The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories

An unabridged collection spotlighting the “best of the best” hard science fiction stories published in 2016 by current and emerging masters of the genre, edited by Allan Kaster.

• “Vortex” by Gregory Benford — Astronauts find a once thriving microbial lifeform that carpets the caves of Mars dying off.
• “RedKing” by Craig DeLancey — A code monkey tracks down the vain creator of a pernicious software virus that people jack cerebrally.
• “Number Nine Moon” by Alex Irvine — Illicit scavengers on Mars are on a rescue mission to save themselves after one of their team members dies.
• “Of the Beast in the Belly” by C.W. Johnson — A young girl’s thirst for vengeance becomes a struggle for survival when she is swallowed by a gigantic sea creature on an alien planet.
• “The Seventh Gamer” by Gwyneth Jones — A writer immerses herself into a MMORPG community to search for characters being played by real aliens from other worlds.
• “Chasing Ivory” by Ted Kosmatka — A woman armed with a rifle stalks a herd of cloned wooly mammoths in British Columbia.
• “Fieldwork” by Shariann Lewitt — A volcanologist struggles with her research on Europa where both her mother and grandmother suffered dire consequences.
• “Seven Birthdays” by Ken Liu — A daughter pays homage to her mother with mega-engineering projects to deal with climate change over eons.
• “The Visitor from Taured” by Ian R. MacLeod — A cosmologist in the near future is obsessed with proving his theory of multiverses.
• “Something Happened Here, But We’re Not Quite Sure What It Was” by Paul McAuley — The citizens of a small town on a “Jackaroo” planet object to a corporation placing a radio telescope near local alien artifacts.
• “Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee” by Alastair Reynolds — A graduate student defends her dissertation on a solar anomaly that threatens humanity.