Review: Infinite Science Fiction One
<p><cite>Infinite Science Fiction One</cite> (edited by Dany G. Zuwen and Joanna Jacksonl Infinite Acacia) starts out rather oddly, with Zuwen&#8217;s introducton in which, though he says he&#8217;s not religious, he connects his love of SF with having read the Bible as a child.  The leap from faith narratives to a literature that celebrates rational knowability seems jarring and a bit implausible.</p>
<p>That said, the selection of stories here is not bad.  Higher-profile editors have done worse, sometimes in anthologies I&#8217;ve reviewed.</p>
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<p>Janka Hobbs&#8217;s <cite>Real</cite> is a dark, affecting little tale of a future in which people who don&#8217;t want the mess and bother of real children buy robotic child surrogates, and what happens when a grifter invents a novel scam.</p>
<p>Tim Majors&#8217;s <cite>By The Numbers</cite> is a less successful exploration of the idea of the quantified self &#8211; a failure, really, because it contains an impossible oracle-machine in what is clearly intended to be an SF story.</p>
<p>Elizabeth Bannon&#8217;s <cite>Tin Soul</cite> is a sort of counterpoint to <cite>Real</cite> in which a man&#8217;s anti-robot prejudices destroy his ability to relate to his prosthetically-equipped son.</p>
<p>P. Anthony Ramanauskas&#8217;s <cite>Six Minutes</cite> is a prison-break story told from the point of view of a monster, an immortal mind predator who steals the bodies of humans to maintain existence. It&#8217;s well written, but diminished by the author&#8217;s failure to actually end it and dangling references to a larger setting that we are never shown. Possibly a section from a larger work in progress?</p>
<p>John Walters&#8217;s <cite>Matchmaker</cite> works a familiar theme &#8211; the time traveler at a crisis, forbidden to interfere or form attachments &#8211; unfortunately, to no other effect than an emotional tone painting.  Competent writing does not save it from becoming maudlin and trivial.</p>
<p>Nick Holburn&#8217;s <cite>The Wedding</cite> is a creepy tale of a wedding disrupted by an undead spouse. Not bad on its own terms, but I question what it&#8217;s doing in an SF anthology.</p>
<p>Jay Wilburn&#8217;s <cite>Slow</cite> is a gripping tale of an astronaut fighting off being consumed by a symbiote that has at least temporarily saved his life.  Definitely SF; not for the squeamish.</p>
<p>Rebecca Ann Jordan&#8217;s <cite>Gospel Of</cite> is strange and gripping.  An exile with a bomb strapped to her chest, a future spin on the sacrificed year-king, and a satisfying twist in the ending.</p>
<p>Dan Devine&#8217;s <cite>The Silent Dead</cite> is old-school in the best way &#8211; could have been an <cite>Astounding</cite> story in the 1950s. The mass suicide of a planetary colony has horrifying implications the reader may guess before the ending&#8230;</p>
<p>Matthew S. Dent&#8217;s <cite>Nothing Besides Remains</cite> carries forward another old-school tradition &#8211; a robot come to sentience yearning for its lost makers.  No great surprises here, but a good exploration of the theme.</p>
<p>William Ledbetter&#8217;s <cite>The Night With Stars</cite> is very clever, a sort of anthropological reply to Larry Niven&#8217;s classic <cite>The Magic Goes Away</cite>. What if Stone-Age humans relied on elrctromagnetic features of their environment &#8211; and then, due to a shift in the geomagnetic field, lost them? Well done.</p>
<p>Doug Tidwell&#8217;s <cite>Butterflies</cite> is, alas, a textbook example of what not to do in an SF story. At best it&#8217;s a trivial finger exercise about an astronaut going mad. There&#8217;s no reveal anywhere, and it contradicts the actual facts of history without explanation; no astronaut did this during Kennedy&#8217;s term.</p>
<p>Michaele Jordan&#8217;s <cite>Message of War</cite> is a well-executed tale of weapons that can wipe a people from history, and how they might be used.  Subtly horrifying even if we are supposed to think of the wielders as the good guys.</p>
<p>Liam Nicolas Pezzano&#8217;s <cite>Rolling By in the Moonlight</cite> starts well, but turns out to be all imagery with no point.  The author has an English degree; that figures, this piece smells of literary status envy, a disease the anthology is otherwise largely and blessedly free of.</p>
<p>J.B. Rockwell&#8217;s <cite>Midnight</cite> also starts well and ends badly.  An AI on a terminally damaged warship struggling to get its cryopreserved crew launched to somewhere they might live again, that&#8217;s a good premise.  Too bad it&#8217;s wasted on empty sentimentality about cute robots.</p>
<p>This anthology is only about 50% good, but the good stuff is quite original and the less good is mostly just defective SF rather than being anti-SF infected with literary status envy.  On balance, better value than some higher-profile anthologies with more pretensions.</p>
