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I’m in the process of clearing the decks of contracted stories. I think I need to take a deep breath and write a few stories that are not on demand and not to deadline. I’ve had a few years of taking on a lot of short-story commitments, and I need to just write a few stories that arise naturally, that insist on being written for their own sake. I have no idea what they will be.
Welcome to issue thirty-eight of Lightspeed! We’ve got another great issue for you this month; read the editorial to see what we have on tap.
It seemed a beautiful image of sunlight made solid, of the fact that food is sunlight. At the beginning of the story, Alan reflects that the light of the sun is still present, even in the darkness, in the energy that’s fuelling his and Jan’s bodies as they break into the lab. In a way, he’s already made of light.
I think that ultra-specialization will continue to be the trend until advances in AI/robotics begin to surpass all human abilities, at which point we will all be generalists again because there will be no point in devoting your life to a single narrow occupation (like writing!) just to be half as good as a machine. I’d also note that the benefits of specialization may outweigh the costs. My short story is a dystopia, but that may only be because it doesn’t show all of the benefits of specialization.
Robert J. Sawyer—called “the dean of Canadian science fiction” by The Ottawa Citizen and “just about the best science-fiction writer out there these days” by The Denver Rocky Mountain News—is one of only eight writers in history (and the only Canadian) to win all three of the science-fiction field’s top honors for best novel of the year: the Hugo Award (for Hominids), the Nebula Award (for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Mindscan). He has written more than twenty books, including Flashforward, which was adapted into a television series on ABC. The show ended in 2010, but more Sawyer adaptations are in the works, and the author himself has been tapped to write the screenplay for a feature film version of his 2012 novel Triggers, a near-future conspiracy thriller.
I wrote the first paragraph last. It was important to get the reader grounded quickly: This is genre, this is about women, this is not going to have a happy ending. I wanted to instil the reader with a sense of foreboding, because the narrator already knows what she’s about to tell you.
I love the most unlikely characters in any giving adventuring group. The one who isn’t the strongest or most powerful, who doesn’t have any particular talents and skills.
Jamaican-born author Nalo Hopkinson burst onto the publishing scene in 1997, when her novel Brown Girl in the Ring, set in present-day Toronto and featuring supernatural events drawn from Caribbean folklore, won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. She followed that up with a string of other successes, including 2001′s short story collection Skin Folk, which was acclaimed by The New York Times. Her two latest novels are Sister Mine and The Chaos.
I love his stories where the whole nature of perceived reality turns out to be untrue. I’m also interested in meta-fiction, where there’s usually a rupture in the text, a place where the story is no longer what you thought you were reading. It’s a version of the same device, only one is inside the story, and the other is outside.
It’s my own tongue-in-cheek response to the current state of the paranormal romance subgenre. I want to love paranormal romances, but I feel like that subgenre takes itself overly seriously, and by doing so has limited the types of paranormal romances that it could explore.
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