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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