The Best Science Fiction of the Year

The second volume of a new best-of-the-year science fiction short story anthology edited by Hugo Award-winning editor Neil Clarke. First contact with a mysterious race of aliens reveals an unusual request; a family's pet dog comes to grips with the newly bestowed gift of human-like intelligence; a poet, in danger and alone on a distant world, makes unlikely allies; hundreds of years in the future, a famous hermit lives in the sea above the now-underwater Harvard University; former friends navigate unsteady peace between human refugees and the technologically superior race that saved them; in a future where human life can be infinitely extended through cybertronic rebirth, one woman declines immortality. 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 Two, 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 2016. TABLE OF CONTENTS The Visitor from Taured by Ian R. MacLeod (Asimov's, September 2016) Extraction Request by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld, January 2016) A Good Home by Karin Lowachee (Lightspeed, June 2016) Prodigal by Gord Sellar (Analog, December 2016) Ten Days by Nina Allan (Now We Are Ten, edited by Ian Whates) Terminal by Lavie Tidhar (Tor.com, April 2016) Panic City by Madeline Ashby (CyberWorld, edited by Jason Heller and Joshua Viola) Last Gods by Sam J. Miller (Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathana Strahan) HigherWorks by Gregory Norman Bossert (Asimov's, December 2016) A Strange Loop by T.R. Napper (Interzone, January/February 2016) Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse by Xia Jia (Invisible Planets, edited by Ken Liu) Pearl by Aliette de Bodard (The Starlit Wood, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe) The Metal Demimonde by Nick Wolven (Analog, June 2016) The Iron Tactician by Alastair Reynolds (Newcon Press) The Mighty Slinger by Tobias S. Buckell and Karen Lord (Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathana Strahan) They All Have One Breath by Karl Bunker (Asimov's, December 2016) Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed, February 2016) And Then, One Day, the Air was Full of Voices by Margaret Ronald (Clarkesworld, June 2016) The Three Lives of Sonata James by Lettie Prell (Tor.com, October 2016) The Charge and the Storm by An Owomoyela (Asimov's, February 2016) Parables of Infinity by Robert Reed (Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathana Strahan) Ten Poems for the Mossums, One for the Man by Suzanne Palmer (Asimov's, July 2016) You Make Pattaya by Rich Larson (Interzone, November/December 2016) Number Nine Moon by Alex Irvine (F&SF, January/February 2016) Things with Beards by Sam J. Miller (Clarkesworld, June 2016) Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit-Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts by Ken Liu (Drowned Worlds, edited by Jonathana Strahan) Touring with the Alien by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld, April 2016)