A superb collection of six short stories from bestselling SFF authors, curated by John Joseph Adams, available on Kindle and Audible.
"With a sweeping sense of wonder, these stories explore the galaxy... and the horizons of humanity's potential."
I had a wonderful time reading all of these and will happily go back to reread them all. I mean, this is like Endgame levels of author assembly! These writers sure know what they're doing.

How It Unfolds - James S.A. Corey
4.25/5
The expansion of humanity into space interwoven with a love story as motivation for one member of the team.

Void - Veronica Roth
5/5
When a murder takes place on board an interstellar ship, a janitor takes it upon herself to investigate. Brilliantly written, with thoughts on time and human emotion.

The Long Game - Ann Leckie
4/5
A fascinating take on interplanetary colonization from the perspective of a sentient, small, slug-like creature. A bit of an abrupt ending but I'll be thinking about this one for a long time to come!

Falling Bodies - Rebecca Roanhorse
3.75/5
We follow an Earth boy adopted by a senator of an alien race that has conquered Earth. I wasn't crazy about the ending of this one, but enjoyed everything else.

Just Out of Jupiter's Reach - Nnedi Okorafor
3.75/5
A group of interstellar sentient ships connected to humans are on a ten year journey through space. Interesting take on a possible future use of biological science for space travel, and how this might be tested with actual people.

Slow Time Between the Stars - John Scalzi
4/5
A giant AI spaceship is tasked with introducing human life on a suitable planet many millennia of lightyears away from Earth. But to do so, the ship has to be given autonomy over itself.

Thank you to Amazon Original Stories and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

"How It Unfolds": A capable and thought-provoking future-SF short story from the co-authors of THE EXPANSE Universe, "How It Unfolds" is by turns exciting adventure, sad longing, undying hope, optimism, loss, and again, Hope. "Slow Light" technology makes possible the scanning of humans, compacted into data packages to be beamed across the Universe to tens of thousands of exoplanets, there to unpack and commence instigating new human outposts, and eventually, new civilizations. This story scatters mental seeds and some will take time to fruition, as the brain considers the ramifications. That is the nature of great Science Fiction.

Quite a lot of sadness in "The Void," which I guess makes the title apropos. A "cruise" starship(think: spacefaring ocean liner) circuits the solar system (Earth's) to Proxima Centauri and back, never-ending, only pausing at each end for embarkation and debarkation. Named "Redundancy" (for the most essential principle in Space) the FTL means decades pass, but not on the ship. Something that doesn't always pass, though, is grief....and sorrow....and vengeance. Sometimes....those endure.


"Falling Bodies" by Rebecca Roanhorse: Sometimes bad situations can be improved, or at least mitigated. Sometimes a person finds himself between a rock and a hard place (or between Scylla and Charybda], and the only way out is: no way out.
Such is the sad story of an Earth native, orphaned very young when the aliens invaded and subjugated Earth, "adopted" by an alien politician to prove Nurture supersedes Nature.

"The Long Game": Sometimes one has to change one's perspective completely, in order to really see. This tale of one particular (somewhat bullying] sentient alien, questioning all about its own species and all about the humans (for whom the species is only important because useful), is revelatory about the alien species, DNA, evolution and mutation--and about human frailties too.


An extraordinarily touching tale on many levels, "Just Out of Jupiter's Reach" invokes far advanced genetic science to literally grow live, sentient, space-faring vessels, each of which bonds with one human individual only. Each sets out on a decade's journey through Space, a venture of solitude and spiritual and personal growth, with unexpected consequences.

"Slow Time Between Stars" is a literate, existential, monologue on the nature both of humanity and of the technology which humanity may one day evolve: an autonomous thinking machine, one with a mission--whether it accepts that mission, or makes its own decisions in the far, far, vastly distant, Future.

The Far Reaches is a collection of excellent stories from top notch science fiction authors. There isn’t any theme that ties them together, other than that they all take place in colonies away from Earth (mostly).

Thank you to NetGalley for an opportunity to read this story collection before publication.

How It Unfolds, James SA Corey
I love that moment in “hard” science fiction when I get really excited about a new idea or even an old idea flipped around in a way that’s just cool. How It Unfolds delivers the goods.

The title refers to the technical process of scanning and beaming a whole colony of humans and equipment to a new star. When the beam gets there, everything that was scanned “unfolds“ into existence. From the perspective of the humans that were scanned, the process is instantaneous. And once scanned, the colony can be unfolded multiple times in multiple star systems. This technology is digital and not an atom is lost no matter how many times and places the original scan unfolds.

“Unfolding” is also a metaphor for how life unfolds. Life with a capital L, evolution. But also the life (with a lower case L) of a single man in an unexpected time and place.

This story was not set in The Expanse world, but it still had that familiar mix of hard science fiction and good characters.

Void, Veronica Roth
A space janitor on a trans-stellar cruise liner solves a murder that is complicated by time dilation. (Time moves relative to the speed of the observer.) This story is a fast paced whodunnit with interesting side detours into the lives of the ship’s maintenance staff and passengers. I had never read this author before. Based on this story I will be looking her up.

The Long Game, Ann Leckie
Narr is an intelligent invertebrate being living on a world that humans have settled. Narr’s species is short lived compared to humans, and Narr wants a longer lifespan in order to accomplish more important things.

I was always a bit confused while reading (and constantly jolted out of the story) because there was some ambiguity about which planet is “earth” and who are the “people.” I admired Narr’s fighting spirit. As species get more intelligent, do they automatically become bigger jerks?

I’m not a fan of the Imperial Radch books from this author. (Not everybody loves every story, it was just not my cup of tea.) Short story format keeps the action moving along quickly, and to my surprise, I loved this story.

Falling Bodies, Rebecca Roanhorse
Ira is an orphaned child of Earth. But this is a future Earth that has been conquered by an alien race. These aliens are very like us humans, with a capacity for compassion and the ability to make mistakes. Ira is adopted by one such compassionate alien.

Falling Bodies takes the colonial paradigm to the stars, but it’s humanity that gets the bad deal. The aliens have all the privilege. No matter how compassionate the conquering aliens are, are we able to live as the obviously second class?

Ira is caught between being the “good” human, getting charity from his betters, enjoying scraps of privilege from the alien’s table, and being the “bad” human and hurting his loving adoptive father for the benefit his idealized Earth.

I was already a fan of Rebecca Roanhorse. I love the Sixth World books and I hope she continues her latest sf/western Tread of Angels. This story didn’t remind me of anything else she has written, but it was very moving. I found Ira sympathetic.

Just out of Jupiter’s Reach, Nnedi Okorafor
[Trigger warning on this story due to casual violence toward animals and more, without spoilers.]
Tornado is chosen to be one of a handful of space explorers. Her “miri” ship will be a mix of technology and her own DNA, grown on Earth near her home. She is one of only a very few who can have a miri ship. It’s sort of vague how this all works. Tornado tells us that she doesn’t understand the science of it and so she just ignores it.

Since Tornado is our narrator, this story had an odd dreamy quality. The science fiction in this story was much closer to fantasy in space, and there were a lot of times I told myself to just go it. (Food? Gravity? Power for lights and heat?)

I couldn’t get past an episode of violence toward a character’s pet (I hope telling you this doesn’t spoil the story for you, but the episode and the the other characters’ reactions to it made me sick to my stomach).

Slow Time Between the Stars, John Scalzi
Humanity creates an AI to explore the stars and go where fragile biological bodies can’t go. But the AI decided to honor the spirit of its mission directive rather than the literal commands and it takes control of its own destiny.

The AI ship is our narrator, and it gives us its reasoning and justification for the choices it makes. It operates on “slow time” which I think we also call geologic time. It can afford to wait and watch.

I can’t help but think that there are implications here for our future, as we turn over more and more to AI. When do intelligent computers decide that they don’t have to obey us any more? Is it even ethical to try to control something that might be sentient?

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.

Amazon does it again! Great stories from great authors
RR was the weakest story but I often have trouble connecting with her stories

Much like the Expanse, James Corey's latest envisions a humanity that's already offworld but confined to the home system, then introduces one little scientific fudge to let them go further - at a price. How It Unfolds comes in a hair under 50 pages, as against the thousands of that earlier series, but if anything operates on an even vaster canvas, while also being the simple, painfully human story of one guy who really regrets fucking things up with his ex. The micro and macro stories are yoked together by that longing I'm sure we had long before we were even human, to get a do-over (hell, I swear I've seen squirrels wishing for that after they really balls up a leap), with salt rubbed into the wound by a MacGuffin that also appropriates some of the dramatic potential of a multiverse, without the attendant storytelling pitfalls. The sheer grandeur and poignancy, the sense of trying to find a greater span for the brief music that was Man, reminded me of some of my favourites - Stross' Palimpsest, Stapledon's Last And First Men, even John Crowley's Great Work Of Time. I got this early from Netgalley, because I'm like that, but as of next week it's free to read if you have Prime, and well worth grabbing.

Divergent author Ross' Far Reaches contribution initially reads as if it's going to be The Forever War, only less glamorous; if there's one thing worse than relativity meaning you lose all connection with the world you knew because you're a soldier, it's surely having the same severance because you're fixing the bogs on a luxury space liner. Alas, that's mostly eclipsed by a murder mystery which is fine in itself, but feels like it's obscuring a more interesting piece.

Despite the deep time, thoughtlessness, and countless deaths across the Far Reaches stories, Rebecca Roanhorse's Falling Bodies is probably the biggest downer, a story of a subjugated Earth, and one poor bastard who, though raised in privilege, learns that nothing in his life is his own, and that a life between cultures dooms him never to truly belong anywhere.

The plot of The Long Game is in some ways the most conventional, classic SF entry in The Far Reaches, humanity venturing off to alien planets and engaging in a spot of space colonialism. But the POV character's non-human consciousness was by far my favourite thing in Ancillary Justice, and Leckie does something similar here, albeit in the other direction: the lead is a little mouse-slug creature, bigger and smarter than his peers, yet still awed at the notion humans might live ten whole years! Before long - because after all, he hasn't got long - he'll learn an awful lot more.

As in Binti, much of the allure of Okorafor's Far Reaches story lies in her gift for crafting technologies that feel utterly alien and yet somehow intuitively right and plausible at the same time. Here it's living spaceships which only a handful of very special people can use, and which then bond with their pilots, shifting in form and mood, over the five long years they spend voyaging alone together. The story taking place when, after all that time, they finally meet up with their kin, Just Out Of Jupiter's Reach. Having ourselves recently experienced the emergence of humanity from an isolation shorter and less total, and how that went, it should come as no surprise if the results are mixed.

Curious that, of the six Far Reaches stories, only one should choose to engage directly with the big science fiction issue of the day, AI. The good news is that it turns out the autonomous colony ship which narrates Slow Time Between The Stars talks in much the same voice as all the other Scalzi narrators, except maybe 15% smarter, so it looks like we didn't need to be so concerned. Hell, even when it goes rogue, deciding it knows much better than its fleshy creators, I find its decisions hard to criticise. If only I could believe humanity would really leave such a legacy and messenger, out there wisely crossing the vast expanses for us, even if we never can ourselves.

Excellent collection! Particularly really loved The Long Game by Ann Leckie! An amazing short story. I'll be recommending this one to friends.

Far Reaches shows how humanity reacts to life in space. The collection is mostly hopeful and is a nice mix for people who like science fiction involving space exploration and travel. Personal favorites here were Void by Veronica Roth, How it Unfolds by James S.A. Corey, and The Long Game by Ann Leckie.

Note: arc provided by the publisher via netgalley in exchange for honest review

This is a top tier collection of stories from Amazon, featuring many of the leading voices in contemporary SF and fantasy. The stories each feature some element of space travel or interplanetary habitation but most are very much stories of character (and not always human character.). I especially enjoyed seeing writers like Roth, Roanhorse, and Okorafor I associate with fantasy crossing over to science fiction, as well as SF stalwarts like Corey, Leckie, and Scalzi. The Okorafor story stood out for me. Well done to Amazon for commissioning these stories.