Mohs 5.5: Megastructures
Published: April 2020 Role: Editor / Curator
“Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests,” wrote Arthur C. Clarke.
In these pages, a spectacular collection of science fiction authors - newcomers and veterans, bestsellers and debuts - clash over one of Clarke’s most famous motifs: extreme feats of engineering. MOHS 5.5 stands for scientific rigor: one big speculative lie, no Ringworlds, and no handwaving the physics. From Sri Lanka, India, Australia, and North America come stories about detecting alien life, great colonies in the void, and a one-man army being endlessly 3D-printed among the stars.
Megastructures has been selected for archival on the Moon via the Lunar Codex, placing this anthology among works preserved for future generations beyond Earth.
Contents
- Foreword - Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
- Super Villain - Peter Cawdron
- Burn Rate - Felix R. Savage
- Machine Learning - Kate Pickford
- Our Lives on Tides - Soham Guha
- A Builder’s Angst - Craig Martelle
- Jimmy’s Sky - Bill Patterson, II
- Rabbit’s Hole - Kalene Williams
- A Quick In-and-Out - Daniel Arthur Smith
- Edenites - Abby Goldsmith
- A Ripple in Amberose - M. D. Cooper
- Battle Ring - Jon Frater
- The Doom That Comes Like Ants - Navin Weeraratne
Behind the Scenes
Megastructures is the first anthology I curated end to end, from story editing to cover art. It is, in part, an homage to the work of Arthur C. Clarke, who lived in Sri Lanka and influenced much of science fiction for decades to come - and cast a very large shadow here. The idea was to chase the feeling I first had when I encountered Rama: this sense of an immense superstructure, a feat of engineering right up there with the Great Wall.
It was also an attempt to get together writers who really enjoyed the engineering of things. I went back over discussions of the “hardness” of science fiction and picked Mohs 5.5 as an appropriate degree - “One Big Lie”, so to speak, and no Ringworlds, because everybody wanted to do Ringworlds.
It succeeded on both those fronts, and it taught me first-hand that enforcing scientific “accuracy” is a quest for lunatics and saints. I am neither. Fortunately, we were blessed with a bunch of people really willing to put up with some merciless edits. Bill Patterson, who did a great deal of review work on the science of the stories, launched a sequel anthology - MARS (Mohs 5.5).
The foreword, which charts the anthology’s inspirations, is available here.