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Starship Century, put together by Gregory and James Benford, is an amalgam of sorts. Part historical record, part advocacy document, part speculation, it's also a statement of purpose, that interstellar spaceflight is possible and worth pursuing.

The non-fiction side of Starship Century grew out of the 2011 100 Year Starship Symposium, a yearly gathering of academics and government researchers interested in the long-term development of spaceflight. There are plenty of well-known names involved in addition to the editors, from Stephen Hawking to Paul Davies and Martin Rees. Topics range from possible construction techniques to the economics of interstellar travel to the bigger question of why to go there in the first place. There's a wealth of information presented, mostly in a form accessible to anyone with a basic interest in the subject.

That, of course, includes many science fiction readers, and in-between the technical discussions, Starship Century features several short stories, all by writers well-known in science fiction. The highlights include Neal Stephenson's "Atmosphera Ingognita," where he pulls off the same trick he used in Anathem with front-loaded exposition and character culminating in a near space adventure story. Nancy Kress tells about an unforeseen danger on a generation starship in "Knotweed and Gardenias," and Stephen Baxter's "Starcall" connects us to an AI's journey to the stars. The final fictional piece is a reprint of Joe Haldeman's "Tricentennial," lending a far-future perspective at the end.

That perspective is welcome, but there's one other that's in short supply. Outside Nancy Kress's story, Starship Century is a bit of an old boys club. Joan Slonczewski's The Highest Frontier is listed under recommended reading, but it's easy to think that Slonczewski's biologically based technology could have added more to the discussion of generation starships than David Brin's generic "The Heavy Generation." The idea that the way to the stars may be paved by the creation of stepping stones along the way begs for input from someone like C.J. Cherryh, Chris Moriarty's ideas about artificial intelligence and space flight would fit right in to section 4, "The Starship Era," and there are many more examples out there. If the attendance at the 100 Year Starship Symposiums mirrors that of the contributors to Starship Century, it's time for some active reaching out.

There are lots of good ideas here, however, ranging from a structure halfway between a space elevator and a ground-based launch system that we're pretty close to being able to build now, to specific designs for life support systems. Starship Century is a treasury of information for any science fiction writer who's ever considered setting a story on board a spaceship. It's also a handy reference for anyone who, like all the contributors, stills dreams of travel to the stars, and dares to believe that it not only should happen, but will.

Reviewer Greg L Johnson thinks that it would be nice to have the space symposium in his corner of the universe sometime. Greg's reviews have appeared in publications ranging from The Minneapolis Star-Tribune to the The New York Review of Science Fiction.