Welcome to issue fifteen of Lightspeed!

Good news, everyone! “Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed, August 2010) has won the Million Writers Award! So congratulations to Adam-Troy, and many thanks to everyone who voted for the story. (Earlier this year, Lightspeed itself was named the winner of the Million Writers Award for best new online magazine.)

One more quick announcement before we get to this month’s teasers, in case you missed the news last month: The Lightspeed: Year One anthology, collecting all of the fiction we published in our first year (from June 2010-May 2011), will be published by Prime Books in November (pre-order now!). But never fear—all of our content will still be available on lightspeedmagazine.com; this will just be yet another way for readers to find and discover Lightspeed.

With that out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

August 2

“Defenders” by Will McIntosh explores an isolated nation and culture of created beings, who invite their creators for a visit twenty-eight years later.

Then, in the related nonfiction, Jeremiah Tolbert teaches us “Five Ways to End an Alien Invasion.”

August 9

In John Varley’s “Just Another Perfect Day,” Varley attempts to convince us that we’ll be just fine … despite the panic, the amnesia, and the Martians.

Neurotopia’s Evil Monkey is back to talk memory once again in “Forget Everything You Already Know About Amnesia.”

August 16

Genevieve Valentine returns to the fiction section of Lightspeed with “The Nearest Thing,” a future in which emotional entanglement in the work place is even more complicated than we know it now.

Then, Graeme McMillan details the “Four Milestones in the Evolution of Artificial Intelligence” that lead artificial intelligence science to where it is today.

August 23

Connie Willis lets us tag along on a tour of possibility in “Non-Stop to Portales.”

And in our feature interview this month, we interview actor and newly minted author Simon Pegg, about his memoir, his movies, and growing up as a nerd.

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So that’s our issue this month. Thanks for reading!