Grace Chan

Every Version of You

Annalee Newitz

Tobias S. Buckell

Leonard Richardson

Alastair Reynolds

Sarah Gailey

Premee Mohamed

Rich Larson

Neil Clarke

Greg Egan

Julianna Baggott

Yoon Ha Lee

Suzanne Palmer

Meg Elison

Naomi Kritzer

A.T. Greenblatt

Nian Yu

Chinelo Onwualu

Wole Talabi

Marie Vibbert

S.L. Huang

M. Bennardo

Jessica Reisman

Ray Nayler

R.S.A. Garcia

Ai Jiang

Hannah Yang

Isabel J. Kim

Congyun "Mu Ming" Gu

J.C. Hsyu

For decades, science fiction has compelled us to imagine futures both inspiring and cautionary. Whether it's a cryptic message encountered by a survey ship, the discovery of alien life in the distant reaches of space, a window into a future Earth, or the adventures of well-meaning AI, science fiction inspires our imagination and delivers a lens through which we can view ourselves and the world around us. At the very heart of the genre is short fiction, the secret lab that has introduced many of the new ideas, techniques, and voices prominent across all other media. In The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Eight, Hugo and Locus Award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a comprehensive year-in-review of 2022's short fiction markets and selects thirty-one of its best stories from the wealth of magazines, anthologies, podcasts, and collections that make up the field. In these pages you'll find works by both the new and established authors who are setting the pace for science fiction today and into tomorrow. Start your journey here.

The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 8

'Asks what it is to be human. Visceral, mind-bending and tender.' - Inga Simpson In late twenty-first century Australia, Tao-Yi and her partner Navin spend most of their time inside a hyper-immersive, hyper-consumerist virtual reality called Gaia. They log on, go to work, socialise, and even eat in this digital utopia. Meanwhile their aging bodies lie suspended in pods inside cramped apartments. Across the city, in the abandoned 'real' world, Tao-Yi's mother remains stubbornly offline, preferring instead to indulge in memories of her life in Malaysia. When a new technology is developed to permanently upload a human brain to Gaia, Tao-Yi must decide what is most important: a digital future, or an authentic past. Never Let Me Go meets Black Mirror, with a dash of Murakami surrealism thrown in, this is speculative literary fiction at its best.

Grace Chan

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