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Fiction: “Her Husband’s Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro, “The Little Bear” by Justina Robson, “Against Eternity” by David Farland, “Some Fortunate Future Day” by Cassandra Clare.
Nonfiction: “The Care and Feeding of Your Disembodied Lungs” by Lauren Davis, “The Physics of a Populated Universe” by Dr. Pamela Gay, “Saving Your Brain to a Disk” by Jeff Hecht, “Feature Interview: Beth Revis” by Gwenda Bond.
Cover art by Falk Haensel and Francois Beuzelin
Welcome to issue seventeen of Lightspeed! On tap this month … Fiction: “Her Husband’s Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro, “The Little Bear” by Justina Robson, “Against Eternity” by David Farland, “Some Fortunate Future Day” by Cassandra Clare. Nonfiction: “The Care and Feeding of Your Disembodied Lungs” by Lauren Davis, “The Physics of a Populated Universe” by Dr. Pamela Gay, “Saving Your Brain to a Disk” by Jeff Hecht, “Feature Interview: Beth Revis” by Gwenda Bond.
I am always fascinated with the contrast of organic (alive) and mechanic (dead) things on our earth and how they both are somewhat connected.
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.
I will confess that I had absolutely no medical realities in mind when I conceived this story, just the dark emotions that drive it.
We’ve come a long way from cultivating a handful of cancer cells in a lab, and every day scientists learn more about the particular wants and needs of our tissues and organs.
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.
Originally “constellations” was the theme of the anthology this story first appeared in and as soon as the subject was mentioned and I had the project to do I thought of how the patterns in the stars were manmade things.
There could be any number of physical laws in place instead of the ones we know, some of them possibly even more probable than the ones we know. But if other laws existed, we as humans may not.
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.
I had a dream that my brain was trapped in the body of a giant tank-like spaceship, and that I was fighting a war on an alien moon—trying to hide in a crater as enemy ships hunted me.
Mind swaps have been a standard science-fictional prop for decades. Just wire up the brain in a tired old body to something new, turn on the magical mind-transfer machine, and your mind gets downloaded into a new body.
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.
I love the idea of this time period where to them technology was indistinguishable from magic and it served the same function in a lot of ways in their literature that magic does in ours.
Beth Revis is the most common kind of overnight success in publishing—the kind where the author actually worked long and hard for years.
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This issue's cover art by
Chainat / Adobe Stock.
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