Welcome to issue 157 of Lightspeed Magazine!

While we at Lightspeed are totally committed to careful driving and pedestrian safety, you might not know it from two of our science fiction titles! “Spaceship Joyride,” a new short story by Dominique Dickey about two teens “borrowing” a spaceship, is just as much fun as the title warns you it will be. But Elad Haber’s flash piece, “Jaywalk the Stars,” is packed with desperate consequences. Our other science fiction short, “Queen of the Andes” by Ruth Joffre, also explores the painful consequences of space travel—in contrast to the terrible consequences of staying on our own climate-ravaged planet. We also have a new flash piece from Rich Larson: “Always Personal.”

Sarah Grey brings us a charming fantasy short, “And All the Fields Below,” that will give your heartstrings an enormous yank. Deborah L. Davitt takes a more classical approach in her poignant story “Philoctetes in Kabul”—where by “classical,” we’re talking about ancient Greece. We also have two flash stories: “The Bone-Gatherer’s Lament” from Wendy Nikel and “Bestiary viventem” from Kyle E Miller.

In nonfiction, our spotlight editor, Laurel Amberdine, sits down with our short fiction authors to bring you more insight on their work. The book review team offers an assortment of delightful reads, and of course, our ebook readers also enjoy a book excerpt—this month’s is Spring’s Arcana by Lilith Saintcrow.

Thanks for joining us for another terrific month of speculative fiction!

Publisher’s Note: Kindle Periodicals is Closing, and We Need Your Support More Than Ever.

Many of you have likely already heard about the new existential threat to Lightspeed and all of the other digital magazines in the SF/F/H field: the impending closure, in September, of Amazon’s Kindle Periodicals program. They will be transitioning some magazines into Kindle Unlimited, and so in some respects things may continue as normal if you subscribe via Kindle Periodicals—but this shift will cut severely into the finances of any magazine currently using the service; Lightspeed, for instance, will see our largest source of funding cut it in half. (For additional information about this seismic shift, you can see Neil Clarke’s deep dive into the details at neil-clarke.com/amazon-kindle-subscriptions.)

What We Can Do About This

The best thing you can do if you are a Kindle Periodicals subscriber is to migrate your subscription over to one of our other subscription options. Currently, we have the following options available:

1. Subscribe direct via our website: We have options for 6 month, 12 month, 24 month, and Lifetime subscriptions. We’re in the process of also bringing back the pay-as-you-go monthly subscriptions (i.e., the way Kindle Periodicals currently works) as well. Your issues can be delivered to your Kindle or Kindle app of choice the same way they are via Kindle Periodicals, though they’d appear on your device as regular eBooks rather than the special “periodical” format Kindle Periodicals forced us to use.
2. Subscribe via Weightless Books: Weightless Books’s subscriptions work exactly like our Direct subscriptions, though they only have 6 and 12 month options.
3. Become a Patreon patron: If you just want to support Lightspeed and the other Adamant Press magazines (without getting ebooks in return), you can become one of our Patrons at Patreon. You’d be able to choose any amount that you’d like to pledge to support us, either monthly or annually.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/support for more info about all of the above.

Why We Need Your Support

There are no big companies supporting or funding Adamant Press’s magazines—and Adamant itself is kind of a two-person show—so the magazines really rely on reader support. Because of that, it’s vital for us to keep as many Kindle Periodicals subscribers—which is the vast majority of our subscribers are—as possible during this upheaval. So, please—if you care about the continuation of Lightspeed and any other genre magazines you subscribe to, please take this to heart and help us make this transition.

Thank You for Being a Subscriber

Thanks so much for your generous support over the months or years you’ve been a subscriber. Together, we can ensure that Lightspeed will continue coming to you every month for many years to come.