The Best Science Fiction of the Year
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As Earth dies, an architect is commissioned to remote build a monument on Mars from the remains of a failed colony; a man who has transferred his consciousness into a humanoid robot discovers he’s missing thirty percent of his memories, and tries to discover why; bored with life in the underground colony of an alien world, a few risk life inside one of the “whales” floating in the planet’s atmosphere; an apprentice librarian searching through centuries of SETI messages from alien civilizations makes an ominous discovery; a ship in crisis pulls a veteran multibot out from storage with an unusual assignment: pest control; the dead are given a second shot at life, in exchange for a five-year term in a zombie military program. 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 Three, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and twenty-seven of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2017.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The State of Short SF Field in 2017
A Series of Steaks by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Holdfast by Alastair Reynolds
Every Hour of Light and Dark by Nancy Kress
The Last Novelist, or a Dead Lizard in the Yard by Matthew Kressel
Shikasta by Vandana Singh
Wind Will Rove by Sarah Pinsker
Focus by Gord Sellar
The Martian Obelisk by Linda Nagata
Shadows of Eternity by Gregory Benford
The Worldless by Indrapramit Das
Regarding the Robot Raccoons Attached to the Hull of My Ship by Rachel Jones and Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali
Belly Up by Maggie Clark
Uncanny Valley by Greg Egan
We Who Live in the Heart by Kelly Robson
A Catalogue of Sunlight at the End of the World by A.C. Wise
Meridian by Karin Lowachee
The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Extracurricular Activities by Yoon Ha Lee
In Everlasting Wisdom by Aliette de Bodard
The Last Boat-Builder in Ballyvoloon by Finbarr O’Reilly
The Speed of Belief by Robert Reed
Death on Mars by Madeline Ashby
An Evening with Severyn Grimes by Rich Larson
ZeroS by Peter Watts
The Secret Life of Bots by Suzanne Palmer
Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance by Tobias S. Buckell
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Recommended Reading
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
