The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 2

An unabridged collection spotlighting the “best of the best” hard science fiction stories published in 2017 by current and emerging masters of the genre, edited by Allan Kaster.

• “Shadows of Eternity” by Gregory Benford — A student investigates enigmatic SETI recordings from probes sent to nearby stars despite her teachers’ admonishments to stick to the curriculum.

• “The Chatter of Monkeys” by Bond Elam — An alien robot offers to help save Earth as war and pollution ravage the last of the survivors on the planet.

• “Acadie” by Dave Hutchinson — The first humans still, even after five hundred years, hunt across the stars for their augmented children who have left Earth in search of paradise.

• “Canoe” by Nancy Kress — The crew of an exploratory starship finds an icy moon that might harbor life.

• “The Use of Things” by Ramez Naam — An astronaut struggles to survive after being jolted free from an asteroid while on a solitary prospecting mission.

• “The Proving Ground” by Alec Nevala-Lee — A problem with the local birds threatens the rebuilding of Bikini Island as sea-levels rise due to global warming.

• “Holdfast” by Alastair Reynolds — A genmod human soldier faces off with an alien warrior in the inhospitable terrain of a superjovian planet.

• “Vanguard 2.0” by Carter Scholz — A Russian astronaut, gathering debris in near-Earth space, must make tough moral choices when asked to carry out a special mission.

• “ZeroS” by Peter Watts — After a terrorist attack, a technically dead fish farmer gets a new body and second chance at life as an experimental super soldier.