We love novellas-they give writers enough room to develop ideas in depth and offer readers a quick fix of entertainment. Each year, Best Short Novels gathers the cream of these longer stories-stories you might otherwise miss-in affordable volumes you can't get anywhere else. For 2006, editor Jonathan Strahan selects nine outstanding works gleaned from small press publishers and the pages of Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog. In Ian McDonald's tale an Asian girl's life is turned upside down when she's chosen to play "The Little Goddess." A search for hte underlying substance of the universe lies at the heart of nefarious doings in Matthew Hughes' "The Gist Hunter." In "Human Readable" by Cory Doctorow, a grid modeled on ant colonies runs the world's infrastructure. A character from a cult TV show comes alive with an important task for a teenage fan in "Magi for Beginners" by Kelly Link. Steven Erikson gives the dreaded school essay, How I Spent My Summer Vacation, an unusual treatment when Jock Junior goes "Fishing with Grandma Matchie." A newly-settled land, whose native species are already endangered by human incursion, opens up before our eyes as Harry Turtledove imagines the adventures of "Audubon in Atlantis." Wil McCarthy's "The Policeman's Daughter tells what happens when a lawyer takes the case of a friend who is being sued by his younger self. Connie Willis offers the take of a professional skeptic his beautiful assistant, and the medium who appears to be channeling famed cynic H.L. Mencken ... but is it for real, or is it an "Inside Job"? and in Jeffrey Ford's fable "The Cosmology of the Wider World," a minotaur escapes the rejecting world of man for a realm where animals live in harmony-a realm that just may have a cure for his loneliness.