A collection spotlighting the “best of the best” science fiction stories published in 2010 by current and emerging masters of the genre, edited by Allan Kaster.

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• “Under the Moons of Venus” by Damien Broderick — A man, who has returned to a mostly deserted Earth from a terraformed Venus with Luna and Ganymede as moons, longs to go back to Venus.

• “The Shipmaker” by Aliette de Bodard — A maker of living spaceships has her career threatened by the birth of a sentient Mind that will arrive before the ship that will house it will be ready in this 2011 winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award.

• “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” by Yoon Ha Lee — A construct meets with an assassin that is the keeper of a gun that erases a victim’s entire lineage to secure the destruction of another gun made by the same gunsmith.

• “Re-Crossing the Styx” by Ian R. MacLeod — An entertainer aboard a cruise ship falls in love with a zombie husband’s Minder and schemes to free her from her marriage.

• “Eight Miles” by Sean McMullen — In this steampunk story, an English lord hires a balloonist to take him and a nonhuman female to a great height in order to learn the secrets of another world.

• “Elegy for a Young Elk” by Hannu Rajaniemi — The gods use a real human to retrieve something important from a city that has become sentient and surrounded by a firewall that protects against gods.

• “Alone” by Robert Reed — A traveler aboard the Great Ship has eschewed contact with others and remained alone for far longer than seems possible.

• “The Emperor of Mars” by Allen M. Steele — In this winner of the 2010 Asimov’s Readers’ Award for best novelette, a contract worker on Mars becomes enamored with the science fiction retrieved from NASA’s Phoenix lander that arrived on the red planet back in 2008.

• “A Letter from the Emperor” by Steve Rasnic Tem — An imperial envoy visits an outlying colony where a retiring colonel, whose memory is suspect for security reasons, claims to have fought alongside the emperor.

• “The Things” by Peter Watts — In this 2010 Shirley Jackson Award winner for best short story, is a retelling of John Carpenter’s classic movie, The Thing, from the perspective of the shape-shifting alien confronting a group of scientists in Antarctica.