And as usual, a large amount of the best short fiction originated in the year’s new crop of anthologies. Among the best of these were Welcome to the Greenhouse, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, Solaris Rising, edited by Ian Whates, Living on Mars, edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

And that is the context in which all of the following stories first appeared. This then is a book about what’s going on now in SF. We try in each volume of this series to represent the varieties of tone and voice and attitude that keep the genre vigorous and responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges, in science and daily life. It is supposed to be fun to read, a special kind of fun you cannot find elsewhere. The stories show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of the evolving genre in the year 2011.

We make a lot of additional comments about the writers and the stories, and what’s happening in SF, in the individual introductions accompanying the stories in this book. Welcome to the Year’s Best SF 17.

David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
Pleasantville, NY

The Best Science Fiction of the Year Three

KEN MACLEOD


Ken MacLeod (Kenmacleod.blogspot.com) was born in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, on August 2, 1954. He is married with two grown-up children and lives in West Lothian. He has an Honours and Masters degree in biological subjects and worked for some years in the IT industry. Since 1997 he has been a full-time writer, and in 2009 was Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University. He is the author of thirteen novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to Intrusion (2012), and many articles and short stories. His collection, Giant Lizards from Another Star, was published in 2006. His novels and stories have received three BSFA awards and three Prometheus Awards, and several have been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards.



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