Fifteen fiction stories, 18 non-fiction and 20 essays on the craft of writing science fiction. One of the fiction pieces is Cal, on a robot who wants to be a writer. His owner, a writer, agrees to program him for the task, but when the robot outdoes the writer in his craft, switches him off.

"Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, traveling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of Earth's first life forms--what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our...

"To save the future, she must return to the beginning. Three years after her best friend Peggy went missing, Harper Starling is lost. Lost in her dead-end job, lost in her grief. All she has are regrets and reruns of her favorite science fiction show, Infinite Odyssey. Then Peggy returns and demands to be taken to the Argonaut, the fictional main character of Infinite Odyssey. But the Argonaut is just that... fictional. Until the TV hero himself appears...

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different; she also possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on...

"Cassandra Penelope Dankworth is a creature of habit. She likes what she likes (museums, jumpsuits, her boyfriend, Will) and strongly dislikes what she doesn't (mess, change, her boss drinking out of her mug). Her life runs in a pleasing, predictable order...until now. She's just been dumped. She's just been fired. Her local caf�e has run out of banana muffins. Then, something truly unexpected happens: Cassie discovers she can go back and change...

"July 25th, 2234: The crew of the Adamura discovers the Anomaly. On the seemingly uninhabited planet Talos VII:a circular pit, 50 kilometers wide. Its curve not of nature, but design. Now, a small team must land and journey on foot across the surface to learn who built the hole and why. But they all carry the burdens of lives carved out on disparate colonies in the cruel cold of space. For some the mission is the dream of the lifetime, for others...

"Idris Telemmier has uncovered a secret that changes everything: the Architects' greatest weakness. A shadowy Cartel scrambles to turn his discovery into a weapon against these alien destroyers of worlds. But between them and victory stands self-interest. The galaxy's great powers would rather pursue their own agendas than stand together against this shared terror. Human and inhuman interests wrestle to control Idris's discovery, as the galaxy erupts...

""The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Almost forty years ago, William Gibson wrote the line that began Neuromancer and, more importantly, cyberpunk-a movement that would change the face of science fiction. Award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five different countries that both establish and subvert the classic cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic-from...

"European Astrobiology Institutes presents fifty-four original SF Stories and Science Essays on "alien" life on Earth and beyond. Science Fiction stories by award-winning speculative fiction authors and accompanying essays by scientists working on the origins of life, habitability, and life detection. What would life be like if it evolved in a cold ocean beneath an impenetrable shell of ice? Or on a world whose haze obscured any view of the universe...

"When the robotic god of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. It killed its priests, its city, and all its wondrous works. But in its final death throes, the god brought one thing back to life: its favorite child, Sunai. For the seventeen years since, Sunai has walked the land like a ghost, unable to die, unable to age, and unable to forget the horrors he's seen. He's run as far as he can from the wreckage of his faith, drowning...