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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Nonfiction

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Matthew Hughes

I try to write about serious things with a slightly comic bent. I have to keep reminding myself that there’s a thin line between ironic twists and the descent into buffoonery. Then I have to remind myself to watch for that line and stay on the right side of it.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Sandra McDonald

The word selfie is pretty well known now, thanks to Ellen DeGeneres and the Oscars, but it was relatively new to me until six months ago. I tried to push that word to its logical extension: another self, walking around on a temporary lease for a specified purpose. If I had a selfie, I’d send her off to grade college essays all day while I wrote the great American novel in coffee shops.

Nonfiction

Interview: Jeff VanderMeer

That little bit of dream is really just the kind of catalyst for all the rest of it. The other catalyst for it was really the fact that I have become so enamored of the wildlife and the wilderness of north Florida where I hike a lot, and so I’ve been wanting to write something with a setting that was like that for a while. That kind of combined in my imagination with the dream bits, and then the character came to me, and the situations that the character was in, and then I knew that I had a story.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Fred Van Lente

Any story based in something fantastical, whether it’s superheroes or sword-and-sorcery, needs a human element the reader can latch on to emotionally. I am a huge history buff and read on that subject widely, and I especially love New York City history, where I’ve lived for two decades, so you manage to just pick up details that you can then deploy in a natural way in fiction that seems organic.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Sean Williams

I think the technology is at the point where people can readily log everything they do, if they want to, but it’s not really mainstream yet. There’s no killer app, if I still can use that term without sounding facile. I like the idea of memory aids—and, going even deeper back in time, full-blown nostalgia engines—but I’m not going to do it myself if it takes any effort at all.

Artist Showcase

Artist Showcase: Peter Mohrbacher

Peter Mohrbacher works as a concept artist, illustrator, and Art Lead for projects such as Magic: The Gathering and Dragons of Atlantis. His art has been featured in Spectrum annuals 18, 19, and 20. He lives in San Francisco. His website is www.vandalhigh.com.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Rajan Khanna

I’ve always been drawn to genre mash-ups, I think, because they’re a way to honor traditional tropes and yet cast them in a new light, to essentially play tropes off against one another. For me, the western has always been one of the most adaptable—it works well with fantasy, horror, or even science fiction. For me personally, there’s just something about many of those western tropes that appeals to me.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Nisi Shawl

I was honestly surprised the first time someone asked me what crimes the prisoners in “Deep End” had committed and then wondered why I hadn’t named these offences. Where I come from, imprisonment is largely a given for huge percentages of the population. Whatever one has done doesn’t matter much—punishment is based more on WHO ONE IS.

Editorial

Editorial, May 2014

We have original science fiction by Seth Dickinson (“A Tank Only Fears Four Things”) and Sandra McDonald (“Selfie”), along with SF reprints by Nisi Shawl (“Deep End”) and Sean Williams (“Zero Temptation”). Plus, we have original fantasy by Matthew Hughes (“The Ba of Phalloon,” a Kaslo Chronicles tale) and Fred Van Lente (“Willful Weapon”), and fantasy reprints by Rachel Pollack (“Burning Beard”) and Rajan Khanna (“Second Hand”). All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a pair of feature interviews. For our ebook readers, we also have the novella reprint “Shiva in Shadow” by Nancy Kress and novel excerpts from DEFENDERS by Will McIntosh and THE SILK MAP by Chris Willrich.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Rachel Pollack

A midrash is a story created about characters or events of the Bible, sort of filling in gaps in the text with creative imagination. The original rabbis considered these divinely revealed, and the stories were usually pious. I prefer a modern sensibility and ideas that challenge traditional pieties.

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