Lightspeed: Edited by John Joseph Adams

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Editorial

Editorial: September 2025

Welcome to issue 184 of Lightspeed Magazine!

We’re kicking off the month with a new SF short by Kel Coleman: “Last Meal Aboard the Awassa,” a space-faring tale about the importance of gratitude and community in the face of adversity. In C.Z. Tacks’ “The Girlfriend Experience,” we steer into a more cyberpunk-flavored experience. We also have two terrific flash pieces: “The Place I Came To” from Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko and “City of One” by Stephen S. Power.

Our original fantasy includes “Apeiron,” a new short by Cadwell Turnbull that perfectly captures what it’s like to parent a talented and gifted teen . . . but with a magical twist. Isabel J. Kim brings us a beautiful story about sirens, family, and the power of love in “Human Voices.” We also have a flash story (“Beginning Before and After The End”) from Jake Stein and another (“On an Unusual Kind of Spatially Distributed Haunting”) from Bogi Takács.

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team.

John Joseph Adams

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John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and the New York Times bestselling editor of more than forty anthologies, such as Wastelands, A People’s Future of the United States, and Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele). He is also editor (and publisher) of the Hugo Award-winning magazine Lightspeed and is publisher of its sister-magazines Nightmare and Fantasy. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award, a winner of the Stoker,  Locus, and ENNIE awards, and a ten-time World Fantasy Award finalist. In addition to his short fiction work, he’s the co-creator of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, and for five years he was the editor of the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lately, he’s been working as an editor on various TTRPG projects for Kobold Press and Monte Cook Games and as a contributing game designer on books such as Kobold Press’s Tome of Heroes. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com.

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