Lightspeed: Edited by John Joseph Adams

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Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Interview: Garth Nix

The idea of Mister Fitz, who’s a puppet who is also a sorcerer, I’m sure comes from the fact that my mother made papier-mâché puppets when I was a child, and in particular one year she made puppets of all the Moomintroll characters, and put on a show of Moominland Midwinter for me for my birthday party.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley

In this story, the lovers aren’t magic. The only magic they really have is that they’re in love. But oh, my, god, love is major magic. There’s a reason we talk about being bewitched.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: David Brin

Back in the 1980s, biological science was abuzz with a new idea—that the boundaries between species aren’t anywhere near as firm and permanent as we (and Darwin) once thought. Bacteria exchange DNA with each other. Many of our own genes entered our chromosomes, originally, from viruses.

Nonfiction

Interview: Brian Greene

Because there isn’t just one flavor of parallel universe—there’s a version that comes out of quantum mechanics, there’s a version that comes out of cosmology, a version that comes out of string theory, and so forth. But one thing that they do share is it’s pretty tough, if not impossible, to go from one universe to another in any of these versions—in any conventional notion of what it would mean to travel from one universe to another.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Peter Beagle

Back in the late sixties or early seventies, a small—and now long defunct—animation company asked me to submit some story ideas. The first version of “Gordon” was one of two notions that I wrote up and handed in. They weren’t impressed with either, but my kids had liked “Gordon,” so I tucked it away in my filing cabinet, thinking that someday I might do something more with it. I had no idea it would take more than 30 years.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: A.M. Dellamonica

Songs are something that humans have always taken with us to war: you can’t go on the march with a painting from home in your pack, or bring your entire library of books with you. […] But you can always sing a song.

Artist Showcase

Artist Showcase: Chris Cold and Tobias Roetsch

Go behind the scenes with this month’s cover artists Chris Cold and Tobias Roetsch in the July artist showcase.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Theodora Goss

I’ve always been fascinated by the secondary or even tertiary characters in stories, the characters who don’t get written about. Who may not even get to speak. I have a tendency to write their stories. […] In this case, I was fascinated by a character in a poem: the Abyssinian maid in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Joe Haldeman

It’s easy to come up with science-fictional cultures that put no great value on long life, for whom immortality would be unpleasant or even obscene. […] A large number of Americans believe they’re going to be immortal up in the sky after they die on Earth. That’s one of the solutions to the problem, and it takes care of certain aspects like expense, real estate, post-mortem effect, and so on.

Editorial

Editorial, July 2012

Welcome to issue twenty-six of Lightspeed! We’ve got another great issue for you this month, so click-thru to see what we have in store.

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