In "Cages" by Ian Watson, a near-future Earth has been invaded by the Varroa, invulnerable and mysterious giant beelike aliens. These creatures came through hoops that appeared all at once all over the planet. The hoops also forced "impediments" upon every adult on the planet. "Impediments" come in a wide variety, but they frequently resemble baroquely complex cages imprisoning some body part, such as the neck or the head or the genitals. There are even wilder impediments, such as living cats attached at a person's elbow, or eyes that have been exchanged between lovers. Watson's plot advances from there, mixing together secret operatives, techno music and gateways to artificial worlds.

Paul Di Fillipo presents the godPod in his story "Personal Jesus." Through these devices every individual on Earth is given the chance to regularly commune and be advised by his own personal link with what is apparently the deity. The author explains that "the engineers had crafted a class of device capable of tapping into the eternal unchanging substrate of the cosmos, the numinous source of all meaning in the universe." Those who listen to their godPods make better choices, live happier lives—the whole world is soon transformed. But what kind of entity has mankind contacted, and what are its ultimate goals?

In "C-Rock City" Greg van Eekout and Jay Lake conjure a painfully beautiful vision of a space habitat carved from fused asteroids by 3,000 artistically brilliant, blind slaves. Mike Resnick and David Gerrold team up to give us a spoofy mind-bender, called "Jellyfish," that explicitly evokes the work of Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut while thoroughly exploring ideas of existence and nonexistence.

For this reader, these are the kinds of stories that renew an interest in the expansive, imagination-liberating possibilities of science fiction. Ideas that could only come from out of science fiction are at the center of every story—but, with a few exceptions, the ideas come naturally linked to the individual, artistic voices of the writers and their keen eye for characterization. Only occasionally do the ideas overburden the story, leaving the writer to an awkward, hasty wrap-up at the end. One might also point to a preponderance of dark, disturbing visions—but perhaps it is those kinds of vision that are most thought-provoking.

Expanding and liberating the imagination

One of the strongest stories is "Zora and the Land Ethic Nomads," by the collection's only female contributor, Mary Turzillo. (It's a little hard to understand why the editor couldn't find more work by the numerous women writers active in the field.) This one builds gradually into a story of suspense and subtle emotional tension, as Zora and her family, already struggling for survival on a sparsely colonized Mars, are driven out of their habitat by sabotage. Their plight uncovers a number of hard truths about life in a hostile environment. Turzillo deftly gathers together a number of familiar SF images and ideas and squeezes a newly intense, personal story out of them.

Another strength of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction is that it draws freely from the deep pool of talented British writers. Some of these may already be familiar to U.S. readers, such as Ian Watson and Stephen Baxter—but other authors showcased here deserve a much larger portion of stateside attention. These included the wonderfully talented Eric Brown, Keith Brooke and Adam Roberts, along with newer writer Tony Ballantyne. All of these make memorable contributions to the book—and Brooke and Ballantyne, in particular, deliver some of the best science fiction to be found anywhere.

In "Third Person," Ballantyne supplies a perfectly written, cool and distressing vision of a future where wars are fought in the midst of unconcerned civilian populations. Citizen-soldiers are recruited with a drug called "Third Person" that causes them to comply with all orders, trapped in a mental state akin to being passive readers of their own third-person stories. Here we get a visceral, plausible future that also manages to play a subtle literary game with the nature of perception.

Keith Brooke's "The Accord" takes us off in a completely different direction—with a far-future story that evokes the best of Zelazny, Vance and Silverberg. All of humanity, living throughout a wide-ranging interstellar civilization, is absorbed into the Accord upon death, forming a collective overmind that has become a virtual god for all of the living members of humanity. The story follows the relationship of an ordinary waitress working at a cliffside tourist trap and a manlike creature she believes is an embodiment of the Accord. It's a story of a woman falling in love with an "angel," wrapped in series of unfolding cosmic vistas.