Short novels are movie length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This collection presents the best-of-the-best science fiction novellas published in 2010 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling, edited by Allan Kaster.

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• “Return to Titan” by Stephen Baxter — Set in the author’s Xeelee sequence, Michael Poole and his father search one of Saturn’s moons for sentient life that would interfere with their plans to build a gateway to the stars.

•  “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis — In this year’s Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner for best short fiction, a terraforming expert is inexplicably invited to Venus by the child who owns most of the planet’s habitable floating cities.

• “Seven Cities of Gold” by David Moles — A Japanese relief worker is charged with tracking down the renegade Christian leader responsible for detonating a nuclear device in an Islam-occupied North American city.

• “Jackie’s-Boy” by Steven Popkes — An orphaned child befriends an uplifted elephant from the abandoned St. Louis Zoo as they trek south across a sparsely populated North America to find sanctuary.

• “A History of Terraforming” by Robert Reed — A young boy’s ambition to take up his father’s work of terraforming Mars, and then much of the solar system, discovers that much more than planets have been altered.

• “Troika” by Alastair Reynolds — The lone survivor of a mission that explored a massive alien object attempts to reveal what he discovered despite the wishes of the Second Soviet Union.

• “Several Items of Interest” by Rick Wilber — Set in the author’s S’hdonni universe, Earth ruling aliens ask a human collaborator to help quell a human insurrection led by the collaborator’s brother.