The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 8

To keep 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 inaugural volume of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, a new 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.

Neil Clarke is the award-winning publisher and editor in chief of Clarkesworld magazine, winner of three Hugo Awards for Best Semiprozine, and the editor of the 2014 cyborg-themed original anthology Upgraded. Clarke lives in Stirling, New Jersey.

CONTENTS: Introduction: A State of the Short SF Field in 2022 / by Neil Clarke The Dragon Project / Naomi Kritzer Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu / Grace Chan The Ship Cat of the Suzaku Maru / S.L. Huang Give Me English / Ai Jiang Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist / Isabel J. Kim If We Make It Through This Alive / A.T. Greenblatt We Built This City / Marie Vibbert Forty-eight Minutes at the Trainview Café / M. Bennardo The Historiography of Loss / Julianna Baggott The Plastic People / Tobias S. Buckell All That Burns Unseen / Premee Mohamed Mender of Sparrows / Ray Nayler Falling Off the Edge of the World / Suzanne Palmer When the Tide Rises / Sarah Gailey The Past Life Reconstruction Service / Zen Cho A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language / Nian Yu Quandary Aminu Vs the Butterfly Man / Rich Larson Bishop's Opening / R.S.A. Garcia Things to Do in Deimos When You're Dead / Alastair Reynolds A Dream of Electric Mothers / Wole Talabi By Those Hands / Congyun "Mu Ming" Gu Solidity / Greg Egan Optimist Cleaver's Last Transmission / J.C. Hsyu Two Spacesuits / Leonard Richardson Nonstandard Candles / Yoon Ha Lee Inheritance / Hannah Yang A Hole in the Light / Annalee Newitz Letters to My Mother / Chinelo Onwualu In the Dream / Meg Elison Aconie's Bees / Jessica Reisman