Year's Best SF 10 (Year's Best Science Fiction)
Kathryn Cramer
Language: English
Pages: 512
ISBN: B000FCK56C
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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
Some of them even thought that the van had been loaded with explosives, and they continued to think so even after Captain Dial told them I hadn’t smelled any. Also, Lieutenant Morris said that he had found the girl’s necklace on the ground. And there were no soldiers who would say that he hadn’t. Except me. I hadn’t smelled any dirt or asphalt on it. All I had smelled was skin and blood from the girl’s neck plus sweat from Lieutenant Morris’s hand. But the only officer who could hear my testimony
and several other electronic devices that I could not identify. “You’re well prepared for running,” I observed. “All the others like me have vanished,” she said softly. “They vanished together, on the same night. I had my suspicions before that, though. Dad always said if I ever had to step outside the law, then I should do it with a cool head. I’d set up a second identity, and as that identity I slept in another apartment. Every morning I phoned a couple of the others to make sure they were
Subterranean Press in 2005. Most of his short fiction is fantastic, and collected in A Conflagration Artist and The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians (1994)—two books which were published together in a slipcase and which won a World Fantasy Award for Best Collection—and in One Day Closer to Death (1998). “Sergeant Chip” was published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, which had a particularly strong year in 2004. In this fine novella about the military virtues, the central character is a
didn’t win the contest, though. He came in second. At the end of two minutes, he had eleven mines, and the winner had twelve. All the people who had watched the race clapped and cheered, and the four sea lions who had raced got up on their hindquarters and barked. The people cheered even more then, and Lieutenant Dial and Melanie did too. But Lieutenant Dial didn’t clap because he had one hand on the handle of my duty harness. Both Lieutenant Dial and Melanie were happy. So I should have been
tense and relax in turn. That effect would be hard to simulate. But there’s nothing in my face, nothing real behind that surface. Where is the pain, the pain that made love real, the pain of understanding? “You okay, sweetie?” Brad says through the bathroom door. I turn on the faucet and splash water on my face. “Yes,” I say. “I’m going to take a shower. Can you get some snacks from that store we saw down the street?” Giving him something to do reassures him. I hear the door to the room close