my kind of thing, but I feel like somehow this went completely over my head, leaving me understanding all the details of the story without really getting the "why" of it. Which is a shame, because I really do love fiction about planned societies with strict social mores.

Overall, interesting and enjoyable, especially as a way to stretch the boundaries of my fiction tastes. And since I tend to like Strahan as an editor, I'm going to continue trying out various volumes of this Infinity series.