Book excerpt: A banner year for speculative fiction has yielded a crop of superb short form SF. Now the very best to appear over the past twelve months has been amassed into one extraordinary volume by acclaimed editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, offering bold visions of days to come that are bright, triumphant, breathtaking, and strikingly unique. Once more, celebrated masters of the field join with exciting new voices to sing of explorations and invasions, grand technological accomplishments, amazing flights into the unknown, horrors and miracles, and the human condition. Welcome to amazing worlds that could be -- and, perhaps, sooner than you have ever dared to imagine. New tales from: Gregory Benford Terry Bisson James Patrick Kelly Pamela Sargent Jack McDevitt Gene Wolfe and more