A human detective and their partner, an enhanced chimpanzee, investigate a strange murder on the subway . . . a smart home goes into lockdown, turning a man's own home into his prison . . . at a robot factory, something has caused the machines to attempt to escape . . . mysterious seeds raining down from deep space could be the first sign of an alien invasion . . . a woman seeks to restore a broken AI, hoping it can help return humanity to better days . . .

For decades, science fiction has compelled us to imagine futures both inspiring and cautionary. Whether it's a warning message from a survey ship, a harrowing journey to a new world, or the adventures of well-meaning AI, science fiction inspires the imagination and delivers a lens through which we can view ourselves and the world around us. With

The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and twenty-nine of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2018:

• When We Were Starless--Simone Heller
• Intervention--Kelly Robson
• All the Time We've Left to Spend--Alyssa Wong
• Domestic Violence--Madeline Ashby
• Ten Landscapes of Nili Fossae--Ian McDonald
• Prophet of the Roads--Naomi Kritzer
• Traces of Us--Vanessa Fogg
• Theories of Flight--Linda Nagata
• Lab B-15--Nick Wolven
• Requiem--Vandana Singh
• Sour Milk Girls--Erin Roberts
• Mother Tongues--S. Qiouyi Lu
• Singles' Day--Samantha Murray
• Nine Last Days on Planet Earth--Daryl Gregory
• The Buried Giant--Lavie Tidhar
• The Anchorite Wakes--R.S.A. Garcia
• Entropy War--Yoon Ha Lee
• An Equation of State--Robert Reed
• Quantifying Trust--John Chu
• Hard Mary--Sofia Samatar
• Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling--L.X. Beckett
• Okay, Glory--Elizabeth Bear
• Heavy Lifting--A.T. Greenblatt
• Lions and Gazelles--Hannu Rajaniemi
• Different Seas--Alastair Reynolds
• Among the Water Buffaloes, a Tiger's Steps--Aliette de Bodard
• Byzantine Empathy--Ken Liu
• Meat and Salt and Sparks--Rich Larson
• Umbernight--Carolyn Ives Gilman