The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four

by Neil Clarke (Editor)

Overview

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.

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 
2018 Recommended Reading List

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949102086
Publisher:	Night Shade
Publication date:	07/16/2019
Series:	The Best Science Fiction of the Year , #4
Pages:	624
Sales rank:	1,141,193
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 2.20(d)

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld and Forever Magazine and owner of Wyrm Publishing, and a six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children.

Read an Excerpt

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

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Neil Clarke’s Anthologies with Night Shade Books
 
“Readers should savor the stories a few at a time to get the most out of Clarke’s superior selections . . . but there are no inferior pieces here. This is a fine, thoughtful book.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review for Not One of Us
 
“Well-known SF authors grace this . . . top-notch selection of imaginative and thought-provoking stories.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review for More Human Than Human
 
“Clarke’s stellar reprint anthology explores the expansive variety of space exploration stories. . . . Outstanding works in which extreme environments bring out the best and worst of human nature.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review for The Final Frontier

“Twenty one fascinating tales from some of science fiction’s new stars. The reprint collection is multicultural and diverse, with tales of all kinds and from some unusual places. . . . Many standouts in this one and likely something here for all sorts of different kinds of folks.”
—Manhattan Book Review, 4.5/5 Stars for The Final Frontier
 
“This hefty anthology of imperial SF covers great space battles, small dramas within an empire, hopeless bureaucracy, and even living space stations, zooming in and out to capture every nuance . . . The diverse array of stories ensures that there’s plenty of interest for any fan of large-scale SF.” 
—Publishers Weekly on Galactic Empires

“Masterful editor Neil Clarke has assembled an exotic, bountiful treasure chest of reprint tales dedicated to that mode of SF that can arguably be said to constitute the very core of the field, the space opera.”
—Asimov’s on Galactic Empires
 
“Clarke has assembled a wide range of authors – from old masters like Robert Silverberg to more recent talents such as Aliette De Bodard – each offering a different take on the central premise. . . There isn’t a bad piece amongst them . . . the Galaxy really is there for the taking.”
—Starburst on Galactic Empires, reviewed by Alister Davison

“As editor Clarke points out in his introduction, when most people hear the term galactic empire, they immediately picture Darth Vader and Star Wars. But there is a long history of star-faring empires in the genre, with stories that imagine our human tendencies to explore and conquer among the stars. . . . The stories gathered here, all of which have appeared elsewhere, show the huge range of possibilities of the chosen theme.” 
—Library Journal on Galactic Empires

“The first must-read anthology of the year, no question, is Neil Clarke’s Galactic Empires, an ambitious (read: huge) collection of SF tales featuring far-flung confederations in the stars. The TOC is a who’s-who of virtually everyone doing important work at short length in science fiction.” 
—John O’Neil, Black Gate on Galactic Empires

“Brings together some of the best voices writing in the genre today. . . . a stunning collection of short fiction.”
—WorldsInInk on Galactic Empires
 

From the Publisher

★ 05/27/2019

The 29 stories in Clarke’s excellent annual span the SF spectrum, and though they vary significantly in their approaches and tones, many are built around the idea of humankind’s often uneasy relationship with advanced technologies. Elizabeth Bear includes both humor and grimness in “Okay, Glory,” an account of a smart house that becomes a prison when extortionists hack its AI to blackmail the owner. Alyssa Wong’s elegiac “All the Time We’ve Left to Spend” concerns a fan who spends her life in the company of simulations of dead members of a band she obsessively follows. Both Simone Heller’s “When We Were Starless” and Sofia Samatar’s “Hard Mary” are set in provincial human enclaves to whom high tech is a near-mystical revelation. Clarke has also selected distinguished stories by Ken Liu, Ian McDonald, Linda Nagata, and other well-known talents whose topics include rogue robots, first contact, and human consciousness downloads. The care with which he has drawn from both print and online sources makes this a year’s-best that truly lives up to its title. (July)

Publishers Weekly

06/01/2019

In his introduction, editor Clarke (Clarkesworld magazine) presents an analysis of the field of short sf, noting the death of Nebula and Hugo Award winner Gardner Dozois (among others listed in memoriam), other award winners, translated works, the changing business of print and digital short sf magazines, and acclaimed anthologies, collections, and novellas. Here, he curates some of the best stories from 2018, highlighting established and new authors such as Madeline Ashby ("Domestic Violence"), Alastair Reynolds ("Different Seas"), and L.X. Beckett ("Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling"). VERDICT Scrutinizing politics and personal journeys, artificial intelligence and human emotion, this anthology will give new sf readers a breadth of material to ponder, while showing established fans new writers to follow. Recommended for all libraries.—Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Library Journal