Welcome to issue 194 of Lightspeed!

This month’s fiction kicks off with “Waru Waru,” an original fantasy story by Ruth Joffre about the power of memory and family. In “The Punishing Animal,” B. Pladek brings the fantastic into a grim climate future. We also have a flash story (“Hungry Like The”) from E. Catherine Tobler and another (“Concerto for Wartime”) from Sean Williams. If you like your SF a little hard-boiled, don’t miss “The Assumption of Maria,” a detective story from Max Gladstone, which we’re publishing in partnership with Dartmouth University and MIT Press (see below). We’ve also got a bonus reprint this month: “Down in the Dim Kingdoms” by Tobias S. Buckell. V.M. Ayala brings us a beautiful story of love and bodily modification in “If a Discarded God Can Change, So Can I.” We also have two terrific flash pieces: “You, Me, Us” from Oyedotun Damilola Muees and “FETSPACE” by Rhiannon Rasmussen. There’s all that, plus our usual assortment of author spotlight interviews and our book reviews.

Android in the Archives

Starting this month, we’ll be featuring one story per issue from the forthcoming fiction + nonfiction anthology Android in the Archives (lightspeedmagazine.com/android), which will be published by MIT Press in 2027. Through design activities, panels, symposia and a mountain lodge retreat, the editors and authors collaboratively imagined worlds that interrogate the future humanity is heading towards. The fiction was edited by Sharang Biswas and Liz Gorinsky, which was done in collaboration with academic editor Rebecca Clark, along with project leads Solomon Diamond and Paula Olson, and contributing academic authors Jacqueline Wernimont and Eugene Korsunskiy. The first of the stories we’ll be featuring is the above referenced Max Gladstone story; there will be other stories forthcoming from Brooke Bolander, Rob Cameron, Nibedita Sen, K. M. Szpara, Sam J Miller, Alice Sola Kim, and Andrea Kriz, plus a story by Dartmouth student Sanjana Raj.

All Good Things…

All good things must come to an end: This month we say a fond farewell to our friend and longtime Senior Editor, Wendy N. Wagner. Please join us in thanking her for all her 12+ years of dutiful service to the magazine. She will be dearly missed!

But as one door closes, another one opens: Just as our one longtime friend says goodbye, we’re saying hello again to someone who was with Lightspeed right at the very beginning: Christie Yant. She’ll be coming back into the editorial trenches, taking over Senior Editor duties for Wendy.

THANK YOU, Wendy, for everything you’ve contributed to Lightspeed over the years. You’ve undoubtedly helped shape it into what it has become, and it won’t be the same without you. <HUGE HUGS> 💖💖💖