Lightspeed: Edited by John Joseph Adams

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Science Fiction Podcasts

Science Fiction

Feast of Famine

The buffet was infinite. It existed in a pocket dimension, via some sort of technological jiggering of the sort that you have heard about before and, unless you are totally anal, don’t want to hear about now.

Science Fiction

Five Dispatches from Conflict Zone W-924/B Regarding Post-Battle Deployment of A. Thanatensis

Dispatch #1. [INAUDIBLE] . . . but hopefully I’ve got the recorder working now. This is Dr. Nathaniel Letheford, Director, Alliance for Military Neutralization and Eradication of Sensitive Incidents and Atrocities. I have been inserted into conflict zone W-924/B for sample collection.

Science Fiction

Finding Love in a Time Loop: A How-To Guide

We all know, by now, how common time loops are. In less than a decade, they’ve moved from the realm of SF movies into the slightly less-realistic realm of self-help books—most famously, Moving On: How to Keep Going When Time Literally Stops.

Science Fiction

Domestic Disputes

Once upon a time, on a spaceship traveling through the divide between galaxies, a married couple was bickering about whose job it was to clean the mouse shit that’d accumulated in the reactor tubes.

Science Fiction

How to Win Against the Robots

Mom lives in a little place off the old meat-packing district, the streets full of cobblestones peeking through asphalt as hipsters turn the bones of slaughterhouses into bespoke gin bars. It’s expensive.

Science Fiction

The Lord of Mars

The grow pods clung to a red, humped ridge about a twenty-minute hike west from the habitats. Inside one of their plastic domes, a farmer named Oliver Judd nestled potato starts in the ground with nimble hands. It was tricky work in a forty-pound outside suit.

Science Fiction

All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

It had been a long day of convention. All I wanted was a quiet drink in the hotel bar and quality time in my room with a romance novel. The utter cad from Planetary Industries was an unanticipated bubble in the fuel line.

Science Fiction

See Now the Misfortune of the Thinking Tenax

See now the misfortune of the thinking tenax. It is alone. The other tenaces have been chased away. Their gore stains the thinking tenax’s mandibles, and its roar drives them further back. Their flickering eyes peer out from behind feldspathic spires.

Science Fiction

The Twenty-One Second God

We lost so many souls today. Reports stream in across five continents; icons bloom on the map like blood spatters. Broken filters, zero latency, bandwidth that somehow blew through the roof when no one was looking. The hardware plays catch-up as best it can.

Science Fiction

The Meaning We Seek

In the pre-dawn light she lies in bed, gazing through the window at graceful trees silhouetted against a turquoise sky. The air is still, the pretty room orderly and calm. She lies motionless except for her eyes, the soft blue quilt rising and falling with her breath. At a hundred years old, breath is shallow. It will not be long now. I am remembering for her, vivid visions linked to her mind through implants and nanos and software.

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