Horton's elegiac anthology of 15 mostly hard SF stories illuminates a broad spectrum of grief over love thwarted through time, space, human frailty or alien intervention, from the gentle melancholy of Michael Swanwick's "Triceratops Summer," which posits tame Technicolored time-warped dinosaurs in Vermont, to newcomer Leah Bobet's "Bliss," an agonizing riff on near-future drug addiction. Several selections address current political-social issues, like Mary Rosenblum's "Search Engine," which extrapolates today's technology to chilling, Big Brotherly results. The long closing story, Alastair Reynolds's "Understanding Space and Time," however, presents a ray of cosmic hope: the sole survivor of a plague that decimated humanity is rescued and healed by intergalactic entities and lives out millennia while seeking ultimate truths, returning to see mankind regenerated. This anthology reflects the concerns of the genre today—and the apparent inability of our society to do anything about them. -- Publishers Weekly

A banner year for speculative fiction has yielded a crop of superb short form SF. Now the very best to appear over the past twelve months has been amassed into one extraordinary volume by acclaimed editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, offering bold visions of days to come that are bright, triumphant, breathtaking, and strikingly unique. Once more, celebrated masters of the field join with exciting new voices to sing of explorations and invasions, grand technological accomplishments, amazing flights into the unknown, horrors and miracles, and the human condition. Welcome to amazing worlds that could be -- and, perhaps, sooner than you have ever dared to imagine. New tales from: Gregory Benford Terry Bisson James Patrick Kelly Pamela Sargent Jack McDevitt Gene Wolfe and more

Award-winning anthologists Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden have combed through a year's worth of books and magazines and websites to find the most outstanding fantasy and science fiction stories of 2004--and collected them into a single volume aimed specifically at teens and young adults. Many of today's most popular authors are represented here, including: * Garth Nix, author of Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen, who presents an unforgettable tale of two swords, two daughters, and two endings.... * S. M. Stirling, author of Island in the Sea of Time, sends a likeable young barbarian across the Channel to Alba, for a confrontation with a wizard from faraway Nantucket that will change his life forever... * David Gerrold, creator of "The Trouble with Tribbles," who takes you to a remote countryside surrounded by a mysterious darkness, whose secret has yet to be revealed...

The best science fiction stories of 2008.

Here are 25 stories of science fiction that push the envelope, by the biggest names in an emerging new crop of high-tech futuristic SF - including Charles Stross, Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton and Neal Asher. High-tech SF has made a significant comeback in the last decade, as bestselling authors successfully blend the super-science of 'hard science fiction' with real characters in an understandable scenario. It is perhaps a reflection of how technologically controlled our world is that readers increasingly look for science fiction that considers the fates of mankind as a result of increasing scientific domination. This anthology brings together the most extreme examples of the new high-tech, far-future science fiction, pushing the limits way beyond normal boundaries. The stories include: "A Perpetual War Fought Within a Cosmic String", "A Weapon That Could Destroy the Universe", "A Machine That Detects Alternate Worlds and Creates a Choice of Christs", "An Immortal Dead Man Sent To The End of the Universe", "Murder in Virtual Reality", "A Spaceship So Large That There is An Entire Planetary System Within It", and "An Analytical Engine At The End of Time", and "Encountering the Untouchable."

Undreamed-Of Wonders From The Farthest Reaches Of Imagination In this second volume of the previous year's finest short fantastic fiction, acclaimed editor and anthologist David G. Hartwell showcases new works by stellar literary artists -- acknowledged masters of the genre and exceptionally talented newcomers alike. Astonishing worlds come alive in these pages -- realms of strange creatures and remarkable sorceries, as well as twisted shadow versions of our inhabited earthly plain. A bold and breathtaking compendium of tales -- including a new Earthsea story from the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin -- Years's Best Fantasy 2 is the state-of-the-art of a unique and winning genre, offering unforgettable excursions into new realities wondrous, bizarre, enchanting...and terrifying.

From the author of Axis and Vortex, the first Hugo Award-winning novel in the environmental apocalyptic Spin Trilogy... One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives. The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk--a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside--more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future. Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses. Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun--and report back on what they find. Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.