Life Beyond Us: An Original Anthology of SF Stories and Science Essays

by Julie Nováková (Editor), Eugen Bacon, Gregory Benford

European Astrobiology Institute Presents: Life Beyond Us: An Original Anthology of SF Stories and Science Essays. How would first contact, on earth, in space, on another planet, transform our understandings of technology, philosophy, and what it means to be human? What kind of cognitive dissonance would society experience, if we discovered a previously unrecognized sentience on Earth?

What would life be like if it originated in a frigid ocean beneath an impenetrable shell of ice? Or on a world whose haze obscures any view of the universe beyond? Or on an unfathomable scale in the depths of space? Or . . .

Dive in as the European Astrobiology Institute presents fifty-four original SF Stories and Science Essays on life, from microbial to macro, from automatic to sagacious. Each speculative story is followed by a professional essay illuminating the scientific underpinnings of the story and providing a new window into the cutting-edge knowledge about exploration for life in the universe.

Contents:
* Foreword (Life Beyond Us) • essay by Julie Novakova
* Introduction (Life Beyond Us) • essay by Stephen Baxter
* Hemlock on Mars / short story by Eric Choi; Planetary Protection • essay by Giovanni Poggiali
* The Dog Star Killer / short story by Renan Bernardo; That Cold Black Cloud • essay by Stefano Sandrelli
* Titan of Chaos / short story by G. David Nordley; Flying Instead of Diving • essay by Fabian Klenner
* Cloudskimmer / short story by Geoffrey A. Landis; Earth's Sister Planet • essay by Dennis Honing
* The Lament of Kivu Lacus / short story by B. Zelkovich; Robots in Space Are Great • essay by Ania Losiak
* Heavy Lies / short story by Rich Larson; Major Transitions • essay by Stephen Francis Mann
* The World of Silver / short story by Tomáš Petrásek; Wet Wet Wet • essay by William Bains
* Spider Plant / short story by Tessa Fisher; Signs of Life (and How to Find Them) • essay by Tessa Fisher
* This Is How We Save Them / short story by Deji Bryce Olukotun; Valuing Life • essay by Erik Persson;
* The Far Side of the Door / short story by Premee Mohamed; Space Agriculture • essay by Raymond M. Wheeler
* Ranya's Crash / short story by Lisa J. Krieg (trans. of Die Todbringerin) [as by Lisa Jenny Krieg]; You Are Not Alone! • essay by Jacques Arnould
* Spiral / short story by Arula Ratnakar; Spiraling Into the Unknown • essay by Tomáš Petrásek
* The Last Cathedral of Earth, in Flight / short story by Tobias S. Buckell; The Latest Black Hole Planet, in Formation • essay by Amedeo Romagnolo
* The Secret History of the Greatest Discovery / short story by Valentin D. Ivanov [as by as by Валентин Иванов]; Cooperation Without Communication • essay by Valentin D. Ivanov [as by Валентин Иванов]
* Human Beans / short story by Eugen Bacon; Microbial Life and Belonging • essay by Tony Milligan
* The Mirrored Symphony / short story by D. A. Xiaolin Spires; Mirror Images • essay by Dimitra Demertzi
* Lumenfabulator / short story by Liu Yang; Crystal Green Persuasion • essay by Nina Kopacz
* Cyclic Amplification, Meaning Family / short story by Bogi Takács; The Science of Xenolinguistics • essay by Sheri Wells-Jensen
* The Diaphanous / short story by Gregory Benford; Life 2.0 • essay by Geoffrey A. Landis
* The Sphinx of Adzhimushkaj / short story by Brian Rappatta; Finding Common Ground • essay by Philippe Nauny
* Defective / novelette by Peter Watts; How Did They Know It Was Agni? • essay by Joanna Piotrowska
* The Dangers We Choose / short story by Malka Older; The Habitability of Water Worlds • essay by Floris van der Tak
* Third Life / short story by Julie E. Czerneda; The Unveiled Possibilities of Biomaterials in Space • essay by Martina Dimoska
* Forever the Forest / short story by Simone Heller; Astra Narrans • essay by Connor Martini
* Still As Bright / short story by Mary Robinette Kowal; — And the Moon Be Still As Bright • essay by José A. Caballero
* Devil in the Deep / short story by Lucie Lukačovičová; Some Like It Hot • essay by Natuschka Lee, Lucie Lukačovičová
* Deep Blue Neon / short story by Jana Bianchi; Destined for Symbiosis • essay by Jan Toman
* Afterword I (Life Beyond Us) • essay by Wolf D. Geppert
* Afterword II (Life Beyond Us) • essay by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law
* Acknowledgments (Life Beyond Us) • essay by editor
* About the Contributors (Life Beyond Us) • essay by editor
* About the Editors (Life Beyond Us) • essay by editor
* Copyright Acknowledgments (Life Beyond Us) • essay by editor
* European Astrobiology Institute (EAI) • essay by editor
* European Science Foundation (ESF) • essay by editor
* Laksa Media Groups Inc. (LMG) • essay by editor

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Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Anthologies, Fiction, Biology, Alternate History

582 pages, Hardcover

First published April 22, 2023

About the author

Julie Novakova is a Czech author and translator of science fiction, fantasy and detective stories. She has published short fiction in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog and other magazines and anthologies. Her work in Czech includes seven novels, one anthology (“Terra Nullius”) and over thirty short stories and novelettes. Some of her works have been also translated into Chinese, Romanian and Estonian. She received the Encouragement Award of the European science fiction and fantasy society in 2013, the Aeronautilus award for the best Czech short story of 2014 and 2015, and for the best novel of 2015. Julie is an evolutionary biologist by study and also takes a keen interest in planetary science.

She's currently working on her first SF novel in English, several new short stories and managing a new translation project.

***

Julie Nováková (*1991 v Praze) je autorkou science fiction, fantasy a detektivních příběhů. Publikovala samostatné romány Zločin na Poseidon City (2009), Tichá planeta (2011) a Nikdy nevěř ničemu (2011), novelu Bez naděje (2014), SF trilogii Blíženci (Prstenec prozření, Elysium, Hvězdoměnci; 2015) a více než třicet povídek. Dosud pět povídek jí vyšlo v časopisech a antologiích v anglickém jazyce, další se chystají k publikaci. Jako editorka se poprvé objevila v antologii Terra nullius (2015). V roce 2013 obdržela cenu evropského fandomu Encouragement Award. Kromě psaní beletrie se věnuje též studiu biologie na PřF UK, publicistice, popularizaci vědy a výuce tvůrčího psaní na workshopech společně s autorem Janem Kotoučem.

Reviews

[John Mauro · Rating 4 out of 5]

My complete review of Life Beyond Us is published at Grimdark Magazine.

Life Beyond Us is an anthology of fifty-four original science fiction stories and science essays compiled by the European Astrobiology Institute, a consortium of European institutions devoted to research, education, and outreach activities in the field of astrobiology, i.e., the study of life in the universe. This anthology is the brainchild of over sixty contributors from across the globe, including some of the world’s top authorities in astrobiology, astrophysics, and aeronautical engineering, as well as experts in science philosophy and linguistics.

Life Beyond Us features twenty-seven short stories, each followed by a professional essay explaining the scientific underpinnings of the story. Over its nearly 600 pages, Life Beyond Us covers a wide range of topics in astrobiology, including the environmental conditions that could foster life, the possible forms of microscopic and macroscopic organisms, and the social consequences of humans making first contact with alien life.

Currently, the only known life in the universe is on our home planet of Earth. How do we extrapolate this knowledge from a single data point to address the potential of life elsewhere in the cosmos? If extraterrestrial life exists, what forms could it take? And how can we study life on another world without contaminating it with organisms from our own planet? If we do discover life elsewhere, what are the ethical implications of engaging with it? How can we even communicate with extraterrestrial life if it does not use the same medium for communication as humans, viz., sound and visual cues. These questions are made especially difficult since there is no universally agreed upon definition of life itself. Life Beyond Us does an admirable job of addressing all these questions and many others.

Life Beyond Us is compiled by a trio of prolific science fiction editors: Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, and Susan Forest. The short stories are written by a diverse range of contributors from around the globe, including both amateur authors and well-established writers such as World Fantasy Award winner Tobias S. Buckell and Julie E. Czerneda, a science fiction veteran with twenty-three published novels already under her belt.

Each short story is followed by a companion science essay. The essays are all accessible and authoritative, complete with citations to relevant papers published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The references are up-to-date, including articles published as recently as last year. The science essays are all written in an approachable fashion, similar in style to articles published in Scientific American, clearly explaining the scientific principles of the preceding story for a general audience. I found the essays to be of uniformly excellent quality across the anthology.

The short stories themselves are more inconsistent. Some are five-star quality, with engaging characters and well-constructed storylines, including many unexpected plot twists. But several of the other stories serve as thinly veiled vehicles for discussing aspects of science. Nevertheless, a common feature among all the short stories is that they are rooted in realistic science, making them both believable and instructive.

Overall, Life Beyond Us is an outstanding collection emphasizing the hard science behind science fiction. The authors clearly recognize the importance of science fiction in stimulating readers’ imagination and fostering an interest in scientific disciplines. This is important for both the field of astrobiology and more broadly for recruiting the next generation of students across STEM disciplines. Personally, I would love to see more anthologies in a similar vein as Life Beyond Us focusing on other areas of science such as quantum physics or artificial intelligence.

The team at the European Astrobiology Institute is to be commended for this comprehensive anthology, which was clearly a labor of love for everyone involved. While the stories focus on life beyond Earth, they also help us to gain an appreciation for the beauty and complexity of life on this pale blue dot we call home.

[Doctor Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

The European Astrobiology Institute and the editors had a great idea for this book. Pair science fiction stories about extraterrestrial life with scientific perspectives on the themes embedded in the stories.

There are endless themes to explore — detection and recognition of life, recognition of intelligence, life as we know it, life as we don’t know it, ethical issues, communication with alien life, . . .

You’d think such a book would bias towards “hard science fiction” — stories that stick close to scientifically grounded facts and speculations, but there are more “fantastic” stories here as well. Eugen Bacon’s story, “Human Beans”, explores a “Super Earth” (not the astronomical use of the term) where humans and other life from Earth, some of it extinct, are transported away from the natural and human-created problems of our own planet.

Other stories stretch us into scientifically grounded, but severely stretched-out possibilities. Bogi Tokacs’ “Cyclic Amplification, Meaning Family”, suggests communication with an alien species via an exchange of prions, and is followed by a more general speculative discussion about the obstacles and possibilities of communication with aliens, by linguist Shari Wells-Jensen.

The stories that touched strongly on the theme of communication were especially provocative — how would we learn to communicate with an alien species, is it even possible?

Sharing a language is a complex matter — language is embedded in a world of things, meanings, actions, practices, and concerns. You can’t just exchange names for common objects and take off from there (if the alien species we’re trying to communicate with even has a language with names for objects).

I think one of the strengths of the collection is that it provokes us to question the kinds of assumptions we’ve grown into with popular depictions of humanoid aliens exchanging messages, maybe even serving together on Star Fleet starships.

Will we recognize life when we see it? Might it take completely unfamiliar forms, like highly structured clouds of magnetically charged particles? Might its metabolism move at such a slow pace that we don’t notice it? How, strictly speaking, do we draw the line between complex chemical reactions and biology?

Attempts have been made to define life, but as biologists here attest, there is no common agreed definition, at least not one without blurry edges and counterexamples.

And, if anything, “intelligence” is an even harder case. Would we know intelligence when we saw it? We have been painfully slow to recognize it in other Earth-based species.

Even if we restrict the kind of intelligence we are interested in to technological intelligence, we’re not on sure footing. Is a beehive technology? Is a bird’s nest, or a beaver’s dam? If we discovered such things on an alien planet, what would we think?

The commentary articles are not all by physical scientists. Obvously, the issues and themes range across all sorts of fields. And the articles include not just physicists, astronomers, and biologists, but also linguists, philosophers (from various branches of philosophy), anthropologists, and others.

So, this is going to make you think, and it’s going to make you think beyond the standard treatments of exoplanets, astrobiology, and cultural studies.

I’m going to give the book five stars just for that. I can’t say these are among the “best” or most riveting science fiction stories I’ve ever read, or even that the commentaries are consistently as insightful and thoughtful as I would have liked.

But this is a unique approach. I’d say it was a unique book altogether, but it turns out the European Astrobiology Institute has published another book with the same format, Strangest of All (unlike this one, that book is not available in print format).

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love science fiction short stories. They can sometimes be more effective with inference and simplicity at conveying a feeling, emotion, or concept than a clearly laid-out explanation to bring the reader up to speed.

That is why this book intrigued me initially. And it did not disappoint. As I expected, some of the stories weren’t really my cup of tea, and others left me pondering them for days afterward. I’ll definitely revisit this book again and again in the future to re-read some of these writings.

This book is 50% science fiction, 50% science reality. After every story, a brief essay is included that explains or adds onto the story preceding it. I appreciated the scope of the stories and the uniqueness that each one had. Most of the stories avoided alien tropes and some even avoided alien life entirely to discuss a concept related to extraterrestrial life or perhaps human nature and how we might react/interact with extraterrestrial life.

To my knowledge, this book had a limited printing, but I would recommend to anyone looking for a fictional xenobiology book strongly rooted in real science consider picking this one up if they can. I’m only not giving this book 5 stars because it didn’t blow me away overall. Some of the stories in it are 4-5 star, others are 3.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those attempts we quite often see from academic sources to combine science fiction and popular science education. It's probably one of the better examples in terms of the contents, and yet as is often the case, it falls between two stools, not being ideal for either purpose. What we have is 27 SF stories, each accompanied by a science essay, inspired by the fiction - all with an astrobiology theme.

Let's take the fiction first. A fair number of the stories do feel amateurish - the kind of thing scientists turn out in their spare time. Often this comes across in wooden dialogue or a lengthy series of descriptive statements from authors who've clearly not got the hang of 'show, don't tell'. There are enough good ones to make it worth reading, though - I really enjoyed Lisa Jenny Kris's Ranya's Crash (translated from German by Simone Heller), which features intelligent dragonflies, for example, while Heavy Lies by Rich Larson was imaginative in featuring eusocial intelligent aliens. But about half of the stories were a bit of a chore to get through and eminently forgettable.

Then there are the essays. These felt too academic for a popular science audience - some of them seemed to have more references than content. Again, there were some interesting contributions, though on looking back I've been unable to pick one out as outstanding - but more so than the stories there was a lot of overlap between the essays. It would have been better, perhaps, to have a single editorial voice, commenting on each story and the associated science, rather than the approach here with many different authors and text that quite frequently had very little to do with the story, but rather dealt with the author's area of interest.

Overall, there were a couple of problems. Firstly, it's far too long. You might think it's impossible to say you can have too many short stories in a collection, but apart from getting decidedly heavy on the wrists (in a hardback with an unpleasantly slimy feeling cover), the great thing about a normal SF story collection is the variety. Although the authors do their best, limiting the book to astrobiology topics means the stories aren't varied enough - and too many of the stories felt like padding. It would have been better to be a lot more critical in cutting down the content to, say, 15 excellent stories.

Secondly, it may be me, but I find the alternation between fiction and non-fiction really irritating. I'd rather read a set of stories or a popular science book (ideally with the same author(s) throughout - a set of essays from many different authors never pulls together as a proper book), but not a mishmash of the two. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't great either.

[Gary Varga · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore this format. Each science fiction short story paired with a matching scientific essay.

The stories cover a wide range of styles and subjects. Certainly, there is something for everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed each pair.

[Jay Brantner · Rating 4 out of 5]

20 stories into this, I was going to call it a disappointment. And then the last seven produced my favorite three in the whole anthology and sent it up into high four-star territory.

It’s not unusual for quality to vary significantly in anthologies, and that’s true here. I was also expecting a lot more first contact. There are a lot of stories that are just about exploration, regardless of whether anything has been found. And some of them—especially toward the beginning—are just “solve a science problem” stories, which by and large don’t bring the emotional heft I want.

Forever the Forest by Simone Heller was the highlight of the book, and it’s exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to find: a non-violent first contact story told in second-person by tree people. It’s great.

Deep Blue Neon by Jana Bianchi and Defective by Peter Watts are also very strong first contact stories. The former takes an epistolary format and has a great emotional core, whereas the latter considers the difficulty of what to do when all your efforts to be understood have fallen short, and all that is left seems to be the violent solution. A powerful pair indeed.

But there were some strong exploration stories as well. The Dog Star Killer by Renan Bernardo is a personal, family story that also involves dangerous space exploration, and I loved it. And The Secret History of the Greatest Discovery by Valentin D. Ivanov just captures the magic of discovery so beautifully.

There’s a lot else in here that I liked quite a bit, and Lady Astronaut fans will appreciate having another entry here. But overall, it was the five I loved that really made this anthology worth it.

(Also, the science articles look long on the table of contents, but they’re just 4-5 pages with extensive bibliographies—just about perfect).

First impression: 16/20. Full review to come at www.tarvolon.com

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few stand-outs:
"Heavy Lies" by Rich Larson - Excellent alien psychological horror.
"The Diaphanous" by Gregory Benford - First contact with toroidal plasma-beings.
"Defective" by Peter Watts - Misanthropic cognitive scientist/linguist striving to communicate with non-baryonic alien refugees.
"Forever the Forest" by Simone Heller - Better and mercifully briefer than Sue Burke's Semiosis.
Also not bad: "Third Life" by Julie Czerneda; "The Sphinx of Adzhimushkaj" by Brian Rappata

[Francesco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non tutte le storie mi hanno convinto ma è un'antologia imperdibile anche solo per la valenza scientifica dei commenti che accompagnano le storie!

[Miguel Azevedo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Felt like a really pleasant evening, one of those surrounded by extremely intelligent friends with excellent stories to share.

[Kam Yung Soh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A large anthology of stories and accompanying essays about unusual non-human life, which may be sentient, and how we might meet them. Stories that I found interesting were by Eric Choi, Geoffrey A. Landis, Rich Larson, Lisa Jenny Krieg, Tobias S. Buckell, Valentin D. Ivanov, Gregory Benford, Peter Watts, Simone Heller and Mary Robinette Kowal.

- "Hemlock on Mars", short story by Eric Choi: a mission to Mars is in jeopardy when it is discovered to be harbouring Earth organisms and may contaminate its landing zone. Mission controllers work to resolve the issue: at the same time, one of the leaders have to struggle with a personal crisis that, in the end, would influence the outcome of the mission.

- "Planetary Protection", essay by Giovanni Poggiali, talks about the history of the Planetary Protection Protocol and how it applies to space probes not contaminating their mission targets.

- "The Dog Star Killer", short story by Renan Bernardo: a cloud of molecules in interstellar space is detected approaching the solar system and may cause more cosmic radiation to reach the earth. To learn more about it, a mission was launched to the cloud, but was lost. Now, years later, a beacon signal is from the lost mission is detected, and a rescue mission is launched, piloted by a daughter of one of the original explorers. As told in a series of flash-back episodes, she has many reasons, historical and personal, for finding out what happened to her mother on the mission.

- "That Cold Black Cloud", essay by Stefano Sandrelli, talks about the history of what we know about molecular clouds in interstellar space, known as Bok globules, and how they may affect the heliosphere produced by the sun if such a cloud were to intersect with the heliosphere.

- "Titan of Chaos", short story by G. David Nordley: on Saturn's moon, Titan, a call for help gets an investigator into deep trouble as he attempts to help his ex-wife escape being trapped in the gut of a deep ocean creature on Titan.

- "Flying Instead of Diving", essay by Fabian Klenner, talks about the unusual organic chemistry of the moon, Titan, where the temperature is so cold that water ice is a rock hard solid and biology (if any) might be based on hydrocarbons that are liquid in such conditions.

- "Cloudskimmer", short story by Geoffrey A. Landis: a member of a team exploring the atmosphere of Venus takes a ride on a drone to see what the atmosphere of Venus is like, and discovers an something interesting.

- "Earth's Sister Planet", essay by Dennis Honing, discusses the current state of Venus and speculations about where it might have liquid water in an earlier age before it became the hot and dessicated planet we know it today.

- "The Lament of Kivu Lacus", short story by B. Zelkovich: on an outpost on Titan, two people investigate the calls of whale-like creatures that may have a link to a developing crisis in the outpost.

- "Robots in Space Are Great", essay by Ania Losiak, looks at the capabilities of humans and robots in space and concludes that despite the difficulties, humans are currently better at handling the unknown unknowns in space exploration.

- "Heavy Lies", short story by Rich Larson: on an alien world, an all controlling queen prepares to give birth and also to consider whether she is the last remaining intelligent organism on the planet.

- "Major Transitions", essay by Stephen Francis Mann, looks at the transition of life from unicellular to multicellular upwards to intelligent and not-intelligent groupings of animals and how it could apply to aliens.

- "The World of Silver", short story by Tomáš Petrásek: both human and alien struggle to survive on an alien world after a crash. Things are made harder when both of them have different biochemistries (based on water and amonia).

- "Wet Wet Wet", essay by William Bains, looks at the possibilities of alternative chemistries for life based on liquids other than water.

- "Spider Plant", short story by Tessa Fisher: an interstellar expedition to a system where radio signals have been detected finds no alien structures, except for enigmatic planet-wide crystal structures. It would need the crew's expertise to finally detect who was sending the signals.

- "Signs of Life (and How to Find Them)", essay by Tessa Fisher, looks at the details behind the alien life imagined in the story.

- "This Is How We Save Them", short story by Deji Bryce Olukotun: on a terraformed moon, ultrarich families come to hunt animals while contributing to their conservation. But this particular hunt goes off in an unexpected direction.

- "Valuing Life", essay by Erik Persson, looks at the ethics of allowing other worlds to be terraformed to save Earth's biodiversity.

- "The Far Side of the Door", short story by Premee Mohamed: a colony on a planet is suddenly faced with a pandemic after a accidental crash of a ship. Initial surveys have found no life on the planet so it is a rush against time to figure out what is causing it.

- "Space Agriculture", essay by Raymond M. Wheeler, looks at what needs to be done to grow food in space and on Mars.

- "Ranya's Crash", short story by Lisa Jenny Krieg (translated by Simone Heller): on a world whose inhabitants have been modified to survive, one scout is desperate to learn the secrets of an ancient compass that may help the survival of its group. But to do that, she may have to first help a group of giant dragonflies.

- "You Are Not Alone!", essay by Jacques Arnould, looks at what kinds of live may be found in the universe.

- "Spiral", short story by Arula Ratnakar: an explorer finds himself among a form of possible life in a pattern forming region of space.

- "Spiraling Into the Unknown", essay by Tomáš Petrásek, looks at life as we might not know it in the form of plasma.

- "The Last Cathedral of Earth, in Flight", short story by Tobias S. Buckell: a tale of a desperate flight of what is apparently left of humanity, feeling an alien life form born near the reality bending madness that is a black hole.

- "The Latest Black Hole Planet, in Formation", essay by Amedeo Romagnolo, look as the possibility of life near a black hole.

- "The Secret History of the Greatest Discovery", short story Valentin D. Ivanov: the story of an astronomer who, while a student, makes some observations of the brightness of stars and makes a discovery that would need years to confirm.

- "Cooperation Without Communication", essay by Valentin D. Ivanov, looks at how alien civilisations would send out a signal to indicate their presence.

- "Human Beans", short story by Eugen Bacon: a young woman unsure about her place in the world finds people around her vanishing from existence. One day she learns where they vanish to.

- "Microbial Life and Belonging", essay by Tony Milligan, looks at people and life belonging to a world in general, even if it is just microbial life.

- "The Mirrored Symphony", short story by D. A. Xiaolin Spires: a space ship investigating what appears to be a reflected image of a cosmological object discovers an apparently deserted planet with a biological secret.

- "Mirror Images", essay by Dimitra Demertzi, looks at the biology and chemistry of chiral molecules.

- "Lumenfabulator", short story by Liu Yang (translated by Ladon Gao): a son composes a poem while hearing stories of their predecessors from his father. Both son and father have rocky bodies, driven by magna.

- "Crystal Green Persuasion", essay by Nina Kopacz, speculates about living rocks and the forces that make drive them.

- "Cyclic Amplification, Meaning Family", short story by Bogi Takács: communicating with aliens can be difficult, unless the aliens take matters into their own hands to cross the language barrier in their own way.

- "The Science of Xenolinguistics", essay by Sheri Wells-Jensen, looks at the possible difficulties in communicating with aliens.

- "The Diaphanous", short story by Gregory Benford: a self-aware maintenance probe in the outer reaches of the solar system is suddenly attacked by intelligent life in the shape of plasma who don't want it there. It would need skill to discover how stop the attacks and to work with the lifeforms.

- "Life 2.0", essay by Geoffrey A. Landis, looks at the possibility of plasma based life.

- "The Sphinx of Adzhimushkaj", short story by Brian Rappatta: a person picks up a intern while going to study an alien life form. Only, the life form ignores the researchers and he spends most of his time painting. But this time, an event occurs that causes a crisis among the aliens, and his paintings may be a clue as to how to communicate with them.

- "Finding Common Ground", essay by Philippe Nauny: discusses how humans might communicate with aliens with different ways of sensing the environment.

- "Defective", novelette by Peter Watts: wormholes open in the solar system and it was determined that it is a work of an utterly alien race that intends to colonise the sun. Attempts to communicate with them fail and now humanity has little choice but to kill off the wormholes to stop the sun being colonies and potentially consumed. But one person, tasked with trying to communicate with the aliens, think differently.

- "How Did They Know It Was Agni?", essay by Joanna Piotrowska, looks at how spectroscopy can reveal what materials make up other exoplanets and whether they can contain signatures of life.

- "The Dangers We Choose", short story by Malka Older: intelligent life is found on a water world. When it is time to send humans to meet them, it may be up to one person with special sight to lead the team back safely from the meeting.

- "The Habitability of Water Worlds", essay by Floris van der Tak, looks at the possiblity of intelligent life developing on an aquatic world.

- "Third Life", short story by Julie E. Czerneda: a human and an alien bond together over their love of weaving.

- "The Unveiled Possibilities of Biomaterials in Space". essay by Martina Dimoska looks at how some biomaterials, like spider silk, may find a use in space.

- "Forever the Forest", short story by Simone Heller: a sentient forest is started when an object crashes into it which turns out to be a free moving organism. It attempts to contact it in the only ways it can, by scent and movement. Communication of a kind is established and the forest discovers what the organism yeans for and, eventually, decides to help it, even if it means losing contact with it forever.

- "Astra Narrans", essay by Connor Martini, looks at how other organisms experience the world about them and the challenges of trying to communicate with aliens with different senses to experience the world.

- "Still As Bright", short story by Mary Robinette Kowal: set in an alternate Earth where destruction caused by a meteorite forces mankind to go to space early, a former astronomer transports the director of a space based telescope. Along the way, and afterwards, she tries to tell him of her plan to detect planets around other stars (exoplanets).

- "— And the Moon Be Still As Bright", essay by José A. Caballero, looks at how possible it would be in the story's alternate Earth for a space based telescope, manned in space and using technology from the 1970s and 1980s, to be able to detect exoplanets.

- "Devil in the Deep", short story by Lucie Lukačovičová: scientist are helpi to investigate deep mines in the hopes of making it safer. But their efforts to help run into resistance from some miners who feel they are dishonouring the god of the deeps. Thing may change when they discover a form of sentient life in the mines.

- "Some Like It Hot", essay by Natuschka Lee and Lucie Lukačovičová, looks at how microbes might survive in the hot, deep interior of the earth.

- "Deep Blue Neon", short story by Jana Bianchi: written in the from of journal and blog entries, it tells the story of a research on the quest to discover a new species of whale that may well lead to her death when she risks contact to confirm a hunch over what happened when her father had earlier made contact with the whales.

- "Destined for Symbiosis", essay by Jan Toman, takes a low at symbiotic organisms.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Life Beyond Us” is the second anthology by the European Astrobiology Institute edited by Julie Nováková. These anthologies focus on science fiction stories that feature different possible types of life. The stories explore the possibilities, from giant ice worms on Titan, to extremophile bacteria beneath the surface of the Earth. There are scientific essays following each story, that explore the concepts exhibited in the story. There are even further references if one wishes to follow-up on the ideas presented.

The stories and essays in the collection are all original, and were commissioned for this volume. I found they were all interesting, although I liked some more than others. Ms. Nováková is herself both a scientist and an accomplished Czech author. This is a great collection that satisfies the science fiction reader, educates the reader on real scientific concepts. What more could one want from an anthology?

[Johan Haneveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

8,5 I'm very glad I was able to read this anthology. I have been fascinated about other planets, in our solar system and outside of it, and the possibility of alien life. I don't even mind alien intelligence - the possibilites of alien life and alien ecosystems are thrilling in themselves. And I don't know what came before: me reading popular science books as a kid, or reading the SF-collections my father had in his collection? I think both pathways: interest in astronomy and biology, and reading speculative fiction enhanced each other - my wonder about ideas in SF-stories leading to interest in the scentific background of the speculation and my interest in scientific exploration leading to speculation about the possible consequences of new discoveries. As is noted in one of the characters here, mankind is 'Homo narrans' - and our storytelling ability informs both our science and our fiction. Sadly the two have grown apart (when I was at university I had to completely rewrite a report because it read like an 'adventure novel'), but what better way to generate interest in the complex realities of our cosmos than writing stories about it, and what better way to explore new possibilities than speculating about them in narrative form. No, I don't think sciencefiction is a form of science - it's fiction. But SF can inspire reader to think about science, to create curiosity, to think about ethical and sociological aspects of discoveries. The best SF-stories (to me) are those inspired by real science. But science is also aided by communication of its ideas to the public, and that is where stories can help.
Maybe the form of stories coupled with essays is a bit jarring, as a mind focused on reading a short story has to adapt to reading a non-fiction piece and vice versa (I found my attention sometimes faltering), but I applaud the effort. Most of the essays were very interesting and they illuminated concepts of the stories with scientific background. I learned a lot from them.
My main concern in this review is the stories. As those are the reason for me to read this anthology. I like science based imagination of life outside of our planet, and I expected most stories here to be so called 'hard SF'. Not all stories were that hard. Some were more fanciful, more experimental, less concerned with science. They could be great stories in their own right, but they did not fit my expectations, so I did enjoy them less (especially seeing how the essayist sometimes struggled to fit the story to some real scientific exploration). I have to say though that these less enjoyable stories were by far the minority, and more stories were surprising, had great ideas, some good characterization and (most importantly) a sense of wonder. I will focus on the stories I enjoyed.
The first story, 'Hemlock on Mars', was hardly science fictional - a lander sent to Mars is possibly contaminated. But it had an interesting dilemma. I did not think it was the most engaging story to open up a collection like this with.
'Titan of Chaos' by G. David Nordley was more wildly speculative, involving possible life on Titan, even though it focused more on human corruption and had the sense of an old school adventure story.
'Cloudskimmer' by Geoffrey A. Landis read like golden age SF, with a hero taking enormous risks to be the first man to be in the atmosphere of Venus. It is backed with hard science and an interesting discovery. Its prose was functional, just like the old SF, but it left me with a big grin.
'Heavy lies' by Rich Larson was the first story in here I would describe as 'great'. A fascinating look, in second person, at the inner life of an alien intelligence, in a situation that is hardly comprehensible. Well written as well and thought provoking.
'The World of Silver' by Tomáš Petrásek has a human and an alien trying to survive on another world. It's a well worn trope, but given new life here and I appreciated the conclusion.
'Ranya's Crash' by Lisa Jenny Krieg was an involving story about cooperating with alien life - and human being having to accept being stranded on a different world. I liked the way the alien culture was introduced and I appreciated the tension in here.
'Spiral' by Arula Ratnakar has speculation on a strange kind of alien intelligence, it involves Information Theory, and has a killer of an ending. Great work.
I already read a collection of Tobias S. Buckells work that I greatly appreciated and I also loved his story 'The Last Cathedral of Earth, In Flight'. It focuses less on aliens, but more about some desperate human being trying to decide between taking a risk or offering up more of what they are just to keep alive ...
'The Secret History of the Greatest Discovery' was a small, but well executed tale.
As a biomedical scientist I appreciated the alien form of communication used in Bogi Takács 'Cyclic Amplification, Meaning Family'
Gregory Benford deliverd what was, to me, the high point of this collection. His story 'The Diaphanous' is modern hard SF, with great speculative ideas, a new kind of life and a tale of first contact. I enjoyed it from beginning to end and found it truly inspiring.
I liked the character interaction in 'The Sphinx of Adzhimushkaj'.
Peter Watts is another author that can be trusted on delivering great hard SF and he does in 'Defective'.
'Third Life' by Julie E. Czerneda was a touching tale of art, love and an alien life cycle ...
I loved 'Forever the Forest' by Simone Heller, another tale that imagined alien life from an alien perspective and based on the idea of intelligent mycorhizal networks connecting trees (it may be doubtful the wood wide web exists, but it remains a powerful science fictional idea).
'Devil in the deep' by Lucie Lukačovičová takes another idea that I find very fascinating, that of the deep biosphere, and runs with it.
The final story 'Deep Blue Neon' by Jana Bianchi is fun, with a great way of telling the story!
All in all, recommended, especially for those loving scientific exploration in their hard SF!

[Sue Burke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended. What if we met life on another planet, in space, or in another ecology? Twenty-seven top-notch science fiction writers wrote short stories to explore the question, followed by essays by scientists explaining what is and isn’t possible in that particular story, such as “The Habitability of Water Worlds” or “Space Agriculture.”
Like any good anthology, the stories vary widely in style and substance. Not every one was to my taste, although they were all high quality, and you and I might have different opinions about which ones are the best. The essays explain the ideas clearly but don’t talk down to the reader.
If you’re a fan of hard science fiction (by “hard” I mean more or less anchored in reality) or if you’re a science fiction writer looking for a better understanding of what we know about space and life science, I wholeheartedly recommend this book, likely to be one of the best anthologies of 2023. There’s a lot to enjoy: the paperback version runs more than 500 pages.

[Carlex · Rating 4 out of 5]

To complement my recent reading of Meeting the Alien: An Introduction to Exosociology (see review), I can't think of a better follow-up than this book I am commenting on, a publication sponsored by the European Astrobiology Institute.

This is a collection of short science fiction stories, most of them written by scientists themselves, each accompanied by an excellent essay on the story's theme. It also features contributions from top-tier science fiction writers such as Stephen Baxter, Peter Watts, Mary Robinette Kowal, among others.

It would be a daunting task to comment on each story individually. Suffice it to say that the level of scientific speculation is high and that, overall, the reading has proven to be highly engaging.

[David H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Life Beyond Us is an ambitious anthology of 27 stories, each paired with a science essay. That's probably the coolest element to the book, and I'm glad the European Astrobiology Institute was involved to make that happen. Thematically, this anthology wanted to look at how alien life could be. (One story even had mirror aliens, so that worked out quite well, and the Prowlers in Buckell's story were quite frightening.) My favorite story was probably Ivanov's "The Secret History of the Greatest Discovery" about a young woman in astronomy camp making a startling discovery, though I also liked Zelkovich's "The Lament of Kivu Lacus."

[Francesco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Non tutte le storie mi hanno convinto ma è un'antologia imperdibile anche solo per la valenza scientifica dei commenti che accompagnano le storie!

[Lindsay Erwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short stories curated by an astrobiologist. Science essays and sc-fi stories about the search for extraterrestrial life. Very interesting.

[Joe Karpierz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow.