Lightspeed: Edited by John Joseph Adams

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Nonfiction

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Robert Charles Wilson

I’ve had an off-and-on fascination with Sandburg’s cycle of designedly American fairy tales for years. They occupy such a strange and interesting literary space—part fable, part poetry, silly and curiously affecting at once. Fragments of phrases from the Rootabaga Stories are permanently lodged in my head.

Nonfiction

Interview: Doug Dorst

I’m a lit geek, always have been, and will probably always identify that way. I think that’s one of the things that at various points I was worried about. “Am I going too far into the lit geek world in a way that’s really alienating to other people?” That was another place where it was great to be working with J.J. and Lindsey, and having people saying, “No, this is interesting. Run with it. If it’s taking you to strange places, by all means. If it’s working, it’s working.”

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Eugene Mirabelli

We humans speak an amazing variety of languages—some of them truly extraordinary compared to our own—but this wonderful plenitude is rapidly disappearing. I wondered what it would be like for one of the last speakers of an onomatopoeia-like language. I imagine that such a terribly lonely speaker would want to preserve it, pass it on, teach it to others.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn

I always planned to tell a story where we meet Harry’s family … and see Harry in her role as Princess Maud. This was it. A story where Harry is balancing her two personae also makes a good fulcrum between what I see as two halves of the series—the early adventures where Harry and Marlowe begin their relationship and we learn about Aetherian technology, and the later stories, where the two will travel all over the world.

Artist Showcase

Artist Showcase: Scott Grimando

Scott Grimando was born in 1968 in New York. He studied at Nassau Community College and Stevenson Academy of Traditional Painting. He maintains dual careers doing work in both advertising and illustration. He works in various mediums, including sketching, painting, digital painting, and photography, often utilizing more than one medium in each work. He has done book illustration work for major publishing houses as well as for Warner Brothers, Disney, Harley Davidson, Lucas Films, Nike, and major sports franchises. His work has been collected in an art book entitled SQP The Art of the Mythical Woman: Lucid Dreams. He currently lives in Long Island. His website is www.grimstudios.com.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Sunny Moraine

One of the things that I think comes up a lot in discussions around representation in fiction—both in terms of characters and authors—is the idea that groups of people are rendered voiceless, that they simply aren’t heard and space is not made for them to speak when they do. Losing one’s voice feels like an especially vicious form of oppression.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Ramez Naam

Sure—you could use direct neural marketing to sell sports cars. But in a lot of ways it’s actually creepier and more interesting when it’s so pervasive that it’s being used to sell something as commonplace as a bottle of water.

Editorial

Editorial, February 2014

This month, we have original science fiction by Jessica Barber (“Coma Kings”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe and the Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition”), along with SF reprints by Ramez Naam (“Water”) and Robert Charles Wilson (“Fireborn”). Plus, we have original fantasy by Sunny Moraine (“So Sharp That Blood Must Flow”) and Ken Liu (“None Owns the Air”), and fantasy reprints by Rachel Swirsky (“Detours on the Way to Nothing”) and Eugene Mirabelli (“Love in Another Language”). All that, and of course, we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a pair of feature interviews. For our ebook readers, we also have the novella reprint “Hellhound” by Robin McKinley and novel excerpts from ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer, DREAMWALKER by C.S. Friedman, and THE TRILLIONIST by Sagan Jeffries.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Rachel Swirsky

I didn’t have any idea where I was going. There was just something about a girl with feathers for hair. I kept writing about her as “the girl with feathered hair” until I realized what that actually meant.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Jessica Barber

I’m an electrical engineer, and I occasionally work building hardware for neuroscience labs, … One day a co-worker and I were having a conversation about what we were jokingly referring to as “brain DJs,” the idea being that you’d take, say, EEG recordings of somebody who was in a deep meditative state (or tripping, or whatever), and then induce somebody else to match their “brain waves” using magnetic stimulation (or flashing lights, or whatever).

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