Welcome to issue twenty-four of Lightspeed!

In case you missed the news last month, Lightspeed has again been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine, and your humble editor is again up for the Hugo Award for Best Editor (Short Form). We’re all very excited to be nominated again, and we’re hugely honored to be so recognized. Thanks so much to all of you who nominated us, and congratulations to all of the other nominees.

In other news, we’re having a bit of a sale on our older ebooks; we currently have all of our 2010 issues on sale for just 99 cents. So if you haven’t already got the whole set, now would be a great time to pick up those 2010 back issues.

This month, we have original science fiction by Linda Nagata (“Nightside on Callisto”) and C. C. Finlay (“The Cross-Time Accountants Fail To Kill Hitler Because Chuck Berry Does The Twist”) and SF reprints by Nicola Griffith (“Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese”) and David Langford (“Different Kinds of Darkness”).

We also have original fantasy by Dale Bailey (“The Children of Hamelin”) and Melanie Rawn (“Mother of All Russiya”), along with fantasy reprints by Catherynne M. Valente (“A Hole to China”) and the late Kage Baker (“The Ruby Incomparable”).

Our ebook-exclusive fiction this month is not a novella, but it is novella-length: It’s part one of a two-part serial–the short novel The Cosmology of the Wider World by Jeffrey Ford. Look for part one in this issue, and for the conclusion in our June issue.

In our ebook edition, we’ll also have an excerpt of Paolo Bacigalupi’s new young adult novel The Drowned Cities, plus . . .

Our issue this month is again sponsored by our friends at Orbit Books. Look for 2312, the new novel by visionary SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson, available in bookstores everywhere on May 22. (You can also read the prologue to the novel in this very issue!) You can find more from Orbit—including digital short fiction and monthly ebook deals—at www.orbitbooks.net.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And remember, there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content:

• Newsletter: lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter
• RSS feed: lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2
• Twitter: @lightspeedmag
• Facebook: facebook.com/lightspeedmagazine
• Google+: plus.google.com/100415462108153087624
• Subscribe: lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Speaking of our content, if you’d like to help other connoisseurs of quality literature like yourself discover Lightspeed, posting reader reviews on sites like Amazon.com and BN.com can help a lot, as positive reviews and/or a high star-rating is a significant contributing factor to readers trying out something new. Reviews of individual issues are, of course, much appreciated, and if you’re a subscriber, please also consider posting a review on the magazine’s subscription page (at Amazon or Weightless Books).

And, finally, if you enjoy listening to stories as much as you like reading them, be sure to check out our podcast, in which we present four stories every month in audiobook-style, audio format. Our podcast is produced by Audie- and Grammy Award-winning narrator and producer Stefan Rudnicki’s Skyboat Road Company, Inc., in association with Ted Scott’s 50 Nugget Wash Productions.

If you haven’t listened before, and you’d like to start, you can go to the podcast category on our website at lightspeedmagazine.com/podcasting to find all of the stories we’ve podcasted. You can listen to them right in your browser, or download them to your computer (or your smartphone or MP3 player) for listening to later. And, of course, you can subscribe to the podcast feed using your favorite podcatching software. The most popular podcatcher is Apple’s iTunes, and the easiest way to subscribe is to just go into the iTunes store and search for Lightspeed Magazine, then click on the “Subscribe Free” button. Or, you can just click this link, and it’ll take you right to it in the iTunes store.

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