Project infinity review 

The theme of this anthology is science fictional works on truly awesome scales, and it definitely delivers. As the editor points out in his foreword though, what's particularly new about the such a theme in the second decade of the 2000s is just how many of those gigantic-scale works relate to anthropocentric climate change remediation.

Overall I was a little disappointed by this anthology. It had a lot of stories that I didn't like much from authors who I normally really engage with. Probably my least favourite of the Infinity anthologies. Here are a few that I felt did stand out:

The first story is one of the best: "Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee" by Alastair Reynolds which is an Interstellar-esque story about exploration of the Sun and an alien artifact inside it. Really mind-bending and fascinating, but a like lot of stuff I've read by Reynolds, I found it a bit dry.

Ozymandias" by Karin Lowachee is set on an enormous space station and involves the caretaker's conflict with smugglers. This is actually a smaller scope story than most of this collection, just using the scale of the station to match the theme. Something so immediate is a good addition to the overall operatic tone.

Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty's "Cold Comfort" is one of the more explicitly climate change-focused stories and strongly brings home the sort of "Moon-shot" level effort that climate change will require and why the environment may not allow it in any traditional way.

The next in the ....Infinity series of anthologies edited by Jonathan Strahan. This one is themed around massive engineering projects, with a scope that ranges from the strictly Earthbound out to the rest of the solar system and then on into deep space (and time). In some ways it feels like quite an old fashioned anthology, with a fair chunk of the stories feeling like something I might have come across in Asimov's circa 1989, but in others it's more up to date - several of the stories tackle climate change head on, which wouldn't have been half as likely back then. As ever with an anthology I preferred some stories to others, so I'll highlight a few of my favourites.

'Cold Comfort' by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty is one of those climate change stories, a near future tale of methane farming in the Arctic, helped by a great sense of place. Charlie Jane Anders' 'Rager In Space' is probably the most fun, as Clueless-esque teen slang meets the last surviving AI. 'Apache Charlie & The Pentagons Of Hex' is one of the stories that made me come up with the Asimov's comparison above, perhaps because that was where I first met Mr Steele. It's an easy going tale of (basically) a biker gang, but the huge alien construct they roam over is a fine idea. Probably the best story is Ken Liu's 'Seven Birthdays'. It's certainly the most wide ranging one in the whole book, over an epic canvas of space and time.

XI have loved the Infinity series so far. I like that the focus is on science fiction, that it’s often a focus on the engineering side of the future but that that doesn’t preclude fascinating characters and intriguing worlds. I am consistently impressed by the variety of worlds presented and the writing talent included.