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This short story originally appeared in Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction (2005), edited by Andrew J. Wilson and Neil Williamson. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 11 (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Giant Lizards from Another Star (2006).

HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO FOR THE TRUTH?

Ball lightning. Weather balloons. Secret military aircraft. Ryan knows all the justifications for UFO sightings. But when something falls out of the sky on the hills near his small Scottish town, he finds his cynicism can't identify or explain the phenomenon.

And in a future where nothing is a secret, where everything is recorded on CCTV or reported online, why can he find no evidence of the UFO, nor anything to shed light on what occurred? Is it the political revolutionaries, is it the government or is it aliens themselves who are creating the cover-up? Or does the very idea of a cover-up hide the biggest secret of all?

There are ever so many ways to conduct a war. Only a few of them look like war.

This story was anthologized in Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Giant Lizards from Another Star is an anthology containing poems, short stories, convention reports, and essays, as well as the novellas "The Human Front" and "Cydonia".

Table of Contents:

• Caesarian - (2006)
• The Second Law - (2006)
• Birds and Bees and That - (2006)
• Succession - (2006)
• Goddess on Our Side - (2006)
• Jo's Trees - (2006)
• Looking Backward on the Year 2000 - (2006)
• Fall 1991 - (2006)
• The Morlock's Arms - (2006)
• After Burns: 11 September 2002 - (2006)
• One for the Carpenter - (2006)
• Scots Poet, Not - (2006)
• Cydonia - [Web - 8] - (1998)
• The Oort Crowd - (2000)
• Undead Again - (2005)
• Tairlidhe - (2006)
• The Human Front - (2001)
• A Case of Consilience - (2005)
• A Fish Dinner in Helsinki: A Report on Millennium Finncon, 18-20 Aug 2000, Helsinki Finland - (2006)
• 'I Had Seen a Better World' - (2006)
• Seeing Mars from Uppsala - (2006)
• Eight Days in Zagreb - (2006)
• Forty Whacks - (2006)
• Space Station Hinckley - (2006)
• Libertarianism, the Loony Left and the Secrets of the Illuminati - (2006)
• The Falling Rate of Profit, Red Hordes and Green Slime - (2006)
• Science Fiction, Liberty, and Literature - (2006)
• A Brief Critique of Nineteen Eighty-Four as Science Fiction - (2006)
• Trends in Science Fiction - (2006)
• Utopias - (2006) - essay
• Review of The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy - (2006)
• Review: The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy by John Clute and John Grant
• Review of Whole Wide World - (2006)
• Review: Whole Wide World by Paul McAuley - (unknown)
• Singularity Skies - (2003)
• Does Science Fiction Have to Be About the Present? - (2004)
• The Inhabitants of the Planets and the Bottom of the Sea - (2006)
• Not a Good Word to Say - (2006)
• Rewriting Humanity - (2006)
• Space - (2006)
• The Scientist's Apprentice - (2006) - essay
• Scotland and Europe - (2006) - essay
• The Scottish Revolution - (2006) - essay
• Their Snuff-filled Rooms, and A' That - (2006) - essay
• Islands, Funerals, and the Footnotes of Buckle - (2006) - essay
• The Strange Death of Socialist Scotland - (2006) - essay
• The Earth Question - (2006) - essay
• Scottish Politics - (2006) - essay
• Another View of Russian Capitalism - (2006) - essay
• The Joy of Sects - (2006) - essay
• The Pro-War Left and the Anti-War Right - (2006) - essay
• Conspiracy in the Shadow of Hierarchy - (2006) - essay
• The Midnight Fathers - (2006) - essay
• A Canticle for Wojtyla - (2006) - essay
• 2001 and All That - (2006) - essay
• Vietnam War Hero Disappoints War Hawks - (2006) - essay
• Molvania Calls - (2006) - essay
• Free-Market Think-Tanks Out-sourced - (2006) - essay

Imagine a near-future city, say London, where medical science has advanced beyond our own and a single-dose pill has been developed that, taken when pregnant, eradicates many common genetic defects from an unborn child. Hope Morrison, mother of a hyperactive four-year-old, is expecting her second child. She refuses to take The Fix, as the pill is known. This divides her family and friends and puts her and her husband in danger of imprisonment or worse. Is her decision a private matter of individual choice, or is it tantamount to willful neglect of her unborn child? A plausible and original novel with sinister echoes of 1984 and Brave New World.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 1 (2007), edited by Lou Anders, and was reprinted in Apex Magazine, March 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Read the full story for free at Apex.

Humanity has spread to every star within 500 light-years of its half-forgotten origin, coloring the sky with a haze of habitats. Societies rise and fall. Incautious experiments burn fast and fade. On the fringes, less modified humans get on with the job of settling a universe that has, so far, been empty of intelligent life.

The ancient starship But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky! is entering orbit around a promising new system after a four hundred year journey. For its long-lived inhabitants, the centuries have been busy. Now a younger generation is eager to settle the system. The ship is a seed-pod ready to burst.

Then they detect curious electromagnetic emissions from the system's Earth-like world. As the nature of the signals becomes clear, the choices facing the humans become stark.

On Ground, second world from the sun, a young astronomer searches for his system's outermost planet. A moving point of light thrills, then disappoints him. It's only a comet. His physicist colleague Orro takes time off from trying to invent a flying-machine to calculate the comet's trajectory. Something is very odd about that comet's path.

They are not the only ones for whom the world has changed.

"We are not living in the universe we thought we lived in yesterday. We have to start learning the world all over again."

BSFA winning short story. It originally appeared in the anthology disLocations (2007), edited by Ian Whates. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

In the aftermath of the Hard Rapture-a cataclysmic war sparked by the explosive evolution of Earth's artificial intelligences into godlike beings-a few remnants of humanity managed to survive. Some even prospered.

Lucinda Carlyle, head of an ambitious clan of galactic entrepreneurs, had carved out a profitable niche for herself and her kin by taking control of the Skein, a chain of interstellar gates left behind by the posthumans. But on a world called Eurydice, a remote planet at the farthest rim of the galaxy, Lucinda stumbled upon a forgotten relic of the past that could threaten the Carlyles' way of life.

For, in the last instants before the war, a desperate band of scientists had scanned billions of human personalities into digital storage, and sent them into space in the hope of one day resurrecting them to the flesh. Now, armed, dangerous, and very much alive, these revenants have triggered a fateful confrontation that could shatter the balance of power, and even change the nature of reality itself.

Siobhan Ross has several reasons for taking a holiday job on the Isle of Skye - her keen interest in marine biology for one - but she's also determined to escape Glasgow and put distance between herself and a failed relationship with fellow student Kieran.

The last thing Siobhan's looking for is romance, let alone with a Selkie, but...

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction (2011), edited by Ian Whates. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 17 (2013), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Fighting has spread across the Middle East and Central Asia to the borders of China. In the US, refugees from climate-change disaster subsist in FEMA camps. Images of official executions circulate on the Internet like al Qaeda videos. State agencies sponsor conspiracy theories as cover-ups. As the troops of the last superpower stand astride the last of the oil, China and Russia aren't the only states considering their options: certain nations of Old Europe are quietly preparing for the worst.

James Travis is a middle-aged middle manager in a software company. He has a son in the army, a daughter in a peace-protest camp outside a USAF base, and a compromising relationship with a foreign intelligence service. When his cover is blown hours before a nuclear explosion destroys the base, Travis, his son, and his daughter are all in serious trouble. And as the spooks and disinformation specialists focus their efforts on his capture, Travis knows that all it will take is one mistake and his only memorial will be another grainy video on... The Execution Channel.

The weather has gone crazy and the war has spread to China. Jase, Euan and Murdo are laggers: forced workers in a future Scotland. The laggers are helping to lay a new power line in the Highlands. Ailiss, a young woman from a secret settlement in the frozen hills, is going to strain their loyalties to breaking point - and beyond.

This novelette originally appeared as a chapbook. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois.

The Human Front follows the adventures of a young Scottish guerrilla, drawn into low-intensity sectarian war in a high-intensity future, when the arrival of an alien intruder (complete with saucer) calls for new tactics and strange alliances. MacLeod's unique vision is developed even further in a new commentary written especially for this edition, and in his delightful personal account of a Hebridean youth's first encounter with the post-capitalist world. Also featured is our Outspoken Interview showcasing the author's deep erudition and skeptical, mordant wit.

This novella can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Infinities (2002), edited by Peter Crowther. It is included in the collections Giant Lizards from Another Star (2006) and The Human Front (2013).

A bishop is dead. As Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson picks through the rubble of the tiny church, he discovers that it was deliberately bombed. That it's a terrorist act is soon beyond doubt. It's been a long time since anyone saw anything like this. Terrorism is history...

After the Middle East wars and the rising sea levels - after Armageddon and the Flood - came the Great Rejection. The first Enlightenment separated church from state. The Second Enlightenment has separated religion from politics. In this enlightened age there's no persecution, but the millions who still believe and worship are a marginal and mistrusted minority.

Now someone is killing them. At first, suspicion falls on atheists more militant than the secular authorities. But when the target list expands to include the godless, it becomes evident that something very old has risen from the ashes. Old and very, very dangerous...

This short story originally appeared in Nature, July 13, 2000. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 6 (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Giant Lizards from Another Star (2006).

Read the full story for free at Nature.

There is no such place as Krassnia. Lucy Stone should know - she was born there.

In that tiny, troubled region of the former Soviet Union, revolution is brewing. Its organisers need a safe place to meet, and where better than the virtual spaces of an online game? Lucy, who works for a start-up games company in Edinburgh, has a project that almost seems made for the job: a game inspired by The Krassniad, an epic folk tale concocted by Lucy's mother Amanda, who studied there in the 1980s. Lucy knows Amanda is a spook. She knows her great-grandmother Eugenie also visited the country in the '30s, and met the man who originally collected Krassnian folklore, and who perished in Stalin's terror.

As Lucy digs up details about her birthplace to slot into the game, she finds the open secrets of her family's past, the darker secrets of Krassnia's past - and hints about the crucial role she is destined to play in The Restoration Game...

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology The New and Perfect Man (Postscripts #24/25) (2011), edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #98 November 2014. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The New Space Opera (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld, December 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer and War & Space: Recent Combat (2012).

Read the full story for free at Redstone Science Fiction or Clarkesworld.

Winner of a Prometheus and Sidewise Award, this science fiction novella is a comedic and biting commentary on capitalism and an exploration of technological singularity in a posthuman civilization. As a world war rages on without an emerging victor, the story follows John Matheson, an idealistic teenage Scottish guerilla warrior who must change his tactics and alliances with the arrival of an alien species. This alternate history and poignant political satire flips hero types and expectations, delivering a lively tale of adventure--as dramatic and thought provoking as it is funny. Also included is an interview with the author and two essays that relate his poignant views on social philosophies.

Table of Contents:

• The Human Front - (2001)
• Other Deviations: The Human Front Exposed - essay by Ken MacLeod
• The Future Will Happen Here, Too - essay by Ken MacLeod
• "Working the Wet End" - interview of Ken MacLeod by Terry Bisson
• Bibliography

They've died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.

Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners - the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.

With this new found autonomy come new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.

Ken MacLeod continues the Corporation Wars trilogy in this action-packed science fiction adventure told against a backdrop of interstellar drone warfare, virtual reality, and an A.I. revolution.

And the ultimate pay-off is DH-17, an Earth-like planet hundreds of light years from human habitation.

Ruthless corporations vie over the prize remotely, and war is in full swing. But soldiers recruited to fight in the extremities of deep space come with their own problems: from A.I. minds in full rebellion, to Carlos 'the Terrorist' and his team of dead mercenaries, reincarnated from a bloodier period in earth's history for one purpose only - to kill.

But as old rivalries emerge and new ones form, Carlos must decide whether he's willing for fight for the company or die for himself.

The enemy is out in the open. The Reaction has seized control of a resource-rich moon. Now it's enslaving conscious robots - and luring the Corporations into lucrative deals.

Taransay is out in the jungle. Her friends are inside a smart boulder on the slope of an active volcano. The planet is super-habitable - for its own life, not hers. But soon, the alien infestation growing on her robot body is the least of her problems.

Carlos is out of patience. With the Reaction arming for conquest, the Corporations trading with the enemy and the Direction planning to stamp out the rebel robots and their allies for good, he has to fight fire with fire.

Seba is out of time. Deep inside the enemy stronghold, the free robots have to spark a new revolt before the whole world falls in on them.

As battle looms, the robots must become their own last hope.

Matt Cairns is a 21st-century outlaw Programmer who takes on the shady jobs no one else will touch. Against his better judgment, he accepts an assignment to crack the Marshall Titov, a top-secret orbital station operated by the European Space Agency. But what Matt will discover there will propel him on an extraordinary and quite unexpected journey.

Gregor Cairns is an exobiology student and descendant of one of Terra Nova's first families. Hopelessly infatuated with a lovely young trader's daughter, he is unaware that his research partner, Elizabeth, has fallen in love with him. Together, Gregor and Elizabeth confront the great work his family began three centuries earlier-to rediscover the secret of interstellar travel.

Ranging from a gritty near-future Earth to a distant alien world, Cosmonaut Keep is contemporary science fiction at its highest level, a visionary epic filled with daring individuals seeking a place for themselves in a vast, complex, and enigmatic universe.

A Tale of Humans In a Universe of Ubiquitous Alien Life

Intelligence, it turns out, is rare - on planetary surfaces. It thrives everywhere else, from the Oort-cloud fringes of star systems to the magma furnaces beneath planetary crusts. And among the most powerful of the galaxy's intelligences, there are profound differences of opinion about how to deal with surface life-forms such as human beings.

For, untold light years from Earth, the powers that rule the universe have been, for millennia, plucking humans (and other intelligent beings) from Earth and forcibly resettling them in a number of star systems close to one another, leaving them to develop on their own. A few generations ago, a small cadre of humans from Earth's 21st century arrived in this "Second Sphere" on their own power - the first humans ever to do so. Their descendants have formed the "Cosmonaut" class that dominates Mingulay. Now, two hundred years later, Gregor Cairns and a small group of associates have rediscovered faster-than-light travel and traveled to the star system next door. They're determined to find more of the original, mysteriously long-lived cosmonauts. They want answers. And for those answers, they intend to interrogate the gods.

WHO OWNS THE STARS?

For ten thousand years Nova Babylonia has been the greatest city of the Second Sphere, an interstellar civilization of human and other beings who have been secretly removed, throughout history, from Earth.

Now humans from the far reaches of the Sphere have come, to offer immortality-and to urge them to build defenses against the alien invasion they know is coming.

As humans and aliens compete and conspire, the wheels of history will lathe all the players into shapes new and surprising. The alien invasion will reach New Babylon at last-led by the most alien figure of all.

Britain in the 21st century is a Balkanized mess. Moh Kohn is a security mercenary unaware that he holds the key to information which could change the world. Janis Taine is a scientist who needs Mohs help. And a rogue computer program is guiding events to a breathtaking conclusion.

Life on New Mars is tough for humans, but death is only a minor inconvenience. The machines know their place, the free market rules all, and only the Abolitionists object.

Then a stranger arrives on New Mars, a clone who remember his life on Earth as Jonathan Wilde, the anarchist with a nuclear capability who was accused of losing World War III. This stranger also remembers one David Reid, who now serves as New Mars's leader. Long ago, it turns out, Wilde and Reid had shared ideals and fought over the same women.

Moving from 20th-century Scotland through a tumultuous 21st century and outward to humanity's settlement on a planet circling another star, The Stone Canal is idea-driven sci-fi at its best., making real and believable a future where long lives, strange deaths, and unexpected knowledge await those who survive the wars and revolutions to come.

Ellen May Ngewthu is a young woman with centuries of experience, a soldier and leader of the Cassini Division, the elite defense force of the utopian Solar Union. Here in the twenty-fourth century, the forts of the Division, in orbit around a mysteriously transformed Jupiter, are the front line in humanity's long standoff with the unknowable posthumans--godlike and remote beings descended from the people who transformed themselves with high technology centuries ago.

The posthumans' capacities are unknown . . . but we know they disintegrated Ganymede, we know they punched a wormhole into Jovian space, and we know that the very surface of the solar system's largest planet has been altered by their incomprehensible artifacts. Worst of all, we know that they have been bombarding the solar system with powerful data viruses for generations.

Now Ellen has a plan to rid humanity of this threat once and for all. But she needs to recruit the right people to her cause--and convince them to mistrust the posthumans as much as she does.

Her quest will take her to the mid-Atlantic towers of Solar Union Earth, to the green ruins of London, and, in the farthest reaches of human space, to the long-separated libertarian colony of New Mars. In the process, much will be revealed--about history, about power, and about what it is to be human.

Centuries after the catastrophic Deliverance, humanity is again reaching into space. And Clovis, a young scholar working in the spaceship-construction yard, could make the difference between success and failure. For his mysterious new lover, Merrial, has seduced him into the idea of extrapolating the ship's future from the dark archives of the past.

A past in which, centuries before, Myra Godwin faced the end of a different space age--her rockets redundant, her people rebellious, and her borders defenseless against the Sino-Soviet Union. As Myra appealed to the crumbling West for help, she found history turning on her own strange past--and on the terrible decisions she faces now.

The Sky Road is a fireworks display, a bravura performance, and the most amazing novel yet by one of the powerful new voices in science fiction.

When a brilliant scientist gets a letter from herself about faster-than-light travel, she doesn't know what to believe. The equations work, but her paper is discredited - and soon the criticism is more than scientific. Exiled by the establishment, she gets an offer to build her starship from an unlikely source. But in the heights of Venus and on a planet of another star, a secret is already being uncovered that will shake humanity to its foundations.

THE FERMI ARE AWAKE...

The invention of faster-than-light technology has brought great opportunity, but also great danger.

The Black Horizon conspiracy is broken up, but it still has deadly assets beyond the reach of Earth. As the great powers jostle for advantage, the alien minds known as the Fermi have their own ways of dealing with humans meddling in plans vaster and more ancient than anyone can suspect.

After the Venus catastrophe, John Grant's starship Fighting Chance and the Space Station have reached Apis--but not for long. They barely have time to mourn the dead before they're chased out of the system. The Station begins exploring the systems Black Horizon warned them against--with good reason, as they soon discover.

On Apis, Alliance agent Marcus Owen has a new mission: to communicate with the alien intelligences in the rocks, and to stop anyone else from getting to them first. Everyone knows he's a spy, but he's not going to let that cramp his style. But the scientists investigating the rock find that the Fermi may not be the only alien intelligence on Apis...