Product Review
Thrilling, smart, and brilliant short science fiction from Simone Heller, Ken Liu, Ian McDonald, and many more.
A human detective and their partner, an enhanced chimpanzee, investigate a strange murder on the subway . . . a smart home goes into lockdown, turning a man’s own home into his prison . . . at a robot factory, something has caused the machines to attempt to escape . . . mysterious seeds raining down from deep space could be the first sign of an alien invasion . . . a woman seeks to restore a broken AI, hoping it can help return humanity to better days . . .
For decades, science fiction has compelled us to imagine futures both inspiring and cautionary. Whether it’s a warning message from a survey ship, a harrowing journey to a new world, or the adventures of well-meaning AI, science fiction inspires the imagination and delivers a lens through which we can view ourselves and the world around us. With
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and twenty-nine of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2018:
- When We Were Starless—Simone Heller
- Intervention—Kelly Robson
- All the Time We’ve Left to Spend—Alyssa Wong
- Domestic Violence—Madeline Ashby
- Ten Landscapes of Nili Fossae—Ian McDonald
- Prophet of the Roads—Naomi Kritzer
- Traces of Us—Vanessa Fogg
- Theories of Flight—Linda Nagata
- Lab B–15—Nick Wolven
- Requiem—Vandana Singh
- Sour Milk Girls—Erin Roberts
- Mother Tongues—S. Qiouyi Lu
- Singles’ Day—Samantha Murray
- Nine Last Days on Planet Earth—Daryl Gregory
- The Buried Giant—Lavie Tidhar
- The Anchorite Wakes—R.S.A. Garcia
- Entropy War—Yoon Ha Lee
- An Equation of State—Robert Reed
- Quantifying Trust—John Chu
- Hard Mary—Sofia Samatar
- Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling—L.X. Beckett
- Okay, Glory—Elizabeth Bear
- Heavy Lifting—A.T. Greenblatt
- Lions and Gazelles—Hannu Rajaniemi
- Different Seas—Alastair Reynolds
- Among the Water Buffaloes, a Tiger’s Steps—Aliette de Bodard
- Byzantine Empathy—Ken Liu
- Meat and Salt and Sparks—Rich Larson
- Umbernight—Carolyn Ives Gilman
