Welcome to issue fifty-five of Lightspeed!

The World Fantasy Awards were presented in early November at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington, D.C. Your humble editor was once again nominated for the award . . . and again managed to lose, for the sixth-consecutive nomination! But many other wonderful folks won, including a lifetime achievement award for our illustrious guest editor of our sister-magazine Nightmare’s Women Destroy Horror! special issue, Ellen Datlow. Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees! (If you’d like to see a complete list, visit worldfantasy.org/awards.)

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

We have original science fiction by Shale Nelson (“Pay Phobetor”) and Vandana Singh (“Wake-Rider”), along with SF reprints by N. K. Jemisin (“Valedictorian”) and Paul Park (“The Lost Sepulcher of Huascar Capec”). We also have a bonus story to wrap up this year: a reprint of “They Tell Me There Will Be No Pain,” by Rachael Acks, which first appeared in the limited edition of June’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue.

Plus, we have original fantasy by Nik Houser (“The Drawstring Detective”) and Damien Angelica Walters (“A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take”), and fantasy reprints by Delia Sherman (“The Faerie Cony-Catcher”) and Nalo Hopkinson (“Soul Case”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with authors Kim Harrison and Steven Gould.

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint: “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” by John Crowley. We also have excerpts from Undercity by Catherine Asaro and from Sergei Lukyanenko’s new novel, The Genome. This issue is brought to you by this month’s sponsor, and publisher of Genome, Open Road Media. Learn more about them at openroadmedia.com.

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!