This book seems to be shortchanged by it's reviews. In one case the review states it was due to a lack of space combat.
As a disabled Veteran, I have to point out the title is Space SOLDIERS, and there is a lot more to soldiers than combat, wherever it happens. The stories here dig into those other parts. ( )

My reaction to reading this collection in 2001. Spoilers follow.

"Preface", Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois -- A perfunctory introduction to the anthology and the general theme of combat in space.

"The Gardens of Saturn", Paul J. McAuley -- This is another of McAuley's Quite War series (so-called because the conflict between Outer System colonists and the Three Powers Alliance of Earth is less overt warfare and more sabotage, espionage, and propaganda). The scientist Sri Hong-Owen is rumored to have set up an illegal experiment in accelerated evolution in the Kuiper Belt for the Democratic Union of China. That experiment sounds an awful lot like the site explored in McAuley's "Reef"; Hong-Owen is not mentioned in that story, but, of course, the events of that story confirm rumors of such an experiment. This story seems to take place at least 17 years after the end of the Quite War. The events of "Reef" take place more than 45 years after the end of the Quite War. Just as "Reef" involves the unpleasant social controls and milieu its contract scientists must work under, this story also, ultimately, revolves around issues of social control and, like "Reef", evolution. At first, though, it has the flavor of film noir with its good-natured protagonist (if amnesiac after being extensively rebuilt), veteran Baker meeting the attractive, but down-and-out fellow veteran, Colonel Vera Flamillion Jackson. But she turns out to have a darker past than we first think. Not only is she a prostitute to the remittance man son of Hong-Owen, a very obese and rather simple man, but she has also been a convict. Like the femme fatales of film noir, she proposes a criminal scheme: a reverse kidnapping of her charge, Berry, and bringing him back to Hong-Owen's base on an asteroid orbiting Saturn. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Baker doesn't really trust Jackson. He also refuses, during sex, to link his updated neural system (updated after he was recovered from drifting 15 years after an incident in the Quiet War) to hers. Baker looks upon Jackson as a pathetic individual who refuses to see the necessity to evolve by having her body further modified. When encountering Hong-Owen, Jackson's plans fall apart, and she is killed. It is revealed that Hong-Owen is engineering people and herself to be something new in evolution: a consciousness that remains, surviving in various bodies including the mold-like being she has become that is filling the asteroid Epimetheus. Hong-Owen's "clade" will remake themselves into a thousand forms to inhabit many environmental niches. Eventually, (recapitulating the theme of exploitation in "Reef"), Baker is forcibly given an implant by the clade which renders him a member, in a different form, of the clade but still absolutely loyal to it and Hong-Owen's son, Berry. As the clade says, "Evolution is cruel" and that seems the theme of this story. The nagging "sidekick" personality and control system planted in Baker by his collective becomes much more controlling when the clade modifies it.

"Soldiers Home", William Barton -- Barton is a poet of despair. In fact, at one point, the narrator even describes a scene and says "They write poems about this stuff." This seems, given the mention of allomorph and the ARM Corporation, to be set in the same universe as Barton's "Heart of Glass" and When We Were Real though it seems set later than those works since the narrator seems to be one of the last humans left after most were killed after being drafted by the Spinfellows for their war against the Starfish. The narrator returns to a deserted (because all the humans are dead) space colony to seemingly commit suicide. He finds a world inhabited by intelligent tools, mostly weapons from the war -- zeppelin-like sharks, intelligent tanks, allomorphs (engineered female surrogates whose sexual services, presence, and conversation were designed to be therapeutic), and silvergirls (intelligent robots). Like the narrator, heavily engineered to be an artilleryman in the war, they are all tools looking for the peace of death. This is a story of existential angst as the narrator fights one last battle which kills the shark, some of the allomorphs, and the intelligent tank. He finds some sort of peace, as much as possible, with an allomorph whose attentions are simply the result of her programming. The story opens with the narrator saying the stars mean nothing, that they are "heaps of meaningless white light", "an empty stage where we live and die". And the story ends, after so many tools have been killed, with the narrator once again expressing the notion that he is doing little more than following pointless programming: "You do what you have to do. Because, sometimes all that's left is life." Barton is a master of depressing stories narrated in the first person.

"Legacies", Tom Purdom -- Not surprisingly, I had a similar reaction to this story as to its sequel, Purdom's "Sergeant Mother Glory". (I've since come to like a lot of Purdom's recent stuff but not this series.). Both stories are weak in dramatic terms and in their main ideas. As with "Sergeant Mother Glory", I found the depictions of futuristic psychotherapy (or, more accurately here, the discussions of psychotherapists) both boring and unbelievable, and, as with the sequel, I found it hard to believe any military unit would spend so much time on the psychological makeup of its regular troops much less their children. (The child here, Denif Wei-Kolin, is the adult protagonist of the sequel.) I will say there are some kernels of interest in the depictions of military families and the behavior traits (stoicism; alternation between strife and obsessive pursuits, even at a young age, for goals; military life appealing to those wanting the structure missing in bad childhoods; military bearing being drilled in you to take over when exposed to horror that would stun a civilian). However much Purdom bases these observations on his own childhood as a "military brat" and knowing others and reading still others' accounts, the story doesn't work as a vehicle to dramatize these observations.

"Moon Duel", Fritz Leiber -- An interesting, dated story from 1965 with gunfire on the moon (Leiber even provides a footnote about the reality of the Swift rifle cartridge which is the ancestor of the round his hero uses -- rounds which ultimately go into orbit around the moon and take out his opponent.). It was interesting to combine a relative hard sf story (at least given what was probably speculated about the moon in 1965 -- and Leiber was an astronomy buff) with the fantasy notion off the moon being a dumping ground for several alien races' criminals, criminals too violent and independent to cooperate with each other.

"Savior", Robert Reed -- This tale reminded me of Ray Bradbury in that it started with rather folksy, old-fashioned activities (here pheasant hunting) and then, almost from the beginning, disquieting elements are slipped in. At first, it is just hints that the protagonist's grandfather is more than what he seems and that something ominous might happen that day. Then we get background exposition showing this is a future world of genetically engineered animals and post-alien invasion. Finally, in an ending that perhaps has more power now than when the story was first published in 1998, it is revealed that the grandfather was a Colonel who is notorious for having, in front of unknown video cameras, gruesomely tortured an alien "king" who is thought to control the aliens devastating Earth. The king dies. It turns out that its claim of not controlling all the aliens on the generation ship (the aliens, faced with a devastated environmental system in their giant ship, split up into factions) is true. The king did not command all those factions. At story's end, the Colonel is to be arrested. America, now embarrassed by his public acts (even though, in a way never exactly explained, he did manage to destroy the alien ship) wants to put him on trial. The Colonel is having none of that. After forcing his young grandson to watch some of his acts and explain what he did and why, he goes off to commit suicide. However, before he does that, he makes the interesting observation that saying that he didn't have all the information he needed is not an excuse. We never, he remarks, have all the information we need; yet, we take credit for actions with good outcomes, so we must take responsibility for those with bad outcomes. In a case of life redeemed by innocence, the grandson talks the Colonel out of suicide.

"Galactic North", Alastair Reynolds -- I loved this baroque space opera with a tale of vengeance spread across thousands of years. Or, to be more accurate, protagonist Captain Irravel responds to a psychoengineered compulsion to protect her passengers in cryosleep when they are kidnapped by the porcine Captain Run Seven and, later, former subordinate Markarian. There are elements of Shakespeare when Irravel goes to the Saburans, who have a play about her millennia long chase of Markarian, and she plays the part of herself (which the Saburans don't believe), and former pirate and partner of Irravel, Mirsky, plays the part of an evil counciler when she programs the ship's systems not to receive communications from Markarian. I liked how a battle in an obscure cometary halo escalates into a plague that threatens all humanity when the nanotechnology of the greenflies, given by Markarian to Seven, get out of control and spread a plague of vegetable-like life which necessitates abandoning the galaxy at story's end. I liked the old legends of the Inhibitors and their War against Intelligence. I liked the Nestbuilders, an old starfaring race who had devolved from intelligence, now the hands and mouths of the Slugs.

"Masque of the Red Shift", Fred Saberhagen -- This story is explicitly based on Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death". While it is more of a biter bitten story (both a cruel human nobleman and the Berserkers get bitten) than Poe's story, it does mostly take place at a decadent party. It does have the interesting twist of the female prisoner Lucinda helping the man who defeated and imprisoned her brother but refusing the touch of the man who has cared for her and shown her kindness while in captivity.

"Time Piece", Joe Haldeman -- Here the protagonist, like the narrator of Haldeman's The Forever War, narrates his own story, experiences alienation due to the relativistic effects of aging at a much slower rate than the rest of his humanity. As in the novel, he finds the military offers him the only familiarity in a world of voluntary suicide, environmental devastation, general homosexuality, and strange fashions. Like William Mandela in the novel, he is conditioned by the military to kill. There are some differences. The alien "snails" are different than The Forever War's Taurans. They can also mount psychic assaults. They breed at a ferocious rate (and it is clear that means they will eventually defeat, unlike the Taurans, humanity). The combat of the story takes place on a jungle-like world rather than the usual colder worlds of the novel. (And, obviously, it makes the Vietnam similarity more pronounced. The combat team the narrator is part of seems to resemble a long range reconnaissance patrol from the Vietnam War.)

"On the Orion Line", Stephen Baxter -- This is the second time I've read this story, and I liked it even better this time. This time I noticed how well Baxter conveyed the military concepts of duty and self-sacrifice with his narrator, young "tar" Case. Baxter also did a nice job conveying the procedures and drills such a space navy would have. I also noticed this time that Commissary Jeru and Academician Pael spend a lot of the story fighting, in effect, for Case's soul as each argues their version of what humanity should be and do and what the Ghosts are. In a very Campbellian touch, Pael, though he doesn't like man's imperial expansion, opts to give his life for the good of his race so that Case can return with his valuable intelligence.

"Poppy Day", Michael Coney -- Evidently this is the tenth Peninsula story going back to the early '70s and featuring two reoccurring characters. It was enjoyable enough but nothing special. I did like the modified and (in the case of swordfish) dangerous fish modified to exist as pets on land. ( )

This is a collection of short stories about soldiers in space. Its not the strongest such collection I have read -- Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow, Body Armor 2002 and Dogs of War are all better.

- The Gardens of Saturn (Paul J McAuley): veterans with jacked up nervous systems encounter genetically engineered people in deep space.
- Soldiers Home (William Barton): veterans and other castoffs from conflict struggle to find meaning in continued existence.
- Legacies (Tom Purdom): a not particularly interesting story about the psychological impact of losing a parent to war. Oh, except we don't really talk about the impact. We talk about the bureaucracy around getting permission to treat. Dull.
- Moon Duel (Fritz Leiber): an interesting concept (interstellar criminals abandoned on the moon). A bit dated, but ok apart from that.
- Saviour (Robert Reed): another good concept, but I don't think this story is particularly well written.
- Galactic North (Alastair Reynolds): a relativistic chase across deep space with a confusing terraforming gone wrong subplot.
- Masque of the Red Shift (Fred Saberhagen): this is the second Berserker story I've read (the other is "What Do You Want Me To Do To Prove Im Human Stop" from Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow. It was ok, although I suspect I was meant to know more about the universe than I actually do.
- Time Piece (Joe Haldeman): read before in Dogs of War, and I didn't like it back then.
- On The Orion Line (Stephen Baxter): I think this is the best story of the bunch. Its about expansionist humanity and their battle with aliens who can tweak the laws of physics.

http://www.stillhq.com/book/Anthology/Space_Soldiers.html ( )