Read courtesy of NetGalley. It’s out now.

Honestly you just look at this list of authors and you can’t help but be impressed, right? I don’t love the Behemoth but this is a pretty amazing anthology.

James SA Corey gives a non-Expanse short story where the goal is humanity populating the galaxy. Which isn’t necessarily a goal I can subscribe to, but the method proposed here is an ingenious one. Clearly the distances are too great to send actual humans; generation ships are deeply problematic. So instead, Corey invents “slow light” that (don’t ask questions) allows for duplication of… stuff. So you can scan people and things and beam it out into the void – and ta dah! Humans colonising worlds that may or may not actually support them. Unsurprisingly, there’s not a lot of focus on the science; instead, this is all about the people. Because it’s the same people going to each of the maybe-settlements, and they can communicate with each other – albeit only at the speed of light. I loved this a lot.

I’ve never read anything by Veronica Roth! But I was fairly impressed by “Void”, which takes a completely different spin from the Corey: while it’s not quite a generation ship, the Redundancy moves people between our solar system and that of Centauri – so the crew lives on ship time, speeding along, while history goes on around them. Again, this is not a story of war or empire or politics of any sort; it’s human relationships and failings and friendships. It’s nicely done, and is exactly the sort of story that works well in the short format.

Ann Leckie, though! A new Ann Leckie story is always to be celebrated! And this is a super weird one from her. Humanity is not at the centre; instead it’s an alien whose planet has been discovered and settled by humans. This particular alien has the uncommon ability to look to the future, and organise its people to make its plans reality – partly inspired by the humans, and partly through its own intuition. So it’s a story of bootstrapping, and of individual genius and shortcomings, as well as the functions of society. It’s enthralling.

Then Rebecca Roanhorse, whom I have also never read. And “Falling Bodies” is heartbreaking. Ira, newly arrived at the space station Long Reach (which is, I’m sure, unintentionally hilarious to the Australian reader), is hoping for a fresh start. He’s human but hasn’t grown up with a human family; he’s got a new name and identity to live on this station, rather than spending however many years in prison; and he’s not sure how to fit in, and whether it will all last. The fitting in bit won’t be unfamiliar to anyone who’s gone away to uni, or moved towns in general; Ira’s particular circumstances just make it that much harder. Set more against a political background than most of the other stories, this one is still intensely personal.

And THEN there’s Nnedi Okorafor’s “Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach”. Seven people in all the world are chosen not at random or for skills but because of their genetics – the fact they happen to match with a genetically bio-engineered creature/machine, in partnership with which they must go exploring the solar system. As with the other stories, the main character, Tornado, isn’t anyone special – she says so herself – and so it’s a story of solitude and companionship, resilience or not… it’s beautifully written, and it’s hopeful and heartbreaking, and I loved it.

Finally, John Scalzi’s “Slow Time between the Stars” is another non-human story. In this case, the narrator is an AI: a ship, for want of a better word, launched by humans, containing the “Alexandria Module” – a repository of all human knowledge – and the task of finding a human-habitable planet and then creating those humans and whatever they required to survive. But of course, sentient beings often end up with their own intentions and goals, and so here. It’s a story of becoming, more than anything – learning about self, and figuring out what to do with it.

The unifying theme here is that these are individual stories. For all the title is “Far Reaches”, these stories are intensely personal. They’re not even really ABOUT exploration or anything else on the grand side of things. They’re about people, and much more about internal discovery and knowledge than external. These stories are fantastic.