Engineering Infinity

If you've been reading science fiction for any length of time, the name Jonathan Strahan should be familiar to you.  He's edited or co-edited an number of successful  and critically acclaimed anthologies, such as The New Space Opera and The New Space Opera 2, both co-edited with Gardner Dozois, and the Eclipse series (the newest, Eclipse 4: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, has just been published) as well as a Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year series, now up to Volume 5.

The book at hand is Engineering Infinity, a collection of original stories that are clearly science fiction.  Not speculative fiction, not fantasy, not slipstream.  Pure science fiction, much but not all of it of the "hard" variety.  It's been on my shelf for a while, something on the general order of about five or six months.  I recently decided to stop dipping into it and finish it.

Let's take a quick scan of the contents, shall we?