The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 4

From Hugo Award-winning editor Neil Clarke, the best science fiction stories of the year are collected in a single volume.

Keeping up-to-date with the most buzzworthy and cutting-edge science fiction requires sifting through countless magazines, e-zines, websites, blogs, original anthologies, single-author collections, and more-a task accomplishable by only the most determined and voracious listeners. For everyone else, Night Shade Books is proud to introduce the latest volume of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, a yearly anthology compiled by Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning editor Neil Clarke, collecting the finest that the genre has to offer, from the biggest names in the field to the most exciting new writers. The best science fiction scrutinizes our culture and politics, examines the limits of the human condition, and zooms across galaxies at faster-than-light speeds, moving from the very near future to the far-flung worlds of tomorrow in the space of a single sentence.

Clarke, publisher and editor-in-chief of the acclaimed and award-winning magazine Clarkesworld, has selected the short science fiction (and only science fiction) best representing the previous year's writing, showcasing the talent, variety, and awesome "sensawunda" that the genre has to offer.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: A State of Short SF Field 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