Awesome Galaxy-Spanning Space Opera

Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is fantastic and I highly recommend it.

The end.

Seriously, I loved this collection. I found it at the dollar store (the fate of overlooked good books every day) and it really didn't deserve to end up there. Although I haven't read many galaxy-spanning space operas in years, I used to love them. I used to read them in preference to fantasy or mystery, which are my go-to genres now. But this collection makes me want to get back into it, and it gives me a bunch of names and series and titles to go hunt up.

This is a mix of reprints and new stories, though it's leaning towards new. A few of these are quite old, golden age stuff, including stories by Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, C.L. Moore, and E.E. Doc Smith. Some are from the years between, like stories by James Blish and George R.R. Martin. Then there's a scattering from the 90s and 2000s. But there's a bunch from around 2019, when the anthology came out, including several that tie in to series that are already popular, maybe filling a gap between novels. I think that's cool. It's a good balance, and I generally liked the older ones about the same as the new ones.

In fact, there are only two or three stories here that I didn't really love. All the rest were fun, and a few were awesome. IMO. But I was surprised by that.

TBH, when I have tried in the last decade or two to read SF short stories in magazines, I feel like I'm being tricked, because I almost never like them. They always feel incomplete, or only bad things happen in them, and they're not fun. YMMV, obviously. But I've given up on the magazines; they're clearly for a different kind of reader. But I thought that mean I didn't like SF short stories at all. If this book hadn't been a dollar, I doubt I'd have ever picked it up. Then it knocked it out of the park for me. The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell sounds great. I'm intrigued by the Wayfarers Universe of Becky Chambers. Tanya Huff I already knew, but now I'm curious about her SF series. Mike Shepherd's Kris Longknife series looks very cool. And on and on. Lots of tips for future reading.

That is kinda the point of an anthology, though, isn't it? Yes, you want it to be a success all on its own. But then you want to point the reader to a bunch of other good stuff that they've been missing out on. And it sure worked that way for me.

5 stars. If you like SF, especially space opera (and maybe military SF, too) you should enjoy this as much as I did. Recommended.

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