Welcome to issue 159 of Lightspeed Magazine!

Scott Edelman returns to our pages with a new piece of science fiction: “The Letters They Left Behind,” the story of a mother torn between her love for her daughter and her duty to her planet. Lowry Poletti writes about the complexity of relationships, human or not, in the story “In the Nest Beneath the Mountain-Tree, Your Sisters Dance.” Our flash stories include “The Things You Can Maintain Yourself” by Benjamin C. Kinney and “Monopticon” from Dani Atkinson.

Our original fantasy shorts include a bloodthirsty tale of dark magic in Sloane Leong’s new story “The Blade and the Bloodwright.” David Anaxagoras mixes faerie with prescribed burns in his short story “The Boy Who Ran from His Faerie Heart.” We also have a flash story (“All the Colours of the Death Knell”) from Russell Hemmell, and another (“You Will Not Live to See M/M Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension”) from Isabel J. Kim.

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt from Katy Rose Pool’s new novel, Garden of the Cursed.

Publisher’s Note: Kindle Periodicals is Closing, and We Need Your Support More Than Ever.

Many of you have likely already heard about the new existential threat to Lightspeed and all of the other digital magazines in the SF/F/H field: the impending closure, in September, of Amazon’s Kindle Periodicals program. They will be transitioning some magazines into Kindle Unlimited, and so in some respects things may continue as normal if you subscribe via Kindle Periodicals—but this shift will cut severely into the finances of any magazine currently using the service; Lightspeed, for instance, will see our largest source of funding cut it in half. (For additional information about this seismic shift, you can see Neil Clarke’s deep dive into the details at neil-clarke.com/amazon-kindle-subscriptions.)

What We Can Do About This

The best thing you can do if you are a Kindle Periodicals subscriber is to migrate your subscription over to one of our other subscription options. Currently, we have the following options available:

1. Subscribe direct via our website: We have options for 6 month, 12 month, 24 month, and Lifetime subscriptions. We’re in the process of also bringing back the pay-as-you-go monthly subscriptions (i.e., the way Kindle Periodicals currently works) as well. Your issues can be delivered to your Kindle or Kindle app of choice the same way they are via Kindle Periodicals, though they’d appear on your device as regular eBooks rather than the special “periodical” format Kindle Periodicals forced us to use.
2. Subscribe via Weightless Books: Weightless Books’s subscriptions work exactly like our Direct subscriptions, though they only have 6 and 12 month options.
3. Become a Patreon patron: If you just want to support Lightspeed and the other Adamant Press magazines (without getting ebooks in return), you can become one of our Patrons at Patreon. You’d be able to choose any amount that you’d like to pledge to support us, either monthly or annually.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/support for more info about all of the above.

Why We Need Your Support

There are no big companies supporting or funding Adamant Press’s magazines—and Adamant itself is kind of a two-person show—so the magazines really rely on reader support. Because of that, it’s vital for us to keep as many Kindle Periodicals subscribers—which the vast majority of our subscribers are—as possible during this upheaval. So, please—if you care about the continuation of Lightspeed and any other genre magazines you subscribe to, please take this to heart and help us make this transition.

Thank You for Being a Subscriber

Thanks so much for your generous support over the months or years you’ve been a subscriber. Together, we can ensure that Lightspeed will continue coming to you every month for many years to come.