A fun book: I'd say half the stories are creative, interesting, well-written, fun, and substantive, while the other half is composed largely of duds, or only half-ready story concepts. The distribution of stories is rather skewed, with most of the good stories in the first half of the book, and the lesser ones packed into the back end. The best story by far in this book is Hannu Rajaniemi's "The Server and the Dragon;" some other notable stories here include Peter Watt's "Malak," Karl Schroeder'...

Engineering Infinity is a fantastic collection of hard sci-fi. I'll admit, there's concepts in here that go over my head, but when they're wrapped up in an enjoyable story, I can live with that. I suspect no matter your preference on flavour, as long as you like science fiction in general, you'll find something in here that works for you.After all, we've got:-combat drones learning the shades of grey that make up a morality-bunkers that are only an explosion away from being something else altoge...

I read this first of a series of seven science fiction anthologies in kindle format. Jonathan Strahan is a veteran anthology editor, and this Infinity Project series is intended to trace an arc from near-future to far-future in all-original hard-sf. These are not re-prints! Now, in my mind, hard-sf should be science fiction that emphasizes the hard sciences – physics, chemistry, space, and the natural sciences. But that does not seem to be the common thread. These are stories of the type that mi...

Image Friendly VersionLaika’s Ghost by Karl Schroeder ★★★★½ When an American finds evidence of a Russian pyramid on Mars he is hunted down by Google and other geopolitical entities. Declining American witness protection he flees to Russia. This proves to be a great decision because a small group of online patriots have been creating a new hope for Russia, and possibly the world.The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter ★★★★☆ Like an exciting version of Rendezvous with Rama, Baxter crushes human im...

Visceral and fast-paced story revolving around the ethics of artificial intelligence and drone warfare. Excellent read.

I love anthologies, short story collections, whatever you might call them. You don't feel any press to finish it. You can pick it up, read a story, then put it down, only to pick it up later when the mood strikes. Jonathan Strahan has edited many collections and has won many awards for doing so. This is a great collection, some authors known to me, some not. That is part of the joy an anthology brings. The reader gets a taste of an author or two or more with whom s/he is familiar but also gets t...

Brainycat's 5 "B"s :blood: 3boobs: 1bombs: 3bondage: 4blasphemy: 4 Stars : 5 Bechdel Test : PASS Deggan's Rule : PASS Gay Bechdel Test : FAILFull review at booklikes.

An interesting variety of stories built around a theme of basically some chunk of gee-whiz technology. Interestingly, two of the tales involve Buddhism, although rather peripherally in one case. There's also a very tasty Charles Stross follow-up to Saturn's Children, and in the final story, John Barnes uses an idea that I recognized immediately from Larry Niven's Known Space. John C. Wright's contribution makes me think the man is incapable of writing actual dialog. It didn't hurt his "Awake in

Engineering Infinity is a collection of modern day hard science fiction stories, of a number of different styles and authors. It's the usual mixed bag here, maybe a little better than just a random short story collection, or one of a single theme or author, but there were still some stories I didn't connect much to, and some I really liked. Unfortunately a number of the ones I really liked I'd already read, but that's hardly the fault of the collection, even if it does somewhat affect my persona...

I give this a three as a neutral kind of rating. Some people may like these and the writing is technically fine BUT...Here is the thing - I don't particularly get into these types of stories. Even the ones that other readers said were the best didn't do much for me. When the author takes a mechanical device or some other non-human and starts trying to make the story POV'd with it - I find that boring for the most part. I've read it too many times. Sometimes an author can come up with something n...

I keep anthologies for reading on my phone because I'm not often without my eReader and the shorter stories are good for the short times where I only have my phone as a reading device. I've been reading this one off and on for the whole of December. This isn't my first Infinity Project anthology; I actually started with the second one Edge of Infinity because I wanted to read an award-winning novella from that collection. I'm actually glad that that was the way I started, because had I read this...

I couldn't decide between 2 and 3 stars, but overall I just wasn't impressed with this anthology. Only 4 or the 14 stories do I consider really good, including: The Invasion of Venus by Stephen Baxter, Bit Rot by Charles Stross, Mantis by Robert Reed, and The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees by John Barnes. The other stories were either not SF (i.e. speculative, fantasy, etc.), poorly written, boring, or all of the above.

This is a collection of short stories (mostly) with the theme of "hard SF", although this is never really defined (a point that the editor notes in the introduction) and some of the stories definitely stray outside this sub-genre. There were more hits than misses in the collection, but it's the misses that stand out for me, possibly because there was a string of them in quick succession in the middle of the book. There was Kathleen Ann Goonan's Creatures With Wings (a small Buddhist community is...

Having started with the second one in this series, and then pushed on with it, it was good to come back to the start. It feels like this one had less of a theme than the later ones - I'm assuming that Strahan didn't realise it was going to be a whole series at this point. Certainly not the strongest I've read so far - it loses its way a bit in the middle, and some of them feel decidedly un-SF let alone Hard SF, but there are still some good ones on there too...

I was pleased with the variety of stories in this collection. You've got aliens, robots, time-travel, all the main sci-fi tropes are hit upon at one point or another. I got this as a gift from someone who knew I like Gaiman and Dick, and I hadn't heard of any of these authors so I wasn't really sure what to expect. The opener, "Malak" by Peter Watts is a great story looking into the mind of a machine. "Walls of Flesh, Bar of Bone" by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar was another one of my favor...

Superior hard-SF anthology of all-new stories: first of a then-new series. All the stories are readable, almost all are good, four are outstanding:* "Malak" by Peter Watts, heavily-armed AI warbird is developing a conscience. Sort of. https://rifters.com/real/shorts/Peter...* "The Invasion of Venus" by Stephen Baxter. Two inexplicable alien civilizations.* "The Ki-Anna" by Gwyneth Jones. Creepy aliens, creepier diet. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/jones...* "The Birds and the Bees and the Gasol...

Wow. Some real gems in this collection. There was only one story that wasn't great, the rest were all brilliant. Incredible concepts, well written. Damn, if only all short story collections had such a high great to suck ratio

I think this started out to be a hard-science anthology, but that's not what it ended up as. These are some great writers, and the collection was mostly entertaining, but most of the stories are pretty experimental, in choice of narrator or style of prose, or are heavily mytho-poetic, and the science is there to support the Ideas about identity, time, or other Heavy Things. Probably worth a look if you like imaginative settings and plots, and have a high tolerance for postmodern fables. That sai...

http://idearefinery.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/back-and-engineering-infinity.htmlI found this one to be a bit patchy. There were some stories in it that I really enjoyed, but just as many that didn't really grab me. It's billed as hard science fiction, but Strahan notes in the introduction that the anthology "moved away from pure hard SF to something a little broader." I actually think this is perhaps its biggest weakness. It isn't laser-focussed, so I couldn't really read it as a bunch of differen...

Overall I liked it; as with any short story collection, some are hit and some are miss. Science Fiction writing has swung from bright-shiny adventures to seeing how characters in a SF setting deal with the circumstances they are in. These stories fall, for the most part, into the latter category - there is still plenty of hard science to be hard, though.My favorite stories:Peter Watts’ Malak - a military strike drone's reaction to a new conscience program.Charles Stross' Bit Rot - android-like p...