Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 136 (September 2021): Lightspeed Magazine, #136

By John Joseph Adams

LIGHTSPEED is a digital science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF--and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales.

 

Welcome to issue 136 of LIGHTSPEED! What if magic was real and you could talk about it on the internet? This month, our first fantasy short-"Fanspell: Flowers in Spring (RobYung, NSFW)," by Anya Ow-asks just this. It also explores the real-life effects of social media, a topic that's never been more timely. Lizz Huerta's new short "Sia" blends humor and heartbreak in a tale about a woman who finds unexpected truths when she attends a New Age spiritual workshop. "It Begins to Snow," our fantasy flash piece from Adam R. Shannon, is a tiny meditation on relationships, set on the background of apocalypse. Our reprint this month is "Invasive Species and Their Habitats," by Alexander Weinstein. On the science fictional side of the issue, Adam-Troy Castro brings us a beautiful elegy for a lost love in his new flash story "Judi." Thomas Ha takes us to a distant and dangerous world in "Where You Left Me." It's a story of space exploration and drug addiction gone horribly awry. Meg Elison tackles worker exploitation in her new story "The Revolution Will Not Be Served with Fries." We also have a reprint from Violet Allen ("Mister Dawn, How Can You Be So Cruel?"). Don't miss author spotlights with this month's fiction writers, and of course the book review team has been busy reading new releases. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from Cat Rambo's new novel YOU SEXY THING.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adamant Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201757960

John Joseph Adams

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. 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. Recent books include The Apocalypse Triptych (consisting of The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come), and series editor for The Best American Fantasy and Science Fiction. John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 136, September 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: September 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

Judi

Adam-Troy Castro

Where You Left Me

Thomas Ha

Mister Dawn, How Can You Be So Cruel?

Violet Allen

The Revolution Will Not Be Served with Fries

Meg Elison

FANTASY

Fanspell: Flowers in Spring (RobYung, NSFW)

Anya Ow

Invasive Species and their Habitats

Alexander Weinstein

Sía

Lizz Huerta

It Begins to Snow

Adam R. Shannon

EXCERPTS

You Sexy Thing

Cat Rambo

NONFICTION

Book Review: Weird Women II, edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger

LaShawn M. Wanak

Book Review: The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne

Chris Kluwe

Book Review: No Gods, No Monsters, by Cadwell Turnbull

Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Anya Ow

Thomas Ha

Lizz Huerta

Meg Elison

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2021 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

From_the_Editor

Editorial: September 2021

John Joseph Adams | 251 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 136th issue!

What if magic was real and you could talk about it on the internet? This month, our first fantasy short—Fanspell: Flowers in Spring (RobYung, NSFW), by Anya Ow—asks just this. It also explores the real-life effects of social media, a topic that’s never been more timely. Lizz Huerta’s new short Sía blends humor and heartbreak in a tale about a woman who finds unexpected truths when she attends a New Age spiritual workshop. It Begins to Snow, our fantasy flash piece from Adam R. Shannon, is a tiny meditation on relationships, set on the background of apocalypse. Our reprint this month is Invasive Species and Their Habitats, by Alexander Weinstein.

On the science fictional side of the issue, Adam-Troy Castro brings us a beautiful elegy for a lost love in his new flash story Judi. Thomas Ha takes us to a distant and dangerous world in Where You Left Me. It’s a story of space exploration and drug addiction gone horribly awry. Meg Elison tackles worker exploitation in her new story The Revolution Will Not Be Served with Fries. We also have a reprint from Violet Allen (Mister Dawn, How Can You Be So Cruel?).

Don’t miss author spotlights with this month’s fiction writers, and of course the book review team has been busy reading new releases. Our ebook readers will also enjoy an excerpt from Cat Rambo’s new novel You Sexy Thing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. Called the reigning king of the anthology world by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Science_Fiction

Judi

Adam-Troy Castro | 1181 words

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.

We were taking a stroll not far from our ship when she sat down and died.

I remember only that last look she gave me. It was not horror. It was not joy. It was not reassurance, and oh, how I wish it was. It was not even the look I had come to treasure and that I thought I would always have, love. It was astonishment. It was as if she had seen something that I had not, something that rendered all persistence at life futile.

She sat down and she was gone, in a place where a white plain met a black sky.

I could not stay with her and I could not take her with me, not in any way that mattered.

So I returned to the ship and set a course for home, knowing that it too was no longer there, not if she could not be part of it.

I left that white world behind, never to speak of it again.

I did not navigate. The ship had a course to follow. It might or not be the right direction, but with her gone there was no itinerary, no purpose in going anywhere at all. It was just movement. The trip out had been filled with possibility. The trip back was only negation. I slept when I could. I woke when I had to. I ate because my body demanded it. I found no pleasure, or flavor. I suspected that I never would again.

Once, I ordered the hull to go transparent because I yearned to see the stars. I didn’t know the coordinates when I did, and did not bother to record them. It was a place like so many other places, between systems, far from any place where humanity or the creatures who rival humanity, breathe air and live what lives creation sees fit to give them. There were countless bright specks of light, pinpricks in the cold and the dark, and I knew that once upon a time in the recent past she and I would have stood here together, enthralled, thinking of all those worlds, and all the wonders they held within their bubbles of atmosphere; all those civilizations, those millennia of history, those unsuspected creatures and those treasures in coin unknown to us; and once we would have drawn closer, comforting each other with gentle hopeful lies of how we would live to see them all. The wonder I would have felt, not so long ago, was gone. I was not a creature of the stars, now. I was rather a creature of the vacuum now, of the void that could not support a life worth living.

I made the hull opaque again and restored full speed.

I let the ship make all the decisions. My only command was that it leave her behind.

I did not pay attention to where it took me.

It retraced our trip out.

It passed the ten thousand worlds that made up human space.

It passed the worlds that had names.

It passed the worlds that had been mapped but had not been visited.

It passed the worlds that were home to others, who may have looked up and wondered about the purpose and destination of this one particular speck of light, passing through the darkness.

It passed the worlds ruined by past cataclysms.

It passed through regions where there were no worlds.

It passed through stark emptiness.

By that time I had long since lost even academic curiosity about the details, no interest in enduring the pointless voyage, and so put myself to sleep for as long as I could, suppressing dreams.

It was not life.

It was only the oblivion I wanted.

I do not know how long I slept. Centuries. Millennia. Eons. The ship could keep me alive. It just could not make what life it forced into me worth living. This was not a problem because I refused to let the details in.

I could have killed myself. But it was not what I wanted. There is a difference between wanting to die and not having a reason to live. I did not want to pilot the ship into some raging sun, and for its fires to reduce me to my component atoms. That was not me. But I did not want to make planetfall, did not want to see another face, whether human or creature that had different features I might not recognize as a face. I did want this to be over. But I would not exert the effort to finish it.

Then the alarm woke me.

The ship told me that it had found a place to land and that I had to go outside.

I rose and put on my suit and stepped out onto the surface of another alien world, one not at all special. The stars in its sky fit no recognizable patterns, not to these human eyes; maybe the ship could have used them to navigate back to some world where people still congregated, but as the dust crunched beneath my boots I preferred to think that I had traveled beyond its ability to map, or been in flight so long that I was now the last human being, anywhere; as alone in the universe in fact as I had felt since the moment since she first sank to the chalky dust.

It was a lifeless and airless world, with nothing of note between me and the horizon. There was nothing to see here and would not be, no matter how far I marched, how carefully I mapped. It was just a cold and silent rock, like the one I had in my chest. It was an unimaginable distance from the place where she had died; one even farther away from familiar places than that lonely world, farther away than we had ever gone, and possibly further away than anyone had ever gone. And yet there was nothing at all exotic about it. It was just a place, like any other place.

I could not think of any reason why my ship would have brought me here, let alone urge me to stand on this earth, beneath these pitiless stars.

I just wanted to break, the irrevocable kind of break, that admitted no possibility of unwanted repair.

And that’s when I knew that it had been useless to flee.

There was nowhere I could go, anywhere, that could be far enough to leave her behind.

©2021 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media), which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories The Hour In Between and Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger. Adam lives in Florida with a trio of chaotic paladin cats.

Where You Left Me

Thomas Ha | 6248 words

The best way to hide a red mouth is to know exactly when your gums start to bleed. If you check your teeth every so often with a quick swipe of the tongue, and you get a bit of that saltiness, you’ll learn to take a swig from a canteen and rinse before anyone else notices. The weeps are a little harder. Most of us wear tinted goggles when we ride at the barrier. They keep solar glare low, of course, but they also let you feel when your tear ducts leak, because the blood collects at the bottom of the rims. That and a dark handkerchief, and you can clean yourself up as needed, no problem. As for the tremors, everyone has a different approach. I’ve heard some folks stick their hands in their pockets, others gesture wildly so people don’t focus on the shaking.

But no matter how well you hide the signs, there’ll never be an easy way to get rid of the bottles. They clink against your wedding ring when you hold one in your hand, clatter against each other when you store them in your rucksack. You can’t pile them in with the refuse, because then they’re out there for the whole world to see. Instead, you’ll start to hide them—empties, half-empties—in closets, on high shelves, so many you’ll forget and sometimes surprise yourself, when you’re looking for a place to put away another.

The day your mother almost caught me, I was burying bottles behind the barn. I heard her calling from the porch, and I covered the hole with dirt. She didn’t ask what I was doing, but I told her I was evening out a patch that wasn’t level.

You didn’t come home last night, she said, and I smiled with a closed mouth, not knowing how my gums looked just then.

Patrol ended late, so I slept at the barrier house.

She shielded her eyes from the creeping sunrise and tilted her head the way she did whenever she was troubled.