The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 10

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

• “My English Name” by R. S. Benedict — An intelligent alien, who parasitizes an English teacher in China, falls in love.

• “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance” by Tobias S. Buckell — After a victorious space battle, an indentured robot finds a refugee who makes an offer it can’t refuse.

• “The Moon is Not a Battlefield” by Indrapramit Das — An Indian soldier retires on Earth after spending most of her life on the Moon.

• “Dear Sarah” by Nancy Kress — A young woman joins the U.S. Army to fight terrorists after aliens arrive on Earth bearing tech gifts unevenly dispersed to humans.

• “An Evening with Severyn Grimes” by Rich Larson — A gifted hacker uses cyberspace to extract pay back on the rich businessman who put her in prison.

• “The Chameleon’s Gloves” by Yoon Ha Lee — Set in the author’s hexarchate universe, an ex-Kel super soldier is enlisted to retrieve a weapon of mass destruction stolen by a rogue general.

• “The Martian Obelisk” by Linda Nagata — On a dying Earth, an architect remotely building a monument to mankind on Mars receives a message from an abandoned Mars colony.

• “A Series of Steaks” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad — A petty meat counterfeiter is blackmailed into forging T-bone steaks for an anonymous thug.

• “The Residue of Fire” by Robert Reed — A torturer tries to cope with one of his alien victims who witnessed a pivotal moment in the lives of two immortals, in this Great Ship tale.

• “Night Passage” by Alastair Reynolds — A starship captain wakes from hibernation with her ship stalled next to an alien artifact and a mutiny in progress in this Revelation Space tale.