Outstanding Hard Science Fiction of 2018

Here are 27 outstanding hard science fiction stories from 2018 that were finalists for major SF/F 🏆awards, included in "year's best" SF/F 📙anthologies, or recommended by prolific 👍reviewers in short fiction (see Q&A). That's 27 out of 340+ best SF/F stories from 2018. A story's score is the sum of the +n points in it's "Recommended By" list (click the Details link to see the awards, year's best, and reviewers and the points).


Observations:
Click the links to highlight the stories discussed.

• 12 are free online (highlighted in default view), 5 have podcasts.
• Among 📚publications, it should be no surprise that Analog has the most hard SF stories here with 9 stories (33%), followed by the anthology "Twelve Tomorrows" with 4 stories.
• Among ️️✒️authors, 3 stories are by Ken Liu, followed by 2 stories each by Gregory Benford and Alastair Reynolds.
• Hard SF stories seem under-represented (8%) among SF/F 🏆awards with only 8 stories (and only 3 stories for major awards like Locus and Sturgeon) out of 101 total award-nominated stories from the 2018 Best SF/F. The only winner was "Bubble and Squeak" for the magazine-specific Asimov's Science Fiction Readers' Award.
• They did a bit better (10%) among "year's best" 📙anthologies with 12 stories out of 121 total included stories from the 2018 Best SF/F. Neil Clarke's anthology has 7 of the 12, followed by Rich Horton's anthology with 3.
• They also did poorly (8%) among prolific 👍reviewers with 10 stories out of 123 total award-worthy stories from the 2018 Best SF/F. Jason McGregor thought 6 of the 10 were award worthy (Note: He removed his posts in September, 2019).
• As for RSR, we recommended 13 stories (3 award worthy), were neutral on 11 stories, and only recommended against 3 stories (view by RSR rating).