THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR, VOLUME 4

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

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.