Bridging Infinity Read online

  Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)

  Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005

  Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005

  The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volumes 1 - 9

  Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Vols 1 - 4)

  The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows

  Life on Mars: Tales of New Frontiers

  Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

  Godlike Machines

  The Infinity Project 1: Engineering Infinity

  The Infinity Project 2: Edge of Infinity

  The Infinity Project 3: Reach for Infinity

  The Infinity Project 4: Meeting Infinity

  The Infinity Project 5: Bridging Infinity

  The Infinity Project 6: Infinity Wars (forthcoming)

  Fearsome Journeys

  Fearsome Magics

  Drowned Worlds

  With Lou Anders

  Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

  With Charles N. Brown

  The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction

  With Jeremy G. Byrne

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 2

  Eidolon 1

  With Jack Dann

  Legends of Australian Fantasy

  With Gardner Dozois

  The New Space Opera

  The New Space Opera 2

  With Karen Haber

  Science Fiction: Best of 2003

  Science Fiction: Best of 2004

  Fantasy: Best of 2004

  With Marianne S. Jablon

  Wings of Fire

  First published 2016 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  Cover by Adam Tredowski

  Selection and “Introduction” by Jonathan Strahan. Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Strahan.

  “Rager in Space” by Charlie Jane Anders. Copyright © 2016 Charlie Jane Anders.

  “The Venus Generations” by Stephen Baxter. Copyright © 2016 Stephen Baxter.

  “The Mighty Slinger” by Tobias S. Buckell & Karen Lord.

  Copyright © 2016 Tobias S. Buckell & Karen Lord.

  “Six Degrees of Separation Freedom” by Pat Cadigan. Copyright © 2016 Pat Cadigan.

  “Induction” by Thoraiya Dyer. Copyright © 2016 Thoraiya Dyer.

  “Seven Birthdays” by Ken Liu. Copyright © 2016 Ken Liu.

  “Ozymandias” by Karin Lowachee. Copyright © 2016 Karin Lowachee.

  “Cold Comfort” by Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty. Copyright © 2016 Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty.

  “Mice Among Elephants” by Larry Niven & Gregory Benford.

  Copyright © 2016 Larry Niven & Gregory Benford.

  “Travelling into Nothing” by An Owomoyela. Copyright © 2016 An Owomoyela.

  “Parables of Infinity” by Robert Reed. Copyright © 2016 Robert Reed.

  “Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee” by Alastair Reynolds.

  Copyright © 2016 Alastair Reynolds.

  “The City’s Edge” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Copyright © 2016 Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

  “Monuments” by Pamela Sargent. Copyright © 2016 Pamela Sargent. Appears by permission of the author and her agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., 200 East 72nd Street, Suite 28J, New York, NY 10021.

  “Apache Charley and the Pentagons of Hex” by Allen Steele. Copyright © 2016 Allen Steele.

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-049-0

  For Marianne,

  who is far stronger than me,

  and for Wendy,

  who is probably stronger

  than either of us.

  IT’S ALWAYS A pleasure and a privilege to work with Jonathan Oliver, Ben Smith and the team at Solaris Books. I’d like to thank them for taking the risks they have with the books we’ve done, and for giving me the freedom to do the books I’ve wanted to do. I will always be grateful to them for stepping in and for believing in the books and in me. I am also very grateful to all of the authors here, especially those who stepped in at the last moment. Special thanks to my agent Howard Morhaim who for over a decade now has had my back and helped make good things happen. Finally, most special thanks of all to Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie. I always say that every moment spent working on these books is stolen from them, but it’s true, and I’m forever grateful to them for their love, support and generosity.

  Introduction, Jonathan Strahan

  Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee, Alastair Reynolds

  Six Degrees of Separation Freedom, Pat Cadigan

  The Venus Generations, Stephen Baxter

  Rager in Space, Charlie Jane Anders

  The Mighty Slinger, Tobias S. Buckell & Karen Lord

  Ozymandias, Karin Lowachee

  The City’s Edge, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Mice Among Elephants, Gregory Benford & Larry Niven

  Parables of Infinity, Robert Reed

  Monuments, Pamela Sargent

  Apache Charley and the Pentagons of Hex, Allen M. Steele

  Cold Comfort, Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty

  Travelling into Nothing, An Owomoyela

  Induction, Thoraiya Dyer

  Seven Birthdays, Ken Liu

  About the Authors

  Also From Solaris

  SCIENCE FICTION IS about thinking big and dreaming bigger. Okay, it’s not always about that, but it often is. SF can be about a lot of things, but when I started reading science fiction what grabbed me were stories that implied something greater, that opened out to a staggering, often cosmic scale. Whether it was what was implied in stories like Clarke’s Childhood’s End and “The Nine Billion Names of God”, the endless grandeur of Asimov’s Trantor, or the almost giddy galaxy-smashing scale of early E.E. Doc Smith, the sense of wonder was what made me want to keep reading science fiction. The sense of wonder, though, is out of fashion these days. Nonetheless, it has played an important part in the project that is science fiction, and I think it’s still relevant today.

  Jeff Brucher’s Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction defines sense of wonder as “a feeling of awakening or awe triggered by an expansion of one’s awareness of what is possible or by confrontation with the vastness of space and time, as brought on by reading science fiction.” It is science fiction’s version of the ‘sublime’, which in art is defined as that “quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic, which especially refers to greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. Something awe inspiring, in the truest sense.” And it is often expressed in physical terms.

  When I was thinking about this I began to wonder if there could be such a thing as a mechanical sublime, an engineering sublime? An instance where the tools we produce to address a problem or which we create for their own intrinsic value are of sufficient scale, sufficient scope that they evoke a sense of awe and veneration that is similar to the sublime in art? Something like the Krel machines in Forbidden Planet. It seemed possible. And it might connect with one of science fiction’s basic tents: that problems can be solved.
/>   Science fiction, or at least the sort of science fiction that was typical in American pulp magazines from the 1930s to the 1950s was founded on a belief that problems are solvable, and that those problems are solvable using technical or engineering solutions. When faced with a problem in a story in John W. Campbell’s Astounding, our engineering hero wouldn’t quail before the challenge, but would instead ‘science the shit out of it’ (as Andy Weir so elegantly put it) and come up with an engineering solution to the problem. And sometime it would take a big solution, a Hoover Dam or maybe moving a planet or two. It was what had worked for the American dream throughout the first half of the 20th century, but as the Atomic Age came and went we began to doubt it, and some of that doubt carries on today.

  Why? By the 1960s the world seemed more complex, darker, more difficult, and the sort of human problems we faced seemed to require something other than a better screwdriver, a smarter mousetrap, or a backyard build rocket ship. With the New Wave science fiction turned inwards and, to some extent, began to set ‘sense of wonder’ to one side. Not that it ever went away, but it seemed like a hoarier, more clichéd, less complex way to solve a problem in a story. And yet, we keep coming back to it, as you can see in any number of hard SF adventures published over the past thirty years.

  The book you’re now holding, Bridging Infinity, is at least in part a new way of asking some old questions. Is solving problems still integral to science fiction? Do we still believe problems are solvable? Can we engineer our way out of the kind of problems we face today and will face in the future? And if we do, if science fiction is still at least partly about solving problems, what scale will we have to face them on? With my mind full of images of Dyson spheres and rings, of star-engulfing AI sub-strates, and of distinctly terrestrial projects that redirected rivers or reshaped continents, I turned to some of the most interesting science fiction writers working today and asked them to send me stories that looked at super-engineering projects. Anything from mad abandoned Soviet plans to re-route rivers to Australian plans to build 3,000 kilometer long canals to Dyson Spheres that enclose stars; stories about sometimes-goofy sounding projects that capture our sense of wonder while providing a chance to look at everything from the greatest of humanity’s successes to our darkest motivations. These also evoke a sense of awe, a sense of the sublime. The stories could be set here on Earth, in our Solar System, or anywhere in the deepest reaches of space. The only criteria was that they be hard SF and relate to a super engineering project or projects.

  In the end fifteen writers responded, and while they responded in very different ways, there were some similarities that were striking. One group of writers took to the cosmic stage, spinning classic tales of hard SF. Gregory Benford & Larry Niven, Allen M. Steele, Robert Reed, Charlie Jane Anders, and An Owomoyela all describe engineering on a mammoth scale that solves a problem – where are we to live, how will we survive, and so on. They show us life inside enormous spacecraft, intelligences made of plasma living inside stars, and adventure across the surfaces of manufactured worlds so huge they engulf solar systems. There’s a real old-fashioned sense of wonder to their stories, alongside an awareness of modern science and engineering.

  What perhaps surprised me the most, though, and shouldn’t have, was the way the other group of writers took the challenge of writing super-engineering stories and turned it to addressing one of the greatest problems facing us today. The first story I accepted for Bridging Infinity, Thoraiya Dyer’s “Induction”, described an engineering project, enormous in scale, that focused on climate change and global warming. It was followed by stories from Stephen Baxter, Ken Liu, Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty, and others. Sometimes they involved small-scale engineering with a large-scale effect, and sometimes the scale of the project was much, much bigger. But the sense of wonder was always there. Bridging Infinity isn’t a climate change book, but working on it convinced me that science fiction is still about finding solutions – both more and less palatable ones – and that at least for now finding a solution to climate change is as key for science fiction as it is for the world at large.

  Science fiction is always changing. It’s much broader, more inclusive, less centralized than when I first encountered it, but a lot of what made it special is exactly the same. It asks questions, it believes problems are solvable, and it tries to find those solutions in stories that are filled with action, adventure and a bit of romance. That’s what I see in these stories, and I hope you will as well.

  JONATHAN STRAHAN

  Perth, Western Australia

  July 2016

  WHAT FIRST DREW you to the problem?

  She smiles, looking down at her lap.

  She is ready for this. On the day of her thesis defence she has risen early after a good night’s sleep, her mind as clean and clear as the blue skies over Ueno Park. She has taken the electric train to Keisei-Ueno station and then walked the rest of the way to the university campus. The weather is pleasantly warm for April, and she has worn a skirt for this first time all year. The time is hanami – the shifting, transient festival of the cherry blossom blooms. Strolling under the trees, along the shadow-dappled paths, families and tourists already gathering, she has tried to think of every possible thing she be might asked.

  “I like things that don’t quite fit,” she begins. “Problems that have been sitting around nearly but not quite solved for a long time. Not the big, obvious ones. Keep away from those. But the ones everyone else forgets about because they’re not quite glamorous enough. Like the solar p-mode oscillations. I read about them in my undergraduate studies in Mumbai.”

  She is sitting with her hands clenched together over her skirt, knees tight together, wondering why she felt obliged the dress up for this occasion when her examiners have come to work wearing exactly the same casual outfits as usual. Two she knows well: her supervisor, and another departmental bigwig. The third, the external examiner, arrived in Tokyo from Nagoya University, but even this one is familiar enough from the corridors. They all know each other better than they know her. Her supervisor and the external advisor must have booked a game of tennis for later. They both have sports bags with racket handles sticking out the side.

  That’s what they’re mainly thinking about, she decides. Not her defence, not her thesis, not three years of work, but who will do best at tennis. Old grudges, old rivalries, boiling to the surface like the endless upwelling of solar convection cells.

  “Yes,” she says, feeling the need to repeat herself. “Things that don’t fit. That’s where I come in.”

  Then she sits back brightly and waits for the next question.

  When you touched the Chatterjee Anomaly, the object that bore your name, the birth name you were given so many centuries ago, what did you feel?

  Fear. Exhilaration. Wonder and terror at how far we’d come. How far I’d come. What it had taken to bring me to this point. We’d made one kind of bridge, between the surface of the Sun and the Anomaly, and that was difficult enough. I’d seen every step of it – borne witness to the entire thing, from the moment Kuroshio dropped her sliver of hafnium alloy on my desk. Before that, even, when I glimpsed the thing in the residuals. But what I hadn’t realised – not properly – was that I’d become another kind of bridge, just as strange as the one we drilled down into the photosphere. I’d borne witness to myself, so I ought not to have been so surprised. But I was, and just then it hit me like a tidal wave. From the moment they offered me the prolongation I’d allowed myself to become something I couldn’t explain, something that had its inception far in the past, in a place called Mumbai, and which reached all the way to the present, anchored to this instant, this point in space and time, inside this blazing white furnace. In that moment I don’t think there was anything capable of surprising me more than what I’d turned into. But then I touched the object, and it whispered to me, and I knew I’d been wrong. I still had a capacity for astonishment.

  That in itself was astonishing.
/>   It was only later that I realised how much trouble we were in.

  Can you express the problem for your doctoral research project in simple terms – reduce it to its basics?

  “It’s a bit like earthquakes,” she says, trying to make it seem as if she is groping for a suitable analogy. “Ripples in the Earth’s crust. The way those ripples spread, the timing and shape of their propagation as they bounce around inside the crust, there’s information in those patterns that the seismologists can use. They can start mapping things they wouldn’t ordinarily be able to see, like deep faults – like the TÕkai fault, out beyond Tokyo Bay. It’s the same with the Sun. For about sixty years people have been measuring optical oscillations in the surface of the Sun, then comparing them against mathematical models. Helioseismology – mapping the solar interior using what you can deduce from the surface. Glimpsing hidden structure, density changes, reflective surfaces and so on. It’s the only way we can see what’s going on.”

  You mentioned Kuroshio. We have records of an individual with that name. She was an academic scientist at the same institution as you, in the same nation state. This was long before Prometheus Station. Was Kuroshio the first to speculate about the project’s ultimate feasibility?

  Kuroshio was a colleague – a friend. We played football together, in the women’s squad. Do you know what football was? No, of course you wouldn’t. My friend was a solid-state physicist, specialising in metallurgy. I knew her a little when I was preparing my thesis, but it was only after I resubmitted it that we got to know each other really well. She showed me around her lab – they had a diamond anvil in there, a tool for producing extremely high pressures, for making materials that didn’t exist on Earth, like super-dense hydrogen.