This is the second book in the series of sf anthologies compiled by Keith Brooke and Nick Gevers and presents highlights from the Infinity Plus website.

The book opens masterfully with Adam Roberts's quite wonderful tale 'Swiftly' which explores what might have happened if the lands of Gulliver's Travels had had further interactions with France and England during the Age of Empires. Despite it being in effect a sequel to one of the most famous fantasy novels of earlier time, this is a highly original piece and Roberts fully shows off his talent as a writer in this tale.

And this is a standard that is maintained pretty well throughout the volume. This is a book of well crafted tales. They cover a number of already trodden grounds in terms of story premise, but each one manages to do it in a way that doesn't make it seem secondhand.

Lisa Goldstein's contribution to this collection is the tale 'The Witch's Child' - what would like be like for Rapunzel if she ran away from the witch's tower she is imprisoned in? It's a wonderful bittersweet tale, a real case of is the grass greener on the other side.

Stephen Baxter is represented here by his take on the supposedly extince creatures surviving until the modern day ('Behold Now Behemoth') but once again the handling differs to other similar tales I've read - this is more a case of believe it or not than the beast attacks.

The theme with Vonda McIntyre's tale 'The Genius Freaks' is super intelligent babies, aware even when in the womb, whilst Paul J. McAuley gives us a tale of exploring an uncharted territory in 'The Rift'. Even the Michael Moorcock tale is an old idea reworked as with 'Cheering for the Rockets' we get a new, updated version of his Jerry Cornelius character. This is in the same mold as the novella Firing the Cathedral (also published by PS Publishing), but this is a much more accessible tale and should prove entertaining to readers not overly familiar with Moorcock's Cornelius stories.

But the real highlight of this book is another story that deals with a familiar theme. Brian Stableford returns to vampirism for his story 'Emptiness' although this is treated in a very sf style unlike most vampiric fiction. And it is quite simply brilliant. The emotions exhibited by the woman who discovers the vampire foundling child and takes it in are rich and easy to empathise with. The conflicts between her emotions and what she does actually realise to be the right thing to do are handled sympathetically and without thrusting it into the face of the reader - it's subtly done and all the better for it. This is a truly great short story, and is ideal in length, any less would not have allowed the author to build the richness it exhibits, any more and it would feel laboured.

This book had a lot to live up to. I have read several PS Publishing titles and found them all to be of a high standard, so the bar was set high. A quick look at the contents page and you feel it capable of managing to maintain this publisher's usual excellent quality. And it certainly does make the grade - this is a superior collection of sf.

And once again this book demonstrated the high production standards of a PS Publishing title, the book itself is a treasure as an item, one which I will be glad to have residing on a shelf in my book collection.

Synopsis
Short fiction from: Paul Park, Lucius Shepard, Vonda McIntyre, Adam Roberts, Ian McDonald, Brian Stableford, Stephen Baxter, Michael Moorcock, Charles Stross, Eric Brown, Paul McAuley, Terry Bisson, and Lisa Goldstein.

With tales of genetic dabbling, literary oppression, nanotechnology and lush fantasy, with crucifixion, vampires, interplanetary financial wheeler-dealing, strange beasts and fairy tales... INFINITY PLUS TWO collects together stories from some of the leading names in speculative fiction.

In 1997 the Infinity Plus website was launched at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk to showcase some of the best in SF, fantasy and horror fiction. The anthology INFINITY PLUS ONE followed in 2001 and, like its predecessor, this second volume features the work of some of the site's major contributors -- stories chosen by the writers themselves, stories dear to their hearts and deserving of renewed attention.