Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54 Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Issue 54, November 2014

  FROM THE EDITOR

  Editorial, November 2014

  Coming Soon: Lightspeed Book Reviews

  SCIENCE FICTION

  What Glistens Back

  Sunny Moraine

  Spidersong

  Susan C. Petrey

  Instructions

  Roz Kaveney

  Drones Don’t Kill People

  Annalee Newitz

  FANTASY

  Sah-Harah

  Gheorghe Săsărman

  A Flock of Grief

  Kat Howard

  Enter Saunterance

  Matthew Hughes

  Solstice

  Jennifer Stevenson

  NOVELLA

  New Light on the Drake Equation

  Ian R. MacLeod

  NOVEL EXCERPTS

  Symbiont

  Mira Grant

  The Three-Body Problem

  Cixin Liu

  NONFICTION

  Interview: Nick Harkaway

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Interview: Charles Stross

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

  Artist Gallery

  Jeremy Wilson

  Artist Spotlight: Jeremy Wilson

  Henry Lien

  AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

  Sunny Moraine

  Susan C. Petrey

  Roz Kaveney

  Annalee Newitz

  Kat Howard

  Matthew Hughes

  Jennifer Stevenson

  Ian R. MacLeod

  MISCELLANY

  Coming Attractions

  Stay Connected

  Subscriptions & Ebooks

  About the Editor

  © 2014 Lightspeed Magazine

  Cover Art by Jeremy Wilson

  Ebook Design by John Joseph Adams

  www.lightspeedmagazine.com

  FROM THE EDITOR

  Editorial, November 2014

  John Joseph Adams

  Welcome to issue fifty-four of Lightspeed!

  In case you missed it last month, October marked the publication of our two sister-magazine special issues.

  Over at Nightmare, we published Women Destroy Horror!, our special double-issue celebration of women writing and editing horror. Guest editor Ellen Datlow selected original fiction from Gemma Files (“This Is Not for You”), Livia Llewellyn (“It Feels Better Biting Down”), Pat Cadigan (“Unfair Exchange”), Katherine Crighton (“The Inside and the Outside”), and Catherine MacLeod (“Sideshow”), along with reprints by Joyce Carol Oates (“Martyrdom”), Tanith Lee (“Black and White Sky”), and A.R. Morlan (“… Warmer”).

  Our WDH nonfiction editor, Lisa Morton, solicited a line-up of terrific pieces—a feature interview with American Horror Story’s producer Jessica Sharzer; a roundtable interview with acclaimed writers Linda Addison, Kate Jonez, Helen Marshall, and Rena Mason; a feature interview with award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates; and insightful essays from Maria Alexander, Lucy A. Snyder, and Chesya Burke.

  Over at Fantasy Magazine, we have Women Destroy Fantasy!, our special double-issue celebration of women writing and editing fantasy. The guest editor for this volume is long-time Fantasy editor Cat Rambo, and she selected original fiction from Julia August (“Drowning in the Sky”), H.E. Roulo (“Making the Cut”), Kate Hall (“The Scrimshaw and the Scream”), and T. Kingfisher (“The Dryad’s Shoe”). The issue also has reprints (selected by none other than Terri Windling!) from Delia Sherman (“Miss Carstairs and the Merman”), Carol Emshwiller (“The Abominable Child’s Tale”), Emma Bull (“Silver or Gold”), and Nalo Hopkinson (“The Glass Bottle Trick”).

  Likewise, our WDF nonfiction editor—our amazing Managing Editor, Wendy N. Wagner—has lined up some great work for the issue, including Kameron Hurley’s critical examination of epic fantasy; a roundtable interview with Carrie Vaughn and Kelley Armstrong in a frank discussion of women writing urban fantasy; a roundtable panel of RPG tie-in writers Margaret Weis, Marsheila Rockwell, Elaine Cunningham, and Erin M. Evans; and a massive discussion of women in fantasy illustration, featuring Julie Dillon, Galen Dara, Elizabeth Leggett, Julie Bell, Irene Gallo, Rebecca Guay, Lauren Panepinto, and Zoë Robinson. It also contains thought-provoking essays from Sofia Samatar and Kat Howard, and a reading guide from the contributors and friends of WDF.

  Both issues turned out really great, and we can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks about them. They’re available now in both ebook ($2.99) and trade paperback ($12.99). For more information about the issues, including where you can find them, visit our new Destroy-related website at DestroySF.com.

  • • • •

  With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

  We have original science fiction by Sunny Moraine (“What Glistens Back”) and Annalee Newitz (“Drones Don’t Kill People”), along with SF reprints by Susan C. Petrey (“Spidersong”) and Roz Kaveney (“Instructions”).

  Plus, we have original fantasy by Kat Howard (“A Flock of Grief”) and Matthew Hughes (“Enter Saunterance”), and fantasy reprints by Georghe Săsărman (“Sah-Hara”) and Jennifer Stevenson (“Solstice”).

  All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with authors Nick Harkaway and Charles Stross.

  For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint: “New Light on the Drake Equation” by Ian R. MacLeod. We also have an excerpt from Mira Grant’s latest offering, Symbiont; and a taste of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin (translated by Ken Liu).

  Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at Tor Books. This month, be sure to look for the aforementioned The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Learn more at Tor-Forge.com.

  Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

  Coming Soon:

  Lightspeed Book Reviews

  Lightspeed is pleased to announce that we will be launching a series of quarterly, rotating book review columns in January 2015, written by:

  *

  Amal El-Mohtar

  Amal El-Mohtar’s essays have appeared in Chicks Unravel Time, Queers Dig Time Lords, Science Fiction Film & Television, Apex, Stone Telling, The Outpost, Cascadia Subduction Zone, and Tor.com. She reviews books for NPR, edits and publishes the poetry in Goblin Fruit, is a Nebula-nominated author and founding member of the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, and has been known to deadlift other genre professionals. Find her on Twitter @tithenai.

  Andrew Liptak

  Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He is a 2014 graduate of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, an
d has written for such places as Armchair General, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lightspeed Magazine, and others. He can be found over at www.andrewliptak.com and at @AndrewLiptak on Twitter. His first book, War Stories: New Military Science Fiction is now out from Apex Publications, and his next, The Future Machine: The Writers, Editors and Readers who Build Science Fiction is forthcoming from Jurassic London in 2015.

  Sunil Patel

  Sunil Patel is a Bay Area fiction writer and playwright who has written about everything from ghostly cows to talking beer. His plays have been performed at San Francisco Theater Pub and San Francisco Olympians Festival, and his story “The Gramadevi’s Lament” will appear in the upcoming anthology, Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place. He loves to create new stories, but he also loves introducing people to stories he loves. Find out more at ghostwritingcow.com, where you can watch his plays, or follow him @ghostwritingcow. His Twitter has been described as “engaging,” “exclamatory,” and “crispy, crunchy, peanut buttery.”

  *

  Each reviewer will have four columns per year. The columns will launch in our January issue with Andrew’s column, followed by Sunil in February, and Amal in March; each reviewer’s column will appear every three months thereafter.

  For the last several years, Lightspeed has had two feature-length interviews in each issue; starting in January, we will reduce that number to one and replace that nonfiction slot with the review columns. Everything else about the structure and content of the magazine will remain the same.

  If you would like information about how to submit books for review, you may send review copies to editor John Joseph Adams at the mailing address your publicist should already have on file (either for Lightspeed, Nightmare, or The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy); if you need that information, please email [email protected].

  If you would like to send an email press release, please direct your inquiry to [email protected].

  SCIENCE FICTION

  What Glistens Back

  Sunny Moraine

  Come back.

  You hear the call as the lander breaks up around you. You’re aware of the entirely arbitrary concepts of up and down before you realize what’s happening, and then they’re a lot less arbitrary. Down is not so much a direction as a function of possibility, of what might happen to you, of what is happening now. You finally get down as an idea.

  Come back.

  Look up and there it is, floating over you in stable low orbit with its backdrop of stars, long and sleek and lovely, all its modules and portholes out of which you spent so much time looking, and that voice clutches at you like it could hold onto you, and you almost start to fucking cry, and you’re panicking and taking huge gasping breaths and clawing at nothing, and you’re falling. And you can’t come back. So the universe goes away for a while, and when you blink again, that brownish pitted curve beneath you is just a little bit bigger.

  “Sean, come back. Do you read? Come back?”

  Hit the comm button on your suit. Take a breath. You have enough air for whatever you need now. Take a breath and let it out and talk.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus Christ, we thought—You broke up, what happened?”

  Close your eyes. It hurts to do so, your eyes feel too big for their sockets. Big and shiny and glassy like marbles. “I don’t know. You have any idea on your end?”

  Silence. Then, “None of what we’ve got makes sense. We triple-checked everything, it shouldn’t have—” More silence. “Did your suit suffer any damage? Sean, are you okay?”

  Look down again. It’s a very boring planet, is the thing, at least on the surface, though you weren’t going down there for the surface anyway so much as you were what’s under it. But right now—and for the foreseeable future—the surface is all you’re concerned with. It’s very brown and very flat, except for the craters, and it’s very boring and ugly, and you’re going to fucking die on it.

  So just let that sit for a moment. Not too long.

  “No. I’m not.”

  Silence. Look up. The ship that held you, cradled you, getting further away—you never thought of it in those blatantly familial terms and you would have thought it was intensely silly to do so, overly romantic, but that was before. Now you realize that it was everything safe and wonderful. It was home, so far from home. You’re leaving it and plunging toward an end, like a life in fast-forward. It birthed you.

  You want to go back. Everyone does, you think as you fall. No one ever really wants that first horrible exit.

  “Oh, God. Okay.” A pause. “Sean, we’re working the problem. Just hang tight.”

  Laugh. That’s a very funny turn of phrase. Laughing will probably worry him. He already sounds like he’s about five seconds from losing it. He was always so nervous about everything, and you suspect very strongly that he didn’t even want to be here, except it was you, so of course he couldn’t really be anywhere else.

  Which makes this your fault. Naturally.

  • • • •

  There are things in your life that, in moments of clarity, you’d do absolutely anything to be able to go back and change.

  You would have majored in physics instead of engineering, because though they weren’t even all that different in a lot of ways, there was a romance about physics that always appealed to you so much more.

  You wouldn’t have spent so much goddamn time in high school worrying about boys. About what boys thought about, cared about, wanted. About what they thought of you. About what was involved in being a boy, what you should be doing in order to really be a proper one. You would have said fuck it to everyone’s expectations and you would have taken some Women’s Studies courses in college, because it’s silly but you think that might honestly have made a difference to the overall bleakness of your outlook on the world and your place in it.

  You wish you had seen more stars. You wish you had spent a lot more time under really, really dark skies.

  You wouldn’t have dumped Carlos in the middle of the street in the rain on a Sunday night that was the culmination of a long time of nothing at all going very well. It wasn’t his fault, it was yours, and knowing that only made you angrier.

  You wouldn’t have left your younger sister alone that day; you knew she was depressed and she’d been saying some worrying things, but you never thought she’d actually do anything, and anyway, what, were you supposed to remove anything even vaguely rope-like from the house? Wouldn’t she have found another way?

  You wouldn’t have said goodbye to your mother like you did. You would have crossed the room and embraced her, pulled her into your big arms; you would have done this even if she had screamed and beaten at your chest. You would have put aside all those things she couldn’t let go of, her upbringing and the things she couldn’t bear to not believe. You would have recognized what she meant to you, what she had always done to and for you; you would have used her ability to hurt you as a yardstick for just how deep inside you she was.

  Except maybe it was worth it.

  Would you still have accepted recruitment? Would you still have told Eric? Would you still have let him come along? Could you even have stopped him? How selfish was this? What do you want now? There are so many questions and you have no time to answer any of them.

  • • • •

  Crackle.

  It’s not even so much a crackle as something softer with more rounded edges, whispering sand in your ears. You’re not sure what it is but you like to think of it as the sound of the big black itself, singing to you like an ocean through the shell of your helmet. It’s comforting, it makes you think of the few vacations you’ve managed to take in your life. Eric, that last time a month before launch; the two of you on a Caribbean beach, waves in your ears, gulls stealing people’s sandwiches, breeze, and his hands spreading lotion on your back. The sand was warm, gritty under your chin. You had this crazy urge to bury your face in it and inhale. You got that urge in the wa
ter, too; you always came up coughing. It’s always been like that. As a child you played with fire, you ran with sharp things. You’re the kind of person who stands at great height and thinks about jumping, so you learned to skydive. You learned to BASE jump. You put on a wingsuit in Norway and you soared down the mountainside, skimming over the snow.

  You’ve always been about as sure as you can be that that’s why they picked you. Normally, you know, they’d go for the steady ones, the stable ones, the people who play well with others. But that’s for conventional missions. ISS mice-in-space kind of shit. For this one, they wanted people who weren’t just not afraid to fall. They wanted people crazy enough to launch themselves over the fucking edge.

  Well, then.

  “Sean?”

  You miss the big black’s whispering voice. For a minute there, you almost caught what it was saying. “Yeah.”

  “We’re still not sure what happened.”

  Look down again. Boy, it is awfully big now. “What happened is it blew the fuck up and I probably have—” Glance at your wrist readout. “—about two more minutes before I hit.”

  Possibly three. You’re guesstimating. You always hated that word, but yeah.

  “It didn’t blow up, it broke up. You’d be dead right now if it actually exploded.” Pause, too short for you to think of a witty retort. “Sean, we’re running through some possible options. Okay? We have some plans, we’re gonna come get you. Stay on with me, talk to me.” Pause again. He’s trying so hard to sound like he’s holding it together, and you sort of love him for that, because it’s so obvious that he’s completely freaking out. “Sean, come on, just say anything.”

  Roll your eyes. Are you going into a spin? A little, maybe. You’re not sure whether or not you’d like to black out for the rest of your life. Down is still down. “What do you want me to say, Eric?”