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PODCAST

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy Story Podcast (Sci-Fi | Audiobook | Short Stories)

Edited by bestselling anthologist John Joseph Adams, LIGHTSPEED is a Hugo Award-winning, critically-acclaimed digital magazine. In its pages, you"ll find science fiction from near-future stories and sociological SF to far-future, star-spanning SF. Plus there"s fantasy from epic sword-and-sorcery and contemporary urban tales to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folk tales. Each month, LIGHTSPEED brings you a mix of original short stories and flash fiction featuring a variety of authors, from the

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All Episodes

29:47

Grace Chan | Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2022/05/05

I’d always known Calam would run. He had all the signs. A taut restlessness, body brittle as an overstretched lute string, when we stayed too long in one place. A gloom in his eyes, as we drifted through stretches of dead space. A sullen crease between the brows, whenever I tried to ask how he’d landed in that dead-end Martian workshop at seventeen. But after ten years, why now? | Copyright 2022 by Grace Chan. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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16:31

Leah Cypess | The Fairy Godmother Advice Column

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2022/04/28

Dear Fairy Godmother: I work as the housekeeper for a collective of seven men. It’s a non-normative living situation, but it works for me. (I am estranged from my family, due to my stepmother being crazy.) Lately, however, I’ve been harassed by a woman trying to sell me apples. She is constantly offering me free samples and acting hurt when I don’t buy. My employers have forbidden me from letting anyone into their home, and I value their trust. But I also know there are a lot of prejudices about old

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16:33

Sandra McDonald | Advice from the Civil Temporal...

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2022/04/07

Do: Be Aware of Strangers Who Ask You What Day It It. Be Aware of Strangers Who Ask You What Year It Is. Be Aware of Stunned Looking Strangers Who Murmur “Mom?” in The Squeeze-In Diner When You Stop By After School For a Chocolate Malt, Though Clearly You Have Never Given Birth to Them or to Anyone At All, Thank You Very Much. Be Aware of Strangers Wearing Clothing, Footwear, or Accessories That Seem Just A Few Years Out of Fashion or Incongruent With the Season, Climate, or Weather Forecast, or

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45:02

Julianna Baggott | The Historiography of Loss

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2022/03/24

I didn’t expect the trailer to feel so small and that some of the blood would still be wet. But I must have expected some blood because I cuffed my jeans before going in. And I didn’t expect the cats would have come back---a window was open, its screen clawed loose. I didn’t expect how they pawed through the blood. Dotting the counters with their small footprints. I didn’t expect the trailer to feel so densely packed---a family had lived here, a mother, a father, a twelve-year-old son, and all of

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67:48

Shiv Ramdas | Bhatia, P.I.

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2022/03/03

It’s a few minutes before seven on a cold October evening and I’m just reaching into the bottom drawer of my desk for the Old Monk and my well-thumbed copy of The Big Sleep when I hear footsteps hurrying up the stairs. A new case, has to be. I sigh, give the drawer a regretful look and shut it again. I sit up, awaiting the knock. It never comes. Instead the door swings open, slamming into the wall, sending plaster chips flying everywhere. Then I see her standing in the doorway. | Copyright 2022 by

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32:57

P H Lee | The Honest Fox, or, A Truth Shared is Not a...

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2022/02/24

I have heard it on the rumors that when the tale-spinner’s guild gathers in its secret places, a full half of them are sworn to never tell the truth, and the other half to never tell a lie, even if it mean their life. Being one of that trade myself, I can tell you that that’s more or less the shape of it, and I tell you this so that you will know that the tale I tell you now is true, just as it happened and just as it was told to me, for I am one of the ones sworn to the truth. | Copyright 2022 by P

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48:18

Isabel J. Kim | Plausible Realities, Improbable Dreams

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2022/02/03

The multiverse broke last week. Broke is perhaps the wrong word. More accurate would be performed a state-change or found new equilibrium, but tell that to Catalina Chang, who has been popping aspirin like M&Ms ever since last Thursday, 5:54 PM, when the Unspecified Incident in the Lab superimposed all versions of reality together like a flaky scallion pancake. Aspirin still exists. So do coffee and antidepressant commercials, except on alternate Tuesdays, except when they don’t exist at all. |

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32:41

Vanessa Fogg | An Address to the Newest Disciples of...

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2022/01/20

You are here because you ignored the words of your parents and elders, your more sensible peers. You have thrown away promising careers in sheepherding or law, trade or civil administration. You bribed your way here; you stole money for your passage; you broke promises and made new ones that you never meant to keep. You’ve sailed rivers and oceans, crossed mountains and plains, and now here you are at the edge of the desert. | Copyright 2022 by Vanessa Fogg. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more

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45:09

Maria Dong | In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2022/01/06

In the beginning of me, I was a bird. A magpie, although I’ve since been a jay and a red-tailed hawk and even a big, black crow, crying tok-tok-tok at every passerby. But the magpie was special: on my first day, I saw those flashing blue wingtips, and I was myself. And every day after, I woke up and flew to a shiny window, just to admire my plumage. Birds don’t last. Their hearts beat so fast, the seeds burn them out. | Copyright 2022 by Maria Dong. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad

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40:00

Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko | Red is Our Country

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/12/16

After the incident with Grey, you have three hours of air left and the only possibility of resupply is two hours in the wrong direction. Burke has found references to an old terraformers’ cache---emergency water and oxygen and who knows what else---and now she’s acting like it’s foresight rather than blind luck. Like she can even be sure the supplies are still there. “We’ll find it. We’ll resupply.” | Copyright 2021 by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your

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41:48

Donyae Coles | When Sri Left the Ruined City

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/12/02

Listen, listen, hush, listen. You’re wrong about the war. You’re wrong about why the world is changing. Why it is dying all around us. That the Gods, many and unknowable be they, wanted this: That’s what you were taught, that’s what you believe. That’s why they gave the Memra their fire beasts and the drawing light that they wield so wildly. That’s why the Reach sings those great stone men into being to crush that flaming war machine. | Copyright 2021 by Donyae Coles. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn

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22:43

Timi Odueso | Cloudgazer

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/11/25

The nearest cloud cluster was sixty miles away, almost an hour’s journey if Bombay went at top speed. A fruit trader had seen it on her way to Sabon-Gari, floating lazily across the azure sky. “You don’t see that often,” the trader had said to the crowd, grappling her basket of mangoes. “A whole cluster, untethered, unbothered, what a sight! So you see why you have to buy my mangoes, they’ve been blessed by clouds!” | Copyright 2021 by Timi Odueso. Narrated by Christina Ogunade. Learn more about

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32:21

Stephen Graham Jones | I Was a Teenage Space Jockey

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/11/04

Two days after my brother turned seventeen, he was gone, just like he’d guaranteed my dad. No sad goodbyes, no notes, no taking a knee in the hall before dawn to give me any good advice for high school when I got there. My mom’s story when anybody asked was that he’d moved out, he was old enough, he needed room, it was completely natural. My dad, if asked, would just shrug, knock back the rest of his can of beer, and say he hoped Rance was in the military. | Copyright 2021 by Stephen Graham Jones

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14:29

Coral Alejandra Moore | The Right Dragon

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/10/28

Marisol stared into the cave, breathing in the stomach-turning scent of decay that meant a dragon’s den was inside. I held my handkerchief over my nose and mouth so that I wouldn’t gag. “You’re sure this is the one?” “Definitely.” She scratched the stub of her left arm where it tucked into the metal hinge, just above where her elbow had once been. | Copyright 2021 by Coral Alejandra Moore. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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43:35

Gene Doucette | Memoranda from the End of the World

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/10/07

Attached, please find your personal company-issued Breathing Apparatus, for immediate use within all corporate campus unfiltered air locations! This includes all outdoor locations, such as: the parking lots; the parking garage; the smoker’s hut; the paths between the buildings; the shuttlebus waiting area; the tennis court; and the corporate golf course. | Copyright 2021 by Gene Doucette. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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11:47

Adam R. Shannon | It Begins to Snow

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/09/23

When it begins to snow, it never stops. Perhaps not for you, but another iteration of you---a manifestation of your wild possibilities. I hope it’s not you, for my sake. When it begins to snow, the sky comes down in sharp, precise fragments, and you press your forehead against the window and think: don’t ever stop. And it doesn’t. I don’t want it to be you, because when it begins to snow, the world ends. | Copyright 2021 by Adam R. Shannon. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad

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13:38

Adam-Troy Castro | Judi

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/09/02

She sank to the ground on a world without name. We were far from home, farther than we had ever gone, maybe farther than anyone had ever gone. It was so far away, or at least so strange for some undefinable local cause, that we could have filled volumes with all the alterations in the way things worked; in the ways that light worked, in the way that time worked, in the way that mass worked. We spoke of bringing back word to the learned of my world and hers. We talked of making our names. | Copyright

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15:24

Isabel Cañas | My Sister is a Scorpion

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/08/26

My baby sister didn’t used to be a scorpion, but she is one now. I don’t know if that sounds weird to you, but it doesn’t to me, because right after my sister was born, Abuelita turned into a white crane and flew away. She was so sad after we buried Abuelito, you know. One winter day, she stepped outside of the faded stucco church into bright sunshine, her Bible tucked under one arm. Maybe the touch of the sun was not enough to warm her after the shadows of the church. | Copyright 2021 by Isabel

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16:45

Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas | Before the Haze...

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/08/05

If time can stop, this is how it feels. 01:32:03 PLSS WARNING: Abnormal temperature detected in EMU. Yunuen was born to be trapped in this moment. She has been looking at the same alert in her helmet’s heads-up display for a perpetual instant that has become her whole existence. One billion kilometers away from home, she lies in the purgatory that is the red glow of this warning message. In front of her eyes, these petrified uppercase letters have lost all their meaning. Time does not exist anymore

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23:03

Lulu Kadhim | Amber Dark and Sickly Sweet

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2021/07/29

Talia sat at the edge of Eliza’s bed, her hands clasped. She was new---so was I, but she was newer. I went to her, and stroked her head, careful to avoid the honeycomb on her brow. “Daughters.” Mother Anam’s face was twisted when she came back from searching the rest of our rooms, her shoes clicking on the hard, pocked floor. It always seemed to us that she was disappointed that we hadn’t broken a rule, that she couldn’t punish us. | Copyright 2021 by Lulu Kadhim. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn

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