Short novels may well be the perfect length for science fiction. They are movie length tales that resonate with moxie while exploring characters, new worlds, and ideas. The stories in this unabridged collection are the best-of-the best short science fiction novels published in 2010 by current and emerging masters of this form. “Return to Titan,” by Stephen Baxter, is set in his 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. In this year’s Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner for best short fiction, “The Sultan of the Clouds,” by Geoffrey A. Landis, 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, tells the story of a Japanese relief worker charged with tracking down the renegade Christian leader responsible for detonating a nuclear device in an Islam-occupied North American city. In “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, involves a young boy’s ambition to take up his father’s work of terraforming Mars and then much of the solar system and discovers that much more than planets have been altered. In “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. Set in the author’s S’hdonni universe, “Several Items of Interest,” by Rick Wilber, the Earth ruling aliens ask a human collaborator to help quell a human insurrection led by the collaborator’s brother.

The New York Times bestselling Culture novel. . . The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, provably, the End Days for the Gzilt civilization. An ancient people, organized on military principles and yet almost perversely peaceful, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture ten thousand years earlier and were very nearly one of its founding societies, deciding not to join only at the last moment. Now they've made the collective decision to follow the well-trodden path of millions of other civilizations; they are going to Sublime, elevating themselves to a new and almost infinitely more rich and complex existence. Amid preparations though, the Regimental High Command is destroyed. Lieutenant Commander (reserve) Vyr Cossont appears to have been involved, and she is now wanted -- dead, not alive. Aided only by an ancient, reconditioned android and a suspicious Culture avatar, Cossont must complete her last mission given to her by the High Command. She must find the oldest person in the Culture, a man over nine thousand years old, who might have some idea what really happened all that time ago. It seems that the final days of the Gzilt civilization are likely to prove its most perilous. The Culture Series Consider Phlebas The Player of Games Use of Weapons The State of the Art Excession Inversions Look to Windward Matter Surface Detail The Hydrogen Sonata

This is the first book to offer a critical analysis of one variant of the mystery story or novel—the use of a physician as the major detective. There is little difference between a medical “case study” and a mystery story. The book reviews the works of major authors, from R. Austin Freeman, Helen McCloy, Josephine Bell, and H.C. Bailey, to Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs, Aaron Elkins, and Colin Cotterill, with briefer reviews of minor authors. It also addresses historical (fictional) physician detectives, psychological detectives, and physician detective nonfiction. Physicians and health workers are avid readers of detective fiction and will welcome this volume, which addresses their specific interests. Its critical analysis of books that have long been viewed as central to detective fiction will also appeal to fans of the mystery story.

The red LCD display quickly counts down. There is no time to waste. The polluting, resource-degrading plant is set to explode. Eco-heroine Inez Wick has only minutes to escape. As she traverses the dark recesses of the dirty plant, she flashes back to a younger self, sixteen. Her father had just died in an oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, and she had just broken up with her boyfriend. She remembers oily ocean water and flames, her footprints in the sand filling with black water. Flames were chasing her. They were jumping from one oily footprint to the next, up the beach after her. Snapping back to the present, she must get out of the plant. The exploits of Inez Wick could not end, just now. Too many others needed to pay.

This edited collection brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars who together offer cutting-edge insights into the complex roles, functions, and effects of pronouns in literary texts. The book engages with a range of text-types, including poetry, drama, and prose from different periods and regions, in English and in translation. Beginning with analyses of the first-person pronoun, it moves onto studies of the subject dynamics of first- and second-person, before considering plural modes of narration and how pronoun use can help to disperse narrative perspective. The volume then debates the functional constraints of pronouns in fictional contexts and finally reflects upon the theoretical advancements presented in the collection. This innovative volume will appeal to students and scholars of linguistics, stylistics and cognitive poetics, narratology, theoretical and applied linguistics, psychology and literary criticism.

Contains thirty-three short stories chosen by the editor as the best in science fiction for 2010, including selections by Damien Broderick, Steven Popkes, Rachel Swirsky, and others, and features a summation of the year's events, as well as a list of honorable mentions.

Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction introduces and analyses the reception of classical antiquity in contemporary science fiction. By using up-to-date methods from classical reception theory, science-fiction analysis and fictional-world studies, the book will help furnish the reader’s understanding of the ways in which the literature, culture, history and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome are appropriated and represented across multiple media platforms in the science-fiction genre today. The book will therefore serve as an entry point into several areas of study: the reception of classics in popular culture, antiquity in modern media, the uses of the ancient world in science-fiction, and broader science-fiction criticism. The chapters – structured by medium – principally offer a roughly chronological overview of that medium and its treatment of ancient history, mythology, literature and culture. An abundance of case studies from literature, film and television and videogames including Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Fallout: New Vegas, the Mass Effect franchise and Assassin’s Creed show how classical antiquity is reused, encountered, re-encountered by creators and consumers of the present – how we bounce off it, and it bounces off us, and how this reciprocation creates new visions of Greece and of Rome.