Lightspeed: Edited by John Joseph Adams

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Sep. 2025 (Issue 184)

We have original science fiction by C.Z. Tacks (“The Girlfriend Experience”) and Kel Coleman (“Last Meal Aboard the Awassa”). We also have two terrific flash pieces: “The Place I Came To” from Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko and “City of One” by Stephen S. Power. Plus, we have original fantasy by Isabel J. Kim (“Human Voices”) and Cadwell Turnbull (“Apeiron”). We also have a flash story (“Beginning Before and After The End”) from Jake Stein, and another (“On an Unusual Kind of Spatially Distributed Haunting”) from Bogi Takács. All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team.

Sep. 2025 (Issue 184)

Editorial

Editorial: September 2025

Be sure to read the editorial for a rundown of this month’s great fiction.

Science Fiction

Last Meal Aboard the Awassa

Gardener ladled dark-purple porridge into her primary digestion sac, staring absently out the viewport at black space and the distant smudge of the planet they had come to study. The simple meal and the gesture it represented soothed her after a long, thorny morning in a section of the growth bay that was in full flower and had needed hand pollinating. Though the other crew members around the mess made do with the usual break time assortment, Cook had steamed and spiced osard grains just for her before going off shift to nap in their rooms.

Fantasy

Beginning Before and After the End

I’m going to explain everything, I promise, but we don’t have much time. For now, you just have to trust me. In three seconds, I need you to raise your right hand. You know, like you’ve got a question in school. (Shouldn’t be too hard; I know you’ve got tons of questions.) Okay—wonderful. By now you must have raised your hand, or we’d both be gone already.

Nonfiction

Book Review: Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon by Mizuki Tsujimura, translated by Yuki Teijima

Feeling contemplative or in the mood for something poignant? Chris Kluwe recommends Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon by Mizuki Tsujimura and translated by Yuki Teijima.

Author Spotlight

Science Fiction

The Place I Came To

The place I came from, the port across the sea of stars, the isle town edged with sturgeon scales, was built on basalt. The place I came to, the city at the centre of the field of view, the once-ringed origin of dreams, was too large and too important to answer to a single kind of rock, but the first I encountered there was an unpolished railing of coarse-grained granite—the kind that leaves little slivers behind in your palm, but when you go to investigate you find they are only imprints where stone has been.

Publishes Online on 9/11

Fantasy

Apeiron

Outside the cabin, there was snow. There had always been snow, far as the eye could see, and further still. It might be true that the snow extended forever in every direction, sitting heavy on mountaintops and green pines, on frozen lakes and frigid tundra. Asha hadn’t tried to go very far from the cabin. […]

Publishes Online on 9/11

Author Spotlight

Nonfiction

Book Review: Novic by Eugen Bacon

If you’re looking for a quick, absorbing read with a lot more depth than you’d expect from a novelette, check out Novic by Eugen Bacon.

Publishes Online on 9/11

Science Fiction

The Girlfriend Experience

The company man’s smile showed off his perfect teeth. Evie hated that smile; it meant he was going to kill her again. Him staring down the camera above the Manic Pixie’s door didn’t help. Even with the dead pixels mildewing the monitor, Evie got the full gut-liquidating effect.

Publishes Online on 9/18

Author Spotlight

Fantasy

On an Unusual Kind of Spatially Distributed Haunting

Dear Dr. Erzsébet Krajcsik-Nagy,

I am contacting you as a member of the general public, and not as a fellow scholar, though I must say my chosen field of art history does have certain similarities to yours. I read the interview with you in the online edition of the Plains Dispatch with great interest, and went on to seek out your research article mentioned therein, titled “On an Unusual Kind of Spatially Distributed Haunting.” I believe I have additional information which could shed light on the case study you mentioned.

Publishes Online on 9/18

Nonfiction

Book Review: Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou

If you immediately understand this phrase, and you get it on an emotional level, then these stories will probably speak to you in ways that they might not otherwise.

Publishes Online on 9/18

Science Fiction

City of One

In City of One, the object is to avoid being seen.

  • You begin at a random point in the city. If you are seen, you die.
  • You cannot leave the city. If you try, you die.

Publishes Online on 9/25

Fantasy

Human Voices

In its dreams, the thing they call “Kos” sleeps deep and drowned in the clutch of the ice-cold trenches, where the pressure is a loving clasp around its arms and tail, where it is near-disintegrate, more spirit than substance, more magic than meat. Then it wakes up in the bathtub. The deoxygenated water filters tepidly […]

Publishes Online on 9/25

Author Spotlight

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