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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

47:55

Andrew Dana Hudson | Your Mind is the Superfund Site

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/12/10

“Ever consider killing yourself?” the gecko said. “It’ll save you one hundred percent on your car insurance.” I was alone, but not. I tried to step on the creature, but my foot wasn’t there. I clenched my teeth, which felt like water. Alleyah’s Southie accent crackled a reminder of radio. “Tracey, are you paralucid yet? Need another poke of DMT?” I was back in high school---or somebody’s high school. The classrooms were vintage Sears catalogs and a spruce tree that grew sideways---not in a

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15:54

Kat Howard | The Lachrymist

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/11/19

It is not the dust that brings her tears. The Lachrymist’s house is dusty, fragments of time and memory fallen everywhere, a living blanket that drapes itself over tables and chairs and things even stranger. But time and memory are to be expected anywhere the dead gather, and even in this abundance, they do not drive her to weeping. Neither is her weeping caused by the voices, calling to each other from shadowy ceiling corners, memories still embodied, repeating phrases into the cold air. |

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44:03

Gene Doucette | Schrödinger’s Catastrophe [Part 2]

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/11/12

It took twice as long to get to the third deck from the first as it did to get to the first deck from the fifth. Alice was quite certain there was no mechanism in existence capable of adding fractional decks to the ship, and so was chalking this up to another aspect of the ongoing computer malfunction. She supposed a way to validate this was to ask that the elevator stop at, say, deck two-and-five-sixteenths, but she also didn’t want to encourage the computer’s departures from reality any more than

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49:58

Gene Doucette | Schrödinger’s Catastrophe [Part 1]

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/11/05

Things began to go badly for the crew of the USFS Erwin around the time Dr. Marchere’s coffee mug spontaneously reassembled itself. Dr. Louis Marchere was not, at that moment, conducting some manner of experiment. Well, he was, only not on entropy and the nature of time. He was running several other tests, of the kind that make perfect sense on a scientific vessel such as the Erwin. About half of them were biological in nature, concerning how small samples of cellular material react to certain

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25:14

Naomi Kanakia | Everquest

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/10/29

Gopal knew before he booted up the game---a Christmas present from his dad---that his character would be some form of elf or human, because the other races were all ugly, and he didn’t play games to be ugly. And he knew too, although he didn’t say it, that his character would be a girl. He always played girls online, although he’d be ashamed if anyone knew it, precisely because it played into the online belief that most girls in most games were “really” men. | Copyright 2020 by Naomi Kanakia

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21:39

Jenny Rae Rappaport | Everything and Nothing

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/10/21

Start with a romance: a man and a woman who are wildly and irrevocably in love with each other. Or two men. Or two women. Or two people, because life is beautiful and complex. Just know that these Lovers are important. The fate of the galaxy rests on their shoulders---because, of course, the fate of an entire portion of known space can be determined by two people in love. The laws of physics are remarkably vulnerable to the laws of love. | Copyright 2020 by Jenny Rae Rappaport. Narrated by Justine

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48:45

Caroline M. Yoachim | The Shadow Prisoner’s Dilemma

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/10/15

Vivian sat at a café opposite Cass. Everything around her had a gritty, dingy quality. Even Cass looked run down, their face deeply tanned and distressingly wrinkled. They were old now, many decades past being the child that Vivian remembered. She looked down at her hands, so different than the black shadows that she’d grown accustomed to seeing during all her years as a Shade---the skin was covered in age spots and hung loose on the bones. | 2020 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Originally published in OR

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23:17

Stephanie Malia Morris | Forty Acres and a Mule

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/10/08

My parents’ farm has shrunk, as old things tend to do. The shed, the workshop, the paddock with its doubled wire fences and chicken coop---all squat and rain-blackened, coming into focus as I step from the car as if I have put on glasses or wiped rain from a window. The house itself stands straight-spined beyond the pear tree, gray in the drizzle, more withdrawn than the last time I visited. The tree has not changed. | Copyright 2017 by Stephanie Malia Morris. Previously published in FIYAH

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24:29

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam | Entanglement

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/09/24

Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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39:27

Theodora Goss | A Statement in the Case

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/02/13

Sure, I know István Horvath. We met about a year before Eva died. That’s my wife, Eva. You knew that? Yeah, I figured you were pretty thorough. It was the year of the blizzard, when snow covered the cars parked on the streets and even the Post Office shut down. I didn’t have to go to work for a week. So one night, I think it was Thursday, Eva says, “Mike, I only have one of the blue pills left.” This was when we still thought the chemo was doing something. | Copyright 2005 by Theodora Goss

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25:11

Kij Johnson | Noah’s Raven

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/02/06

Ten months after the ark first floated, and forty days after its keel snagged on a drowned mountain peak, Noah released a raven to look for land. Her name was ungraspable by humans, but might be translated as Bessary, plus a term ravens used for the taste of three-day-dead goat when the temperatures have stayed just above freezing, plus a color at the 327-nanometer wavelength, plus a sensation along the rictal bristles in a particular sort of cool air. Her feathers rustled like silk. | Copyright

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30:46

N.K. Jemisin | The Ones Who Stay and Fight

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/01/23

It’s the Day of Good Birds in the city of Um-Helat! The Day is a local custom, silly and random as so many local customs can be, and yet beautiful by the same token. It has little to do with birds---a fact about which locals cheerfully laugh, because that, too, is how local customs work. It is a day of fluttering and flight regardless, where pennants of brightly dyed silk plume forth from every window, and delicate drones of copperwire and featherglass---made for this day, and flown on no

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18:34

J.R. Dawson | She’d Never Had a Name Before

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/01/16

I never had a sister. Okay, so I did have a sister. She just died before she was born. No one talked about her, because sometimes a family looks ahead and sees through a veil into another universe where tomorrow is a given. But then we end up not living in that reality, and it creates a terrible break in our brains. Her name was Sarah. My dad finally told me her name on the deep black road between Omaha and Chicago, on my return to college for junior year. | Copyright 2020 by J.R. Dawson. Narrated

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22:06

Alexander Weinstein | Destinations of Joy

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/01/09

Ever since the discovery of the eighth continent, we’ve all had to come to terms with the presence of a landmass we never knew existed. In this age, wherein it often feels like every inch of mountain and valley has been charted, crossed, and geocached, how could we have been blind to a continent floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? We suppose, like the mapmakers of a millennium ago, we were blinded by our self-assured scientists and their navigational tools. | Copyright 2020 by Alexander

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31:04

Kij Johnson | Story Kit

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2020/01/02

The pain of losing something so precious that you did not think you could live without it. Oxygen. The ice breaks beneath your feet: Your coat and boots fill with water and pull you down. An airlock blows: Vacuum pulls you apart by the eyes, the pores, the lungs. You awaken in a fire: The door and window are outlined in flames. You fall against a railing: The rusted iron slices through your femoral artery. You are dead already. | Copyright 2011 by Kij Johnson. Originally published in Eclipse Four,

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30:19

Matthew Baker | A Bad Day in Utopia

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2019/12/26

She’d had a hard day. Earlier that morning she’d discovered that the game her company was developing, which was already months behind schedule for release, had a glitch somewhere in the code that caused the game to crash if the player character was equipped with diamond armor on the level with the meteors, and nobody could figure out why. It didn’t make any sense. It was a total nightmare. Anna, her boss, was mad at her for leaving dirty dishes in the kitchen again. | Copyright 2019 by Matthew

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36:34

Cat Rambo | The Silent Familiar

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2019/12/19

The Wizard Niccolo was not happy. At the age of 183---youthful for a wizard, but improbable for an ordinary human---he had thought certain things well out of his life. Sudden changes in his daily routine were one. And romance was another---even if it was his familiar’s romance, and not his own. “Could make an omelet with it, I suppose,” he grumbled to that familiar, the tiny dragon Olivia. She sat on the cluttered mantle, wrapped around her egg, still marveling at its production and entirely too

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28:03

T.L. Huchu | Njuzu

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2019/12/12

Water looks the same everywhere. It’s only the background, lighting, and impurities that differ. I peer at the silver-gray surface of Bimha’s pond, calm and still, undisturbed by wind. It’s deep and the bottom is a black abyss. Midday here is like dawn on Earth in the middle of the Kalahari. Light shines through the transparent panelling of the pressurised geodesic dome that prevents the water boiling straight into vapour. “This is where it happened,” VaMutasa says to me on the crackling open

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23:02

KT Bryski | The Path of Pins, the Path of Needles

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2019/12/05

In the very heart of winter, the forest holds its breath. Frozen earth sleeps without dreaming; brittle sunlight breaks and scatters in gasps between the trees. The girl walks through the woods, boots crunching the crusted snow. There is always such a girl, walking alone. Little footprints point the way back to a clutch of hovels; she peers half-dazzled through shadow and snow-flash. A basket hangs dispiritedly from her arm. Sausage end. Hardened loaf. The creeping doubt in spring itself. |

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29:02

Adam-Troy Castro | Eros Pratfalled, Or, Adrift in the...

LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy... ·

2019/11/28

Ellis Neider met his soulmate. The End. That’s his story. The rest is annotation. We would almost skip that part, were it not for the stone knowledge that any love story not about masturbation does require at least two characters. The object of his affection does deserve something approaching equal time. Ellis was a guy. Some men are guys, other men are dudes. Ellis was a guy. As a child, he was a little guy. As an adult, he was a bigger guy. Like most guys, he gave off the vibe that he knew the

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