Welcome to issue seventeen of Lightspeed!

Alas! Lightspeed did not win any Hugo Awards this year (we were 0-3), but it truly was an honor to be nominated. (And hey, we did get some frickin’ sweet rocket pins for being nominees.) Congratulations to Mary Robinette Kowal, Clarkesworld, and Sheila Williams for defeating us in each respective category, and congratulations to all of the other winners as well. And thanks again to everyone who nominated us and voted for us.

In other, better news: While we didn’t win any Hugos, Lightspeed did win a Parsec Award! Presented at Dragoncon over Labor Day weekend, the Parsec Awards—which honor excellence in genre podcasting—presented the award for Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form) to “Saying the Names” by Maggie Clark, from the March 2011 issue of Lightspeed. So congratulations to Maggie Clark, to the story’s narrator, Emily Janice Card, to our audio editor Stefan Rudnicki, and to everyone else on the Lightspeed podcasting team.

That’s all the news there is to report this month, but don’t forget: 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!).

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

October 4

We welcome back author Adam-Troy Castro, who brings us a story of complicated human relationships, in which the people involved have to question what it is exactly that makes us human in “Her Husband’s Hands.”

In the related nonfiction, Lauren Davis explains the ins-and-outs of organ transplantation in “The Care and Feeding of Your Disembodied Lungs.”

October 11

Justina Robson gives the story of a family separated—definitely in space, but also possibly in time—in “The Little Bear.”

Dr. Pamela Gay explains the coincidence of life and quantum mechanics in “The Physics of a Populated Universe.”

October 18

In “Against Eternity” author David Farland takes us through a far-future transformation in pursuit of immortality.

Jeff Hecht explores the possibilities and pitfalls of downloading yourself into a computer in his article “Saving Your Brain to a Disk.”

October 24

And in the last, but not least of our fiction offerings this month, we have, from Candlewick Press’s new Steampunk! anthology, Cassandra Clare’s tale of a lonely girl and her clockwork dolls: “Some Fortunate Future Day.”

In our feature interview this month, Gwenda Bond talks with Beth Revis, author of Across the Universe, about writing YA and SF, and cryosleep and genetic-engineering.

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