Welcome to issue eighteen of Lightspeed!

No news to report this month, but by the time this issue comes out, I will have already won (or lost) one (or two) World Fantasy Awards; at press time, however, my fate was still unknown. So until the end of October, think of them as Schrödinger’s Awards—until one of you looks up the winners, I’m in a superposition: I’ve both won and lost the awards until you observe the results, thereby forcing the quantum waveform to collapse and my cat to huff some poisonous gas. Or something like that.

Finally, after months of teasing you with the forthcoming release date, the Lightspeed: Year One anthology, collecting all of the fiction we published in our first year (from June 2010-May 2011), is out this month (so order now!). And remember, 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:

November 1

Martian folklore is brought to life in Lisa Nohealani Morton’s powerful debut, “How Maartje and Uppinder Terraformed Mars (Marsmen Trad.).”

Then, writer/astrophysicist Alan Smale explains how to actually terraform Mars in his article “Planetary Alchemy.”

November 8

Maureen McHugh brings us a story of an AI discovered in an unlikely place, by an unlikely heroine, in “The Kingdom of the Blind.”

In our feature interview this month, China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station and The City & The City, joins us to discuss Dungeons & Dragons, international relations, and his recent science fiction novel Embassytown.

November 15

New writer Mark Pantoja channels Ray Bradbury and Brian Aldiss as he examines what might happen to smart houses and machines after their inhabitants and operators are long gone in his first published story, “Houses.”

Carol Ann Moleti explores the science of smart houses, robots, and artificial intelligence in her article, “Back to the Future.”

November 22

In John Crowley’s “Snow” we examine the grief, memory, and the memorials of the future.

And last, but not least, Graeme McMillan studies the science and history of corpse preservation, from mummification to cryonics, in his article “Keeping the Dead Among the Living.”

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