Engineering Infinity
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 1907519521
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Whether it's coming up hard against the speed of light and, with it, the enormity of the universe, realising 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, this exciting and innovative science-fiction anthology collects together stories by some of the biggest names in the field including Stephen Baxter, Charles Stross and Greg Bear.
The universe shifts and changes: suddenly you understand, you get it, and are filled with a sense of 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, realising 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 sense of wonder is most often found and where science-fiction's true heart lies. The exciting and innovative science-fiction anthology collects together stories by some of the biggest names in the field including Stephen Baxter, Charles Stross, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Gwyneth Jones.
patches of lichen. He had fragments of Lione's incense in the sleeve pocket of his inner, in a First Aid pouch. The police were fully occupied: furtively he opened the arm of his hardshell, and fished the pouch out. He was right, it was the same - Lione had stood here. The incense was not a gift, she had gathered it. She had been standing right here. His need was irresistible. He released his face-plate, stripped his gauntlets, rubbed away quarantine film. KiAn rushed in on him, cold and harsh
Again and again and again she flew upwards and fell, crying out in frustration. That was what the server had heard, through the interfaces of the virtual. It watched the dragon in astonishment. Here, at least, was an Other. The server had a million questions. But first, it had to serve. How can I help? the server asked. What do you need? The dragon stopped in mid-air, almost fell, then righted itself. "Who are you?" it asked. This was the first time anyone had ever addressed the server
full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels (notably Saturn's Children, on this year's shortlist) and winner of the 2005 Hugo award for best novella ("The Concrete Jungle"), Stross's works have been translated into over twelve languages. Coming up is a new near future SF novel, Rule 34, a new collection, and a new Laundry novel. Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped-catastrophes in the
distortions and visual paradoxa of Dali, Escher, Magritte, the decompressions into art that denied itself as art, Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein, the comic antics of Warhol and Koons and a thousand others, Dadaists, Fauves, frauds, Freudians, unpeelers of pretence and its practitioners, and through it all the slowly ebbing passion, the curdling of my cynical eye observing everything into nothing... All of this a millionfold, birth, copulation, and death. "Bev," I said, "help me," and tears
of local elements, as if in a 3D scanner... The scarred Ki woman fascinated him, he hardly knew why. The portent he felt in their meeting (had he really met her?) was what they call a "transit hangover." He must sleep it off. The Ki-anna was rated Chief of Police, but she walked the beat most days. All her officers above nightstick grade were seconded from the Ruling An's Household Guard: she didn't like to impose on them. The Ki - natural street-dwellers, if ever life was natural again -