Lightspeed: Edited by John Joseph Adams

ADVERT: The Time Traveler's Passport, curated by John Joseph Adams, published by Amazon Original Stories. Six short stories. Infinite possibilities. Stories by John Scalzi, R.F. Kuang, Olivie Blake, Kaliane Bradley, P. Djèlí Clark, and Peng Shepherd. Illustration of A multicolored mobius strip with folds and angles to it, with the silhouette of a person walking on one side of it.

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Science Fiction

The Kingdom of the Blind

The system had been screwy for months. Sydney thought someone had probably been messing with it, introducing bugs or maybe even writing some sort of virus. BHP DMS was an elaborate system.

How Maartje and Uppinder Terraformed Mars (Marsmen Trad.)

As her breath hissed out it thickened and spread and wrapped around the planet. Before long it was pushing everything down; my mother’s breath became the atmosphere of Mars.

Some Fortunate Future Day

Time is many things, her father told her. Time is a circle, and time is a great turning gear that cannot be stopped, and time is a river that carries away what you love.

Against Eternity

The wan gray of polluted skies will weigh on your soul, and you will recall bluer days, and wish for your childhood, when the grass seemed taller and would rub your inner thighs as you rambled through the fields.

The Little Bear

She felt without a shadow of doubt that the expanse of outer space was a bagatelle kind of nothing, compared with the space she’d become aware of as it grew inside her mind: the distance between herself and her husband Guy.

Her Husband’s Hands

They opened the box and showed her Bob’s hands, resting side by side on a white pillow. The left one lay palm-down, the right one palm-up. The one that was palm-up twitched and waggled fingers at Rebecca when it saw her.

The Island of the Immortals

Somebody asked me if I’d heard that there were immortal people on the Yendian Plane, and somebody else told me that there were, so when I got there, I asked about them.

Thief of Futures

“For a man who has stolen so many futures, you seem to have no future yourself.” He lets this painfully accurate assessment seize hold; then he says matter-of-factly, “Is this what you want for your daughter?”

Bubbles

Serena still felt the heat of her passage through Kaluza space. That in­candescent journey via the bowels of a singu­larity had raised her temperature dangerously near the fatal point.

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Ngoraich hadn’t slept that whole month we were in transit. She was a pupating larva, soft and pearly. The spacers didn’t know how to put her into stasis, and even if they could, she wouldn’t notice the difference.

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