"These are good times for the novella," says editor Jonathan Strahan. The Best Science Fiction Short Novels of the Year offers nine of these "marvels of compression"-a selection of the best novellas published in 2003. In "The Green Leopard Plague," Walter Jon Williams tells of a philosopher who develops a way to make human skin photosynthetic-ending starvation as a tool of oppression. But his breakthrough has unforeseen repercussions? John C. Wright describes life in a distant future after the sun has gone out and true humans are confined to a single giant pyramid in "Awake in the Night." William Barton sends an sf-loving teen "Off on a Starship"-an automated probe that carries him across space to a world where he's all alone, except for a robot that becomes increasingly? female. And in "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know," Connie Willis imagines the ultimate global warming effect: a freak snowstorm that effectively shuts down North America. From a distant future where both beer and rebellion brew in a tavern on Mars to an alternate WWII where the cutting-edge science is quantum biology? from a haunting story of a bizarre prison without guards or rules to a Bradbury-esque tale of small-town America, The Best Science Fiction Short Novels of the Year is a must-have collection for sf readers.