

S'està carregant… Engineering Infinity (2011)de Jonathan Strahan (Editor)
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Cap No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. A couple of great stories in here, but otherwise I found it dragged. 2.5/5 ( ![]() There are some good stories in here, and I only really disliked one, but there was too much testeria in the middle of the book. Along with the male gaze being strong in this one, though 2 of the 8 authors are women. Very good to see some hard science fiction. Really enjoyed it. 1.Introduction 2.Malak, Peter Watts - excellent 3.Watching the Music Dance, Kristine Kathryn Rusch - good 4.Laika’s Ghost, Karl Schroeder - ok 5.The Invasion of Venus, Stephen Baxter - dull 6.The Server and the Dragon, Hannu Rajaniemi - excellent 7.Bit Rot, Charles Stross - good 8.Creatures with Wings, Kathleen Ann Goonan - poor 9.Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone, Damien Broderick & Barbara Lamar - good 10.Mantis, Robert Reed - ok 11.Judgement Eve, John C. Wright - poor 12.A Soldier of the City, David Moles - dull 13.Mercies, Gregory Benford - good 14.The Ki-anna, Gwyneth Jones - good 15.The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees, John Barnes - good
According to Strahan’s introduction this anthology is a collection of stories roughly categorisable as hard SF, adding the disclaimer that the term is now a slippery concept hence the stories are inevitably broader in scope than might once have been implied. Whatever his claim that they all invoke the sense of wonder, most exhibit a tendency to be didactic in their narrative styles. The tone is set early with “Malak” by Peter Watts, the tale of an unmanned airborne war drone that learns from its experiences. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Watching the Music Dance” deals with the effect of enhanced abilities for children on their dependency and psychological development. The ghosts of the Soviet space programme are being made real in “Laika’s Ghost” by Karl Schroeder, mainly set in the former cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Stephen Baxter’s “The Invasion of Venus” is peculiar in that everything that happens, including the disappearance of the planet Neptune, occurs off stage. Apt, in that humans, and Earth, are of no consequence to the eponymous invaders. Hannu Rajaniemi’s “The Server and the Dragon” has an intergalactic AI on some inscrutable purpose creating a baby universe as its plaything before being suborned and consumed by a message packet it receives. Extremely dry in the telling, a knowledge of quantum physics and cosmology might be advantageous here. Charles Stross’s “Bit Rot”is a generation starship type story where the ship is “manned” by cyborgs who are suffering the deleterious aftermath of a gamma and cosmic ray burst. Stross references Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” but overall the story is more reminiscent of John Wyndham’s “Survival.” In “Creatures with Wings” by Kathleen Ann Goonan the remnants of humanity eke out their lives in what could almost be a zoo which the protagonist leaves to achieve enlightenment. Though Goonan tries to finesse it the story has too large a disjunction when these survivors are taken from Earth by the creatures of wings of the title. “Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone” by Damien Broderick & Barbara Lamar is the story from which the collection’s title may have sprung. A man sees himself on a film shot in 1931. The story moves on swiftly to become a concoction of quantum entanglement, self-interference of particles, Bayesian probability, spatial displacements and time travel. Robert Reed’s “Mantis” concerns the realness (or otherwise) of our experiences and how to tell whether or not we live in stories. The SF gloss involves two way CCTV type screens called infinity windows. The title of John C Wright’s “Judgement Eve” evokes Edgar Pangborn but unfortunately Wright is no Pangborn. The story, involving angels and Last Judgement, aspires to the condition of myth or Biblicality. As a result the “characters” become cyphers, the prose overblown, the dialogue bombastic and syntactically archaic. In “A Soldier of the City” by David Moles the eponymous soldier volunteers for the revenge attack on the habitat of the terrorists who attacked his city and killed the goddess whom he loved. The somewhat loopy protagonist of “Mercies” by Gregory Benford, made rich by inventing a logic for constructing unbreakable codes, invests in and then uses quantum flux technology to “jogg” to nearby timelines in order to execute serial killers before they set out on their sprees; thus becoming himself the object of the same fascination. In Gwyneth Jones’s ”The Ki-Anna” a man travels to a distant planet to discover the circumstances surrounding his sister’s death and encounters the obligatory strange and disturbing ritual practices. John Barnes’s “The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees” features a humaniform who has swum Europa’s oceans and stridden the beds of Titan’s methane seas unravelling the unforeseen consequences of humans trying to offset climate deterioration by seeding Earth’s Southern Ocean with iron from meteorites. Hard SF? Sense of wonder? In an uneven collection a few stories fail to hit these marks. Enough do, though. Pertany a aquestes sèriesThe Infinity Project (Book 1) ContéMalak de Peter Watts
The universe shifts and changes: suddenly you understand, you get it, and are filled with wonder. That moment of understanding drives the greatest science-fiction stories and lies at the heart of Engineering Infinity. Whether it's coming up hard against the speed of light - and, with it, the enormity of the universe - realizing that terraforming a distant world is harder and more dangerous than you'd ever thought, or simply realizing that a hitchhiker on a starship consumes fuel and oxygen with tragic results, it's hard science-fiction where a sense of discovery is most often found and where science-fiction's true heart lies. This exciting and innovative science-fiction anthology collects together stories by some of the biggest names in the field, including Gwyneth Jones, Stephen Baxter and Charles Stross. Author bio: Jonathan Strahan is an editor and anthologist. He co-edited The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology series in 1997 and 1998. He is also the reviews editor of Locus. He lives in Perth, Western Australia with his wife and their two daughters. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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![]() GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)813 — Literature English (North America) American fictionLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:![]()
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