of optimism surrounding space travel that followed Sputnik, Laika, Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11, Voyager, Skylab, the space shuttle program and the International Space Station had pretty much run out by the time of the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. That moment, for some of us, seemed to mark the endpoint of a certain romance with the future, the idea that we actually would travel into space and finally leave our home world in some meaningful way. Increasingly the stories being told were of a humanity restricted to Earth, where all of its offworld exploration was restricted to robots and probes, or to uploaded intelligences in tiny craft. A practical, scientific future.
And yet science fiction is about the romance of science and the romance of fiction, about our love affair with tomorrow. During the Fourth Generation of fecundity (see, I came back to it), another kind of story began to appear, one that saw a place for us in our own Solar System, if not out in the stars (yet). This story was to some extent an engineering story. It told of massive engines and small craft, of tiny colonies and bubbles of life spreading out to the moon, to Mars, through the asteroid belt, past massive Jupiter, and on to the distant colder places far from our star. It was a story that appeared as the background to any number of short stories published over the past half-dozen years, and then flourishing in major novels like James S.A Corey’s Leviathan Wakes and Kim Stanley Robinson’s stunning2312. It was a story filled with romance, adventure, and with a love of science and our solar system. It is the story of the Fourth Age of Science Fiction.
And that brings us back to this book. Edge of Infinity is a companion to Engineering Infinity, as the title foreshadows. It’s a Fourth Generation book. It takes stories set firmly in an industrialised, colonised Solar System during a time when starflight is yet to emerge, and imagines life in the hottest places close to our star, and in the coldest, most distant corners of our home. For all that some individual stories may be darker or lighter in tone, it’s a love letter to our home, to our future and to science fiction. It won’t be the last.
Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
THE GIRL-THING WHO WENT OUT FOR SUSHI
Pat Cadigan
NINE DECS INTO her second hitch, Fry hit a berg in the Main ring and broke her leg. And she didn’t just splinter the bone – compound fracture! Yow! What a mess! Fortunately, we’d finished servicing most of the eyes, a job that I thought was more busy-work than work-work. But those were the last decs before Okeke-Hightower hit and everybody had comet fever.
There hadn’t been an observable impact on the Big J for almost three hundred (Dirt) years – Shoemaker-Somethingorother – and no one was close enough to get a good look back then. Now every news channel, research institute, and moneybags everywhere in the Solar System was paying Jovian Operations for a ringside view. Every JovOp crew was on the case, putting cameras on cameras and back-up cameras on the back-up cameras – visible, infrared, X-ray, and everything else. Fry was pretty excited about it herself, talking about how great it was she would get to see it live. Girl-thing should have been watching where she wasn’t supposed to be going.
I was coated and I knew Fry’s suit would hold, but featherless bipeds are prone to vertigo when they’re injured. So I blew a bubble big enough for both of us, cocooned her leg, pumped her full of drugs, and called an ambulance. The jellie with the rest of the crew was already on the other side of the Big J. I let them know we’d scrubbed and someone would have to finish the last few eyes in the radian for us. Girl-thing was one hell of a stiff two-stepper, staying just as calm as if we were unwinding end-of-shift. The only thing she seemed to have a little trouble with was the O. Fry picked up consensus orientation faster than any other two-stepper I’d ever worked with, but she’d never done it on drugs. I tried to keep her distracted by telling her all the gossip I knew, and when I ran out, I made shit up.
Then all of a sudden, she said, “Well, Arkae, that’s it for me.”
Her voice was so damned final, I thought she was quitting. And I deflated because