The March 2014 Issue is Now on Sale!

Welcome to issue forty-six of Lightspeed!

We have original science fiction by Sofia Samatar (“How to Get Back to the Forest”) and Chen Qiufan (“The Mao Ghost,” translated by Ken Liu), along with an SF reprint by Jo Walton (“Turnover”) and the aforementioned story by Charlie Jane Anders (“Break! Break! Break!”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Kat Howard (“A Different Fate”) and Matthew Hughes (“Phalloon the Illimitable”), and fantasy reprints by Robert Jackson Bennett (“A Drink for Teddy Ford”) and Eileen Gunn & Michael Swanwick (“The Armies of Elfland”).

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 “The Lucky Strike” by Kim Stanley Robinson and novel excerpts from Sand by Hugh Howey and The Milkman by Michael J. Martineck.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. This month, look for The Milkman by Michael J. Martineck (of which you can also read an excerpt in our ebook edition this month). You can find more from EDGE at www.edgewebsite.com.

Can’t wait to get your hands on a copy? You can purchase the issue from the following ebookstores: Lightspeed (direct), Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, and Weightless Books. Visit our Ebooks page for links and more information.

Women DESTROYED Science Fiction!

As you know from our newsletter, editorials, and (incessant?) social media posting, we ran a very successful Kickstarter in January-February to fund the publication of our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue, which will be guest-edited by Lightspeed’s own Christie Yant. We asked for $5000, and we got $53,136 in return, which was 1062% of our funding goal. Wow! As a result of all that sweet success, we announced—and met—some rather excellent stretch goals: Once we surpassed $25K of funding, that unlocked a Women Destroy Horror! special issue of our sister-magazine, Nightmare (guest edited by Ellen Datlow!), and once we passed $35K, that unlocked a Women Destroy Fantasy! special issue of our other sister-mag,Fantasy (guest-edited by Cat Rambo!). Look for the Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue this June, and then you can expect the Women Destroy Horror! and Women Destroy Fantasy! issues in October.

If you missed out on the Kickstarter: Never fear. All of the special issues (including the print editions) will be available for pre-order soon. Watch this space!

Women Destroy Science Fiction Newsletter

Speaking of the Women Destroy Science Fiction! campaign, for a while there we had our WDSF newsletter as a separate entity. Since almost everyone who signed up for the newsletter also backed the Kickstarter (we assume!), we figured it didn’t make sense to send out project updates via Kickstarter and then also send that same information via a newsletter. So we merged our WDSF newsletter list into our main Lightspeed newsletter list. We hope you don’t mind! If you don’t want to continue to receive the newsletter, though, please just use the unsubscribe link at the end of the newsletter email.

Lightspeed Got FOUR Nebula Award Nominations!

Awards season is officially upon us, with the first of the major awards announcing their lists of finalists for last year’s work. Neither Lightspeed nor Nightmare got any love from the Bram Stoker Awards (alas), but we’re delighted to announce that the Nebula Awards, on the other hand, seem to be absolutely infatuated with us: Lightspeed has four Nebula finalists this year! (That brings Lightspeed’s lifetime Nebula nomination total to eleven since we launched in June 2010.) Our nominees for this year are: “Paranormal Romance” by Christopher Barzak, “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” by Ken Liu, “The Sounds of Old Earth” by Matthew Kressel, and “Alive, Alive Oh” by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. For a complete list of the finalists, visitSFWA.org. If you missed reading our Nebula finalists, you can find them all at lightspeedmagazine.com/tag/2013-nebula-award-finalists.

THE END IS NIGH!

In other news, my new anthology—The End is Nigh—is on sale now. It’s the first volume of what I’m calling The Apocalypse Triptych—a series of three anthologies looking at three different modes of apocalyptic fiction: before the apocalypse, during the apocalypse, and after the apocalypse. I’m editing—and publishing—all three volumes of the Triptych in collaboration with bestselling author Hugh Howey. All of the books will be available in both ebook and print formats, and The End is Nigh is available now. Visit johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptychor your favorite book retailer for more information. Meanwhile, you’ll find a sneak peek of The End is Nigh right here in this very issue: Charlie Jane Anders’s story “Break! Break! Break!” Enjoy!

JJA Will Curate New Best-of-the-Year Anthology Series

And in a case of maybe saving the best for last and/or burying the lede: I’m delighted to announce that I have agreed to serve as the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, a new entry in the prestigious Best American series published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Our inaugural guest editor will be bestselling author and all-around swell guy Joe Hill. The first volume will be published in October 2015, collecting the best of 2014. To learn more about the series, including information about how you can recommend stories for consideration, visit johnjosephadams.com/best-american.

Newsletter Pandemonium!

If you’re reading this, then chances are you already subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter. Thanks! But did you know that we also have a couple of other newsletters you can subscribe to?

Lightspeed Subscriptions & Bundles of Back Issues! (Now also in PDF format!)

Just a reminder that our Lightspeed Direct ebookstore is open for business. If you’d like to purchase an ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, please visitlightspeedmagazine.com/store. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in both epub and mobi format, and now we’re also offering all of our issues in PDF format as well.

And don’t worry—all of our other purchasing options are still available, of course; this is just one more way you can buy the magazine or subscribe. You can, for instance, still subscribe viaAmazon.com or from our friends at Weightless Books. Visitlightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options.

In the Lightspeed ebookstore, we’re also currently featuring a selection of Ebook Bundles. We currently have the following Lightspeed ebook bundles available:

• Lightspeed (Year One) – $19.99

• Lightspeed (Year Two) – $24.99
• Lightspeed (Year Three) – $29.97
• Lightspeed Supermassive Bundle (Years 1-3) – $69.95

Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So, for instance, the Year One Bundle gets you a copy of every issue we published during our first year (June 2010 – May 2011), etc. And then there’s the SUPERMASSIVE BUNDLE, which nets you a copy of every issue published during our first three years. (And buying the Supermassive Bundle saves you $5 off the cover price of buying the other three Bundles individually!)

Fantasy Magazine Back Issue Bundles

In addition to the Lightspeed bundles mentioned above, you can now also buy ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister magazine,Fantasy. (You might remember that we merged Fantasy into Lightspeed back in January 2012.)

To check out the back issues, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy eachFantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine—all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the Bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!). Of course, if you don’t want to buy a Bundle, you can also just purchase an individual ebook issue! All issues of Fantasy Magazine are available in epub, mobi, and PDF format.

• Fantasy Magazine (2005-2007)  – $24.99

• Fantasy Magazine (2008) – $24.99

• Fantasy Magazine (2009) – $24.99

• Fantasy Magazine (2010) – $24.99

• Fantasy Magazine (2011) – $24.99

• Fantasy Magazine (MegaBundle: Every Issue, #1-#57) – $114.99

Have You Tried Our Sister-Magazine, Nightmare, Yet?

Have you checked out our sister-magazine Nightmare yet? Because of the ubiquity of gory horror movies, when a lot of people think of the horror genre in literature, they imagine it deals with that same kind of gory slasher-type stories we typically see in film, full of blood and guts and generally a lot of awfulness. But literary horror is rarely like that, and the fiction in Nightmarebasically never is. The fiction in Nightmare tends toward “quiet horror”: that is, the stories are literary and dark—at times visceral, and at times unsettling. In other words, not overly dissimilar from the stories you’d find in Lightspeed—just more toward the darker end of the literary spectrum.

Pop on over to www.nightmare-magazine.com to check out the magazine, purchase issues or subscribe, or just for more information and updates (or to subscribe to the free Nightmarenewsletter).

If You Love Your Subscription, Review Your Subscription!

If you already have and love a Lightspeed subscription, please consider leaving us a positive review on Amazon.com or Weightless Books. A few kind words can go a long way toward encouraging other readers to try out Lightspeed if they’re on the fence about whether to give it a shot or not.

If you’d like to leave a review, here’s the product page on Amazon.com:https://www.amazon.com/Lightspeed-Magazine/dp/B004HO5TCO, and here’s the 12-month subscription option on Weightless Books:https://weightlessbooks.com/format/magazine/lightspeed-magazine-12-month-subscription.

Reviews of individual issues are also welcome, of course, though our primary interest is in spreading the word about subscriptions, so if you want to help out, please let other readers know what you think!

Sponsor Spotlight: EDGE

Lightspeed‘s sponsor this month is EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

This month, look for The Milkman by Michael J. Martineck (of which you can also read an excerpt in our ebook edition this month). You can find more from EDGE at www.edgewebsite.com.

For more information about Lightspeed‘s sponsorship program, visit our advertising page.

Keeping Current

Remember, in addition to this newsletter, there are several ways you can sign up to be notified of new Lightspeed content:

• RSS feed (full): lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2
• Podcast feed: lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss
• Twitter: @lightspeedmag
• Facebook: facebook.com/lightspeedmagazine
• Google+: plus.google.com/100415462108153087624
• Subscribe: lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Looking Forward: Issue 46

Coming up in April, in Lightspeed . . .We have original science fiction by Linda Nagata (“Codename: Delphi”) and Shaenon K. Garrity (“Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can Kill You”), along with SF reprints by Scott Sigler (“Complex God,” which also appears in the new anthology Robot Uprisings) and Ted Chiang (“Exhalation”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Carmen Maria Machado (“Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa”) and Thomas Olde Heuvelt (“The Day the World Turned Upside Down”), and fantasy reprints by K. J. Bishop (“Alsiso”) and C. J. Cherryh (“The Only Death in the City”).

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 “Shiva in Shadow” by Nancy Kress as our novella reprint and a pair of novel excerpts.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Sarah Pinsker, Seth Dickinson, Sandra McDonald, Fred Van Lente, Matthew Hughes, Steve Hockensmith, Adam-Troy Castro, Maria Dahvana Headley, Seanan McGuire, Daniel José Older, and Theodora Goss.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed!

Thanks for Reading!

We couldn’t publish the magazine without the loyal support of readers like you. So we here atLightspeed salute you, and would like to thank you for your continued patronage.

Well, that’s about it for this installment of the newsletter. Thanks again for reading. Meanwhile, for more, visit www.lightspeedmagazine.com. See you next month!