Engineering Infinity, Ed. Jonathan Strahan

Strahan's taste tends to match up better to mine than that of most other anthologists I've read recently, so I figured I'd check this out (despite the John C. Wright story, which I didn't read due to the crazy). I got through most of it on the plane back from Austin (where I attended the wedding of hplovescats and zenithblue - hurray!), and finished it up last night.

Of the 13 stories in the anthology I read, I thought 5 were good, 5 caused me to make various sorts of faces, and 3 felt pointless or actively terrible.

The Good...:

"Malak" by Peter Watts: This is a Peter Watts story, which is to say it's about as hard and cold and black as the devil's heart. I suspect other people's reactions to a story about a conscience upgrade to military UAVs that has undesired consequences wouldn't be quite so positive, but for me it hit everything I like about Watts' work.

"Laika's Ghost" by Karl Schroeder: This is a lot lighter than the Watts story, and there were some bits where I didn't entirely buy what was going on, but it was a fun romp despite dealing with arms control and the ruins of the Soviet Union.

"The Invasion of Venus" by Steven Baxter: Huh, apparently all of my favorite stories from this volume were pretty dark. This one covers the human fallout of an alien invasion which isn't even directed at Earth. It's probably the slightest of the stories I like, but it hits what it's aiming for, and its target is a worthy one.

"Bit Rot" by Charles Stross: A robot-populated interstellar voyage gets hit by a surge of hard radiation that turns pretty much everyone on board into the robot equivalent of flesh-eating zombies. Set in the universe of Saturn's Children, the narrative voice is assured and the premise is both amusing and well thought-out. Possibly my favorite story in the anthology.

"A Soldier of the City" by David Moles: A goddess of one of the space-borne cities of Babylon is assassinated, and a soldier who loved her from afar enlists with her husband to wreak vengeance on those who slew her. The world-building here really worked for me, and the overall trajectory of the story wasn't obvious. If "Bit Rot" isn't my favorite story in the anthology, this one is.


...The Blah...:

"The Server and the Dragon" by Hannu Rajaniemi: Olaf Stapledon writes a romance between a lonely Matrioshka brain and an interstellar virus. I hope that The Quantum Thief works for me better than this did, because while I could track everything that was going on, I didn't actually care about any of it.

"Mantis" by Robert Reed: I didn't buy the level of real-time image processing postulated here, and I wasn't invested enough in what was going on to not devolve into that kind of nitpicking. Verges on "not actually a story."

"Mercies" by Gregory Benford: Some of the time travel bits are interesting, but the structure was painfully obvious. As such, the 'surprise' ending fell pretty much completely flat.

"The Ki-anna" by Gwyneth Jones: This story's execution didn't live up to its premise (aliens who've institutionalized cannibalism via mind control)... and I wasn't really all that impressed by the premise to start with.

"The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees" by Stephen Barnes: It's not generally a great sign when your infodumps are more interesting than your character interactions and you try to finish the story with two of your characters making up. This one was also teetering right on the edge of "not actually a story," though at least it had some cool ideas and creepy imagery.

...and The Ugly

"Watching the Music Dance" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: This one? Is the platonic form of "Not actually a story." Nothing happens, and the possibility space the story inhabits is too small for anything interesting to happen. The entire story could fit between two paragraphs in Orson Scott Card's "Unaccompanied Sonata", except it wouldn't, because it would get cut for being boring and unnecessary.

"Creatures With Wings" by Kathleen Ann Goonan: Massive Hawaii fail here. (Liliha and Kalihi are place names, not people names; not every neighborhood or block has a Chinese restaurant in/on it... the list goes on and on.) Also massive Zen fail (in terms of taking Western popular descriptions of Zen seriously and ending with a lame and cliched vision of enlightenment). Not impressive.

"Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone" by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar: This starts out following a painful cliche of a drunken divorced academic, introduces a semi-interesting film reel, and then lurches through a dozen pages of semi-mimetic misery to conclude in incoherent surrealism. I kept reading in hopes that a single redeeming quality would show up, but I did so in vain.

For all of my crankiness, I should note that 5/13 is almost a 40% hit rate, which is still better than I've gotten from any SF/F magazine, online or otherwise. So Strahan is doing something right.