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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 Four, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and twenty-nine of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2018.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 21, 2019 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781980059530
- File size: 858523 KB
- Duration: 29:48:35
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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This inclusive collection starts with Neil Clarke's introduction about the state of short science fiction in 2015. Each story begins with a brief author biography, with additional titles. Narrating duties are skillfully shared by Amy Tallmadge and Jeremy Arthur. "The Murmuration" by Alastair Reynolds is movingly told by Arthur, who inhabits the story's scientist and his mixed emotions as he observes how starlings react to a sparrow hawk drone that they think is real. Yoon Ha Lee's "The Cold Inequalities," narrated by Tallmade, is a passionate defense of books in the midst of a battle between librarians on an archive ship. The standout is "Today I Am Paul," by Martin L. Shoemaker. Arthur expertly portrays the android that cares for Paul's mother, Mildred, in her final days. Arthur's android touchingly "pretends" to be Paul and significant others in Mildred's life to comfort her in this bittersweet story. Everyone should find something to enjoy in this varied collection. S.G.B. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from May 27, 2019
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.
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