Engineering Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

came together. Slowly drift set in, we moved away from pure hard SF to something a little broader. Yes, each and every story here has at its heart a piece of scientific speculation. Yes, there’s a real attempt not to break any known laws of physics. But far more importantly, I think, the writers here who are some of our finest dreamers turned away from Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” and towards the promise embedded in the title of this book itself: the point where the practical application of science meets something without bound or end – our sense of wonder. There’ll be times as you read the stories collected here – encountering everything from a mirror that makes us ask who is real and who is not to a cannibalistic zombie cyborg – when you might ask, how is this story hard SF? My answer, the best answer I can give you, is that some of the stories are classic hard SF, some are not. Some hold at their heart a