The second in a series of story groupings based upon a pre-existing work of art, in this case a Richard Anderson painting. The first such group, The Palencar Project, was published by Tor.com in 2012. Judith Moffett is a poet, biographer, and SF writer who somehow manages to blend all these passions in a story about a new art form involving the science of dreaming, and interpreting dreams, and art. Give a poet a painting to write a story about and you get “Space Ballet”, in which students at the Center for Dream Research struggle to interpret a cryptic precognitive dream, a group effort that may avert a disaster. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s stories and novels often evoke a deep desire for some form of utopian future, both better and somehow wilder that the present. This is a story about an animal rights activist and a genius parrot, inter-species communication, and the dream of space, a great leap forward in several ways. Ken Liu is among the most prominent new award-winning SF writers of the last decade, and this vision of a really uncanny alien invasion set in Boston, MA, is a stunner, with echoing reverberations, of love, identity, resistance and revolution. At the publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied

Once again, the finest short-form sf offerings of the year have been collected in a single volume. With Year's Best SF 17, acclaimed, award-winning editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer demonstrate the amazing depth and power of contemporary speculative fiction, showcasing astonishing stories from some of the genre's most respected names as well as exciting new writers to watch. Prepare to travel light years from the ordinary into a tomorrow at once breathtaking, frightening, and possible, with tales of wonder from: Elizabeth Bear Gregory Benford Neil Gaiman Nancy Kress Michael Swanwick and others