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.

Advertisement

Nonfiction

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Jeremiah Tolbert

Meaningful science fiction stories are really about the human condition, or so I’ve been told enough times that I’ve begun to believe it. We’re a pretty self-centered species at a fundamental level, so a story that deals only with an extremely “alien” entity would not be very satisfying to our need for stories. At the core of any story, there has to be a human soul, regardless of how dressed up it is as “other.”

Nonfiction

Interview: Margaret Atwood

I think utopia and dystopia are essentially flipsides of the same form, and that every utopia has a dystopia concealed within it. And every dystopia has got a utopia concealed within it, otherwise you wouldn’t have anything to judge the “bad” by.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: William Browning Spencer

A great deal of what I like about this story is what isn’t there. It is meant to be mystical and elegiac, which is life, as I understand it. I don’t know how Lena lost her place in the strange world that begins this story, but I know that poetry sustains that world, and it will die if it doesn’t regain its Muse, its inspiration.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Gregory Benford

Take away those who hold a major belief system and yes, society alters. Those left behind have their beliefs shaken. Those transported greet a new world, and though somewhat reassured, have a hard time and many questions. It’s a huge reset.

Nonfiction

Interview: Jay Lake

I grew up overseas in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. This was before satellite TV, VCRs, and media globalization. This meant we relied almost entirely on books for entertainment, even while my age cohort was growing up as the second television generation. Because of living in odd places with limited resources, the reading material was often eclectic. I wound up with the reading habits and history of an SF fan ten or twenty years my senior, and virtually no television or movie viewing history at all.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Siobhan Carroll

When I encountered JANE EYRE again in graduate school, I was in for a bit of a shock. This was not the dull, safe story I remembered. It was a novel out of Victorian nightmare, clawing against the constraints of its historical period. And this time it was clearly, to my eyes, a fantasy novel: It features a young Orphan With A Destiny adventuring across a landscape infused with fairy-tale imagery.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Maureen McHugh

I wrote “Dead Fads” because a friend was thinking of doing an anthology based around the idea that there was a technology that could resurrect the recently dead but that it left them “tainted.”

Artist Showcase

Artist Showcase: Halil Ural

Halil Ural was born in Turkey in 1983. He grew up with the pop culture and cartoons of the ’80s and ’90s and has been passionate about drawing since childhood. He studied at the Istanbul High School of Fine Arts, where he concentrated on drawing and painting, and the Marmara Faculty of Fine Arts, from which he graduated in 2006 with a degree in graphic design. He currently works in the medium of digital painting as a freelance science fiction/fantasy illustrator and concept artist for book publishers, game developers, and advertising firms. His website is mrdream.deviantart.com.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: James Patrick Kelly

I am very aware of the story clock that ticks in the background of all fiction. The shorter the story, the faster the clock ticks.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: David Barr Kirtley

One book I read as a kid claimed that when knights traveled east to attack Jerusalem during the Crusades, they sometimes got so hot that their sweat filled up their armor, drowning them. That was still fresh in my mind, so when John suggested I write a power armor story, I got the idea of a critical flaw in someone’s otherwise invincible armor that would cause the suit to fill with fluid, drowning them.

ADVERTISEMENT: Robot Wizard Zombie Crit! Newsletter (for Lightspeed, Nightmare, and John Joseph Adams' Anthologies)
Discord Wordmark
Keep up with Lightspeed, Nightmare, and John Joseph Adams' anthologies, as well as SF/F news and reviews, discussion of RPGs, and more.

Delivered to your inbox once a week. Subscribers also get a free ebook anthology for signing up.
Join the Lightspeed Discord server to chat and share opinions with fellow Lightspeed readers.

Discord is basically like a cross between a instant messenger and an old-school web forum.

Join to chat about SF/F short stories, books, movies, tv, games, and more!