Nonfiction
Five Ways to End an Alien Invasion
After all, they come to us. We barely have the means to leave low-Earth orbit, but these would-be conquerors have traveled light years with the express purpose of pressing us into human-flavored cider.
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Nonfiction
Author Spotlight
Author Spotlight: Will McIntosh
I envisioned this newly formed species standing around, not knowing what to value, how to go about creating their own culture and norms after their mission was complete.
Artist Showcase
Artist Spotlight: Tim Warnock
The vehicles in particular were just an exercise in form and surface exploration. Much of the buildings were sourced from photography I had taken that day. The people were a mix of painting and photography.
Editorial
Editorial, August 2011
Welcome to issue fifteen of Lightspeed! Here’s what we’ve got on tap this month … Fiction: “Defenders” by Will McIntosh, “Just Another Perfect Day” by John Varley, “The Nearest Thing” by Genevieve Valentine, “Non-Stop to Portales” by Connie Willis. Nonfiction: “Five Ways to End an Alien Invasion” by Jeremiah Tolbert, “Forget Everything You Already Know About Amnesia” by The Evil Monkey, “Four Milestones in the Evolution of Artificial Intelligence” by Graeme McMillan, “Feature Interview: Simon Pegg” by John Joseph Adams & David Barr Kirtley.
Nonfiction
Interview: Mary Doria Russell
What does it mean to be human in a large and frightening and beautiful universe? That’s an immense question, and there are many kinds of answers.
Author Spotlight
Author Spotlight: Karen Joy Fowler
I usually start a story believing I’m writing about one thing. But as the story unwinds, I usually find, a couple pages in, that I’m actually writing about something else entirely.
Nonfiction
The Superpowered Potential of Epigenetics
In the past few years, something very exciting happened in the field of human genetics: After decoding the human genome, scientists began to realize that the old paradigm of genes as the sole player of inheritance had to be modified.
Author Spotlight
Author Spotlight: Kat Howard
One of my colleagues wrote about was the idea of “requickening,” which, to vastly oversimplify, was the thought that by taking on a saint’s name, a convert also took on a part of that saint’s identity.
Nonfiction
The First Step to Enlightenment is Abject Failure
Philosophers like to think science works in an orderly way, in which scientists propose hypotheses, conduct experiments to validate their ideas, then emerge triumphantly from the laboratory to publish their results. Sometimes that happens.
Author Spotlight
Author Spotlight: Jake Kerr
We all face loss, and we all face how cold and harsh reality can be at times. To see or feel that this is shared by all of us is powerful, even through as simple a vehicle as a science fiction story.
