Award-winning anthologists Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden have combed through a year's worth of books and magazines and websites to find the most outstanding fantasy and science fiction stories of 2004--and collected them into a single volume aimed specifically at teens and young adults.
Many of today's most popular authors are represented here, including:
* Garth Nix, author of "Sabriel," "Lirael," and "Abhorsen," who presents an unforgettable tale of two swords, two daughters, and two endings....
* S. M. Stirling, author of "Island in the Sea of Time," sends a likeable young barbarian across the Channel to Alba, for a confrontation with a wizard from faraway Nantucket that will change his life forever...
* David Gerrold, creator of "The Trouble with Tribbles," who takes you to a remote countryside surrounded by a mysterious darkness, whose secret has yet to be revealed...

"Twenty-First Century Science Fiction" is an enormous anthology of short stories--close to 250,000 words--edited by two of the most prestigious and award-winning editors in the SF field and featuring recent stories from some of science fiction's greatest up-and-coming authors.
David Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden have long been recognized as two of the most skilled and trusted arbiters of the field, but "Twenty-First Century Science Fiction" presents fans' first opportunities to see what their considerable talents come up with together, and also to get a unique perspective on what's coming "next" in the science fiction field.
The anthology includes authors ranging from bestselling and established favorites to incandescent new talents including Paolo Bacigalupi, Cory Doctorow, Catherynne M. Valente, John Scalzi, Jo Walton, Charles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, and Peter Watts, and the stories selected include winners and nominees of all of the science fiction field's major awards.

One of "Publishers Weekly"'s Best Science Fiction Books of 2013

Five original tales set in a shared urban future--from some of the hottest young writers in modern SF
More than an anthology, "Metatropolis "is the brainchild of five of science fiction's hottest writers--Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Karl Schroeder, and project editor John Scalzi---who combined their talents to build a new urban future, and then wrote their own stories in this collectively-constructed world. The results are individual glimpses of a shared vision, and a reading experience unlike any you've had before.
A strange man comes to an even stranger encampment...a bouncer becomes the linchpin of an unexpected urban movement...a courier on the run has to decide who to trust in a dangerous city...a slacker in a "zero-footprint" town gets a most unusual new job...and a weapons investigator uses his skills to discover a metropolis hidden right in front of his eyes.
Welcome to the future of cities. Welcome to "Metatropolis."

For the first time in paperback, the culminating novel of Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Jo Walton's stunning Small Change trilogy.
Following the award-winning "Farthing" and its sequel" Ha'penny," "Half a Crown" is an amazing alternate-world noir tale of resistance to encroaching fascism, from the author of "Among Others."
In 1941 the European war ended in the Farthing Peace, a rapprochement between Britain and Nazi Germany. The balls and banquets of Britain's upper class never faltered, while British ships ferried "undesirables" across the Channel to board the cattle cars headed east.
Peter Carmichael is commander of the Watch, Britain's distinctly British secret police. It's his job to warn the Prime Minister of treason, to arrest plotters, to discover Jews. The midnight knock of a Watchman is the most dreaded sound in the realm.
Now, in 1960, a global peace conference is convening in London, where Britain, Germany, and Japan will oversee the final partition of the world. Hitler is once again on British soil. So is the long-exiled Duke of Windsor--and the rising gangs of "British Power" streetfighters, who consider the Government "soft," may be the former king's bid to stage a coup d'etat.
Amidst all this, two of the most unlikely persons in the realm will join forces to oppose the fascists: a debutante whose greatest worry until now has been where to find the right string of pearls, and the Watch Commander himself.
"A literary Guernica--a top-notch thriller set in a terrified Britain that is all too willing to trade freedom for security, and which gets neither." --Cory Doctorow on "Ha'penny"

Before Jo Walton won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for her stunning "Among Others, " she published a trilogy set in a dark alternate postwar England that had negotiated "Peace with Honor" with Nazi Germany in 1941. These novels--"Farthing, Ha'penny, "and "Half a Crown"--are connected by common threads, but can be read in any order.
In "Ha'penny, " England has completed its slide into fascist dicatorship. The last hopes of democracy seem extinguished. Then a bomb explodes in a London suburb.
The brilliant but compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists--of staunch King-and-Country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen--to murder the Prime Minister and his ally, Adolf Hitler.
Against a background of domestic espionage and suppression, a band of idealists blackmails an actress who holds the key to the Fuhrer's death. From the ha'penny seats in the theatre to the ha'pennys that cover dead men's eyes, the conspiracy and the investigation swirl inexorably to a stunning conclusion.