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.

Table of Contents
Introduction: A State of Short SF Field in 2018
When We Were Starless--Simone Heller
Intervention--Kelly Robson
All the Time We've Left to Spend--Alyssa Wong
Domestic Violence--Madeline Ashby
Ten Landscapes of Nili Fossae--Ian McDonald
Prophet of the Roads--Naomi Kritzer
Traces of Us--Vanessa Fogg
Theories of Flight--Linda Nagata
Lab B-15--Nick Wolven
Requiem--Vandana Singh
Sour Milk Girls--Erin Roberts
Mother Tongues--S. Qiouyi Lu
Singles' Day--Samantha Murray
Nine Last Days on Planet Earth--Daryl Gregory
The Buried Giant--Lavie Tidhar
The Anchorite Wakes--R.S.A. Garcia
Entropy War--Yoon Ha Lee
An Equation of State--Robert Reed
Quantifying Trust--John Chu
Hard Mary--Sofia Samatar
Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling--L.X. Beckett
Okay, Glory--Elizabeth Bear
Heavy Lifting--A.T. Greenblatt
Lions and Gazelles--Hannu Rajaniemi
Different Seas--Alastair Reynolds
Among the Water Buffaloes, a Tiger's Steps--Aliette de Bodard
Byzantine Empathy--Ken Liu
Meat and Salt and Sparks--Rich Larson
Umbernight--Carolyn Ives Gilman
2018 Recommended Reading List