Lightspeed: Edited by John Joseph Adams

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Reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction

Science Fiction

Nightside on Callisto

by Linda Nagata

Author spotlight

A faint, steady vibration carried through the igloo’s massive ice walls—a vibration that shouldn’t have been there. Jayne heard it in her sleep. Age had not dulled her soldier’s reflexes, honed by decades spent on watch against incursions of the Red. Her eyes snapped open. She held her breath.

In May 2012 (Issue 24)

Science Fiction

Ruminations in an Alien Tongue

by Vandana Singh

Author spotlight

Sitting on the sun-warmed step at the end of her workday, Birha laid her hand on the dog’s neck and let her mind drift. Like a gyre-moth finding the center of its desire, her mind inevitably spiraled inward to the defining moment of her life. It must be something to do with growing old, she thought irritably, that all she did was revisit what had happened all those years ago.

In Apr. 2012 (Issue 23)

Science Fiction

In-fall

by Ted Kosmatka

Author spotlight

The stars seemed to flow around an enormous, circular gap in the star field. It had many different names, this region of space. The astronomers who discovered it centuries earlier had called it Bhat 16. Later physicists would call it “the sink.”

In Dec. 2010 (Issue 7)

Science Fiction

Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain

by Yoon Ha Lee

Author spotlight

The usual fallacy is that, in every universe, many futures splay outward from any given moment. But in some universes, determinism runs backwards: given a universe’s state s at some time t, there are multiple previous states that may have resulted in s. In some universes, all possible pasts funnel toward a single fixed ending, Ω. If you are of millenarian bent, you might call Ω Armageddon. If you are of grammatical bent, you might call it punctuation on a cosmological scale. If you are a philosopher in such a universe, you might call Ω inevitable.

In Sep. 2010 (Issue 4)

Science Fiction

Amaryllis

by Carrie Vaughn

Author spotlight

I never knew my mother, and I never understood why she did what she did. I ought to be grateful that she was crazy enough to cut out her implant so she could get pregnant. But it also meant she was crazy enough to hide the pregnancy until termination wasn’t an option, knowing the whole time that she’d never get to keep the baby. That she’d lose everything. That her household would lose everything because of her.

In June 2010 (Issue 1)