An unabridged collection of the “best of the best” science fiction stories published in 2013 by current and emerging masters of the genre, edited by Allan Kaster. In “Zero for Conduct,” by Greg Egan, an Afghani teenager, living in a near-future Iran with her exiled grandfather, makes a game-changing superconductor discovery. A young girl struggles to survive on a planet, with a stringent class structure, where Doors are used to go off-world in “Exit, Interrupted,” by C. W. Johnson. “Pathways” by Nancy Kress, follows a teenage girl from a small Kentucky mountain town, in a near-future U. S., struggling with her family and culture as she seeks treatment for Fatal Familial Insomnia. In “Entangled,” by Ian R. MacLeod, an Indian woman, in a Britain turned upside down by a disease that links people’s minds, searches for answers to her personal catastrophe. In “The Irish Astronaut,” by Val Nolan, a colleague brings the ashes of an astronaut, who died in the Aquariusdisaster, to Ireland for final burial. In “Among Us,” by Robert Reed, a government agency goes to extraordinary lengths to identify and track the aliens among us. “A Map of Mercury,” by Alastair Reynolds, showcases the plight of a failed artist dispatched to retrieve an artistic genius from a collective of cyborgs parading across the face of Mercury. In “Martian Blood,” by Allen M. Steele, a researcher from Earth goes on an expedition into the untamed regions of Mars to extract blood from its natives. “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin,” by Michael Swanwick, set in the same milieu as Gene Wolfe’s “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” follows the childhoods of two sisters on a planet far from Earth. Finally, in “The Best We Can,” by Carrie Vaughn, a frustrated scientist pursues first contact among an apathetic populace.

The latest edition of the annual publication boasts new editors and six papers on social cognition in birds compared to primates, predicting cognitive capacity from natural history with examples from four species of corvids, assessing body conditions in birds, avian chemical defense, evaluating the

Tiffani Angus (Ph.D.) and Val Nolan (Ph.D.) met at the 2009 Clarion Writers' Workshop in California and since then have collaborated many times as fans and scholars on panels for SFF conventions and writing retreats. Working together on this book and combining their experience as SFF writers and as university lecturers in Creative Writing and Literature made perfect sense! Every year they see new students who want to write SFF/Horror but have never tried the genres, have tried but found themselves floundering, or, worse, have been discouraged by those who tell them Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror are somehow not "real" literature. This book is for all those future Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror writers. Tiffani and Val are approaching these three exciting fields by breaking them down into bite-sized subgenres with a fun, open, and contemporary approach. Each chapter contains 10 subgenres or tropes, with a quick and nerdy history of each derived from classroom teaching practices, along with a list of potential pitfalls, a description of why it's fun to write in these subgenres, as well as activities for new writers to try out and to get them started!