The Hugo Award Showcase

    Tags:

    Each year, members of the World Science Fiction Convention vote for the science fiction and fantasy works they love the most: the Hugo Awards. Now, for the first time in more than a decade, you can find these treasured gems within a single volume. The Hugo Award Showcase collects the stories—by rising stars like Kij Johnson, beloved taleslingers like Michael Swanwick, and literary legends like Nancy Kress—that have captured the hearts and imaginations of some of the genre’s most dedicated readers.

    The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2009 Edition

    Tags:

    This inaugural volume of the year’s best science fiction and fantasy features thirty-seven stories by some of the genre’s greatest authors, including Peter S. Beagle, Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake, Ian McDonald, Sarah Monette, Garth Nix, Naomi Novik, Robert Reed, Patrick Rothfuss, and many more. Selecting the best fiction from Asimov’s, F&SF, MIT Technology Review, The New Yorker, Tor.com, Weird Tales, and other top venues, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy is your guide to magic realms and worlds beyond tomorrow.

    The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition

    Tags:

    This second volume of the year’s best science fiction and fantasy features thirty stories by some of the genre’s greatest authors, including Elizabeth Bear, Nancy Kress, Jay Lake, Margo Lanagan, Kelly Link, Paul McAuley, Sarah Monette, Lucius Shepard, Jo Walton, and many others.

    Selecting the best fiction from Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF, The New Yorker, Tor.com, and other top venues, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy is your guide to magical realms and worlds beyond tomorrow.

    Lightspeed Magazine: 12-Month Subscription

    Tags:

    About Lightspeed Magazine

    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.

    A 12 month subscription to Lightspeed includes more than 100 stories (around 700,000 words of fiction). In each issue, you will find eight pieces of short fiction (a mix of short stories and novelettes) from a variety of authors—from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven’t heard of yet. Some of the authors we’ve published over the years include Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, N.K. Jemisin, Ted Chiang, and Ken Liu, to name but a few. In addition our short fiction offerings, Lightspeed also offers a variety of nonfiction features, including feature interviews, Q&As with our authors that go behind-the-scenes of their stories, book and media reviews, and more.
    Launched in 2010, Lightspeed is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award, and stories from the magazine have been nominated for major genre awards dozens of times, including the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award. Our editor, John Joseph Adams, has been nominated for the Hugo Award twelve times and the World Fantasy Award eight times, and in addition to editing Lightspeed he’s also edited more than thirty anthologies (including Wastelands and The Living Dead) and serves as series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.
    Subscribing to Lightspeed saves you $1 off the cover price of each issue (savings of 25% on each issue). Sign-up for a subscription now and you’ll see where science fiction and fantasy comes from, where it is now, and where it’s going.

    John Joseph Adams, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

    John Joseph AdamsJohn Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. In 2011, he was nominated for two Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com. John is also the co-host of io9’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

    Apex Magazine Issue 19

    Tags:

    Get your dark science fiction and fantasy short story fix at Apex Magazine. New issue released on the first Monday of every month!

    Fiction:
    “Radishes” by Nick Wolven
    “Pale, and from a Sea-Wave Rising” by C.S.E. Cooney
    “At the Core” by Erzebet YellowBoy (first appeared in Fantasy Magazine

    Poetry:
    “Flourless Devil’s Food” by Shweta Narayan
    “Cancelled Flight” by W.C. Roberts

    Clarkesworld Magazine – Issue 51

    Tags:

    The December 2010 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine.

    This issue features fiction by Kelly Barnhill (“The Taxidermist’s Other Wife”) and A.C. Wise (“The Children of Main Street”), interviews with Theodora Goss, and a History of Evil Entertainment by Nancy Fulda.

    Lightspeed Magazine, December 2010

    Tags:

    Lightspeed Magazine is a monthly science fiction magazine that features all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between:

    Our lead story this month, “In-fall,” by Ted Kosmatka, puts us aboard a ship hurtling through space. Aboard this ship, two men–mortal enemies–await their inevitable deaths, although that means something very different for each of them.

    “The Observer,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch tells the story of a woman separated into various parts of herself. However, there’s always a dominant side. And that side will do whatever it can in order to survive.

    After reading our third piece of fiction for the month, “Jenny’s Sick” by David Tallerman, you might do a double take when you see your colleague coughing by the water fountain. A seasonal cold, he says, but are you certain that’s the case? Maybe it’s something more serious.

    For our final story this month, we present “The Silence of the Asonu” by Ursula K. Le Guin, which allows us a glimpse into a race of people that do not speak as we do, but have plenty of other ways to communicate, some which may be more powerful than our own.

    Luna Station Quarterly – Issue 4

    Tags:

    The fourth issue of Luna Station Quarterly, featuring a collection of unique stories by up and coming women writers. Our first Drabble issue!

    Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet Subscription

    Tags:

    Want to support LCRW, but thwarted by VAT because you’re in the EU? Subscribe via PayHip!

    Get your LCRW ebook subscription here. We have yet to figure out how to produce eChocolate. When we do, the patent office will be the first to know but you will be a close second. In the meantime, if you’d like chocolate with your LCRW, you’ll need a non-Weightless subscription.

    LCRW means Loads of Chocolate something something....

    Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 26

    Tags:

    8.5 x 7 · 64pp · December 2010 · Issue 26 · Available in lo-res or hi-res PDF, epub, mobi, and lit.

    After issue no. 25, NewPages said, “More, more, more please.” SF Revu suggested, “If you want to support some very wonderful fiction, than subscribe to Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.” Esubs will be available very soon. And Mr. John Klima declared on Tor.com “The issue is filled with a bunch of names I don’t know, but that’s always been true. And while I like reading work from my favorite writers, I like uncovering new (either brand-new or new-to-me) writers, too.” Which made us very happy as while we also very much enjoy our favorite writers we also love reading new (or new-to-us) writers.

    This zine was almost published in October. And so nearly in November. And here it is coming up to December and (insert chorus singing something striking but not at all holiday-like) and Lo! here it is. Eight stories: dread pirate ships, dread submersibles, dread sheds! Alice, Three-Hat Juan, and welders in love. Ted Chiang on folk biology. And a cover that should be reproduced on the side of a skyscraper. Yep, we liked it—hope you do, too.

    All of this copiously illustrated with letters throughout. Sometimes as many as 2000 per page. Most arranged in forms known colloquially as “English.”

    No part of this zine was produced on a Freyfarm.

    Advertisers! We have advertisers! We will sell you space, too! We take dollars, pounds, euros, or chocolate bars. Hello and thank yous to Bull Spec, Icarus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Publications, Electric Velocipede, &c!

    * Also known as “text.”

    And now, the actual and real Table of Contents:

    Fiction
    Harvey Welles and Philip Raines, The Cruel Ship’s Captain
    Patty Houston, Elite Institute for the Study of Arc Welders’ Flash Fever
    Carlea Holl-Jensen, Sleep
    Rahul Kanakia, The Other Realms Were Built With Trash
    Veronica Schanoes, Alice: a Fantasia
    Sean Melican, Absence of Water
    Jenny Terpsichore Abeles, Three Hats
    J. M. McDermott, Death’s Shed

    Nonfiction
    Ted Chiang, Reasoning about the Body
    Gwenda Bond, Dear Aunt Gwenda
    The Patient Writers

    Poetry
    Lindsay Vella, Thirst; The Way to the Sea; Spit Out the Seeds; The Seamstress; Poor summer, she doesn’t know she’s dying
    Darrell Schweitzer, Dueling Trilogies

    Cover
    Sarah Goldstein, Broken Stick; Year: 2004; Size: 11” x 10. ”Materials: acrylic medium, gouache on paper.

    About These Authors

    Jenny Terpsichore Abeles is an amateur cosmologist, ragpicker, fabulist, and wandering scholar. She lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts (she thinks) and is writing a novel about Renaissance feminism and werewolves. “Three Hats” is her first non-self published story and LCRW is her favorite literary magazine, so she’s having an unusually splendid day.

    Gwenda Bond has just finished a novel.

    Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York and holds a degree in computer science from Brown University. In 1989 he attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. His fiction has won three Hugos, four Nebulas, three Locus awards, and a Sturgeon award. He lives near Seattle, Washington.

    Sarah Goldstein was born in Toronto and lives in western Massachusetts. Her artwork has been exhibited in the US and Canada, and her first book, Fables, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press next spring.

    Carlea Holl-Jensen was born on a Wednesday. Since then, her short fiction has appeared in Pindeldyboz and Call & Response, and she once received a prize. She is confident that you will enjoy reading her blog at hourofgold.wordpress.com.

    Patty Houston lives in Cincinnati with her husband and daughters. She teaches English at the University of Cincinnati and is also at work on a short story collection.

    Rahul Kanakia is an international development consultant based in Washington, D.C.

    J. M. McDermott’s favorite color is dark blue. With five novels forthcoming, he has not been able to keep up with all the activity of his favorite television programs. Forthcoming books include a reprint of his critically-acclaimed Last Dragon, with his new novel Maze from Apex Books, and a fantasy trilogy beginning with Never Knew Another from Nightshade.

    Sean Melican would like you to know that true love exists. Oh, and that Popeye’s is da shizz.

    Philip Raines lives in Linlithgow in Scotland. Harvey Welles lives in the Milwaukee of his mind.

    Veronica Schanoes’s work has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, and Sybil’s Garage. She lives in New York City where she is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College—CUNY. She does not like cats.

    Darrell Schweitzer has also rewritten a good deal of the works of H.P. Lovecraft into limerick form. Among his longer works, he has published about 300 stories and three novels. His PS Publications novella Living with the Dead was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. He used to edit Weird Tales and now edits anthologies, the most recent of which are Cthulhu’s Reign and Full Moon City (with Martin Greenberg).

    Lindsay Vella has been assigned a flammability rating of 3 (severe fire hazard). Fires involving Lindsay Vella should be fought upwind and from the maximum distance possible. Keep unnecessary people away; isolate hazard and deny entry. Her poems have appeared in Spork, and she lives in Detroit.

    Made by: Gavin J. Grant, Kelly Link, Jedediah Berry, and Michael J. DeLuca.
    Readers: Su-Yee Lin, Samantha Guilbert, Cristi Jacques.
    Extra thanks: Jennifer Terpsichore Abeles, Hannah Goldstein, Matthew Harrison.

    Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No.26, December 2010. ISSN 1544-7782. Text: Bodoni Book. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. LCRW is published in June and November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., Easthampton, MA 01027 · smallbeerpress@gmail.com · smallbeerpress.com/lcrw

    Subscriptions: $20/4 issues (see page 17 of the paper edition or here—and, whoop de doo, are there some choices). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions are available through EBSCO & Swets.

    LCRW is available as an ebook through smallbeerpress.com, Weightless Books, and Fictionwise, and occasionally as a trade paperback and ebook from lulu.com/sbp. Electronic subscriptions coming next week!

    Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, & all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply.  Paper edition printed by the good people at Paradise Copies, 21 Conz St., Northampton, MA 01060. 413-585-0414.

    These days we’re always behind in our reading, sorry. Thanks to the writers for their patience—especially Darrell, whose misplaced poems took five years to reach print(!), Sean, and Phil & Harvey (whose stories took two or three years). On the right side of the first page are covers of a few books we’re working on for 2011. Not all of those covers are final. There are a few books missing and then there is a chapbook—the last, we expect, for a while—by Hal Duncan, An A-Z of the Fantastic City, which we will publish in some lovely ways in spring. As always, thanks for reading.

    Sea, Ship, Mountain, Sky

    Tags:

    A unique collaboration between Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, “Sea, Ship, Mountain, Sky” is a story of love and loss, identity and respect, life and death and change.

    Originally published in the summer 2000 double issue of the Australian magazine Altair (No.6/7—sharing a ToC with Anya DeNiro), “Sea, Ship, Mountain, Sky” was reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror XIV (Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, eds.).

    Length: 4,000 words. 10 pages in pdf.

    Read an excerpt:

    Father told us a story from a long time ago, when we lived by the sea. He said, “We were boatbuilders for the dead.”

    In my family the oldest child learned the skills from their mother or father. The boats had to be sturdy enough to go far out to sea, yet light enough to burn well. Then the northerners came and killed many of us so we moved, left the sea and our boats behind us and came to these southern mountains where we had to find a new path for the dead.

    Our village is in a high valley where we grow most of what we need. We herd the mountain sheep with their rough, silky wool. We grow flax. We tend orchards. And up beyond the village, up through the orchards, a half-day’s walk with a bier, is the burial place.

    Father has been drinking salt wine. Now he is asleep. At mother’s burial today I could see that this story is true. It is indeed a ship that we build for the dead. I have done this, I have built ships, since I was a child. My shoulders are big from chopping and carrying wood, and my hands are hard. The other children—even my brothers and sisters—were always a little afraid of me. But there is one in the village who returns my looks and sometimes exchanges a few words with me, so I do not expect to be always lonely. It is a solitary job, but it carries respect.

    About the authors

    Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant have published a zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, since 1996, and founded Small Beer Press in 2000. In 2007 they published The Best of LCRW (Del Rey). Candlewick published their young adult anthologies, Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories and Monstrous Affections. In 2019 they took over a small new and used book shop in Easthampton, MA, and reopened it as Book Moon.

    Kelly Link is the author of five short story collections, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Get in Trouble, White Cat Black Dog (Random House, 2023), and a collection for young adults, Pretty Monsters. Her stories have appeared in The Faery Reel, The Restless Dead, The Starry Rift, The Best American Short Stories, Poe’s Children, McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and Firebirds Rising, and have won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Tiptree, British Science Fiction, and World Fantasy Awards. She worked for three years at a children’s bookshop in North Carolina and for five years at Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston.

    Originally from Scotland, Gavin J. Grant moved to the USA in 1991. He worked in bookshops in Los Angeles and Boston and has written for the Los Angeles Times, Bookslut,and Time Out New York, and is a zine reviewer for Xerography Debt. His stories have been published in Strange Horizons, SciFiction, 3 AM Magazine, and The Third Alternative, and have been reprinted in Best New Fantasy and Year’s Best Fantasy.

    Grant and Link live in Western Massachusetts.

    Clarkesworld Magazine – Issue 50

    Tags:

    The November 2010 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine.

    This issue features fiction by N. K. Jemisin (“On the Banks of the River Lex”) and Genevieve Valentine (“Seeing”), interviews with Lois McMaster Bujold and Cherie Priest, and article on Sherlock Holmes and the Science Fiction of Deduction by Ryan Britt.

    Lightspeed Magazine, November 2010

    Tags:

    Lightspeed Magazine is a monthly science fiction magazine that features all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between:

    In our lead story this month, “Standard Loneliness Package,” Charles Yu—author of the debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe—takes us to a strange future in which those who don’t want to feel pain, don’t have to: You can hire someone else to do it…whether it’s suffering through a root canal, a migraine, or the loss of a loved one.

    “Faces in Revolving Souls” by Caitlín R. Kiernan depicts a future in which body modification has reached an extreme: not only can people modify their bodies, they can become a unique species entirely by incorporating attributes of other creatures into their own physiology.

    In “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim, poor eponymous Hwang is slipping through time, but that’s what you get when you try to use a time machine to solve your problems.

    For our final story this month, we present “Ej-Es” by Nancy Kress. In it, we follow a team of medicians who provide medical relief around the galaxy. But the people of Good Fortune prove challenging to communicate with…

    Apex Magazine Issue 18

    Tags:

    This is our special Arab/Muslim themed issue.

    Apex Magazine is a monthly science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazine featuring original, mind-bending short fiction from many of the top pros of the field.

    Fiction:
    “The Green Book” by Amal El-Mohtar
    “50 Fatwas for the Virtuous Vampire” by Pamela K. Taylor
    “The Faithful Soldier, Prompted” by Saladin Ahmed
    “Kamer-taj, the Moon-horse” from Forty-Four Turkish Fairy Tales

    Poetry:
    “Me and Rumi’s Ghost” by Samer Rabadi
    “Tur Disaala” by Jawad Elhusuni
    “Al Manara Dirge” by Sara Saab

    On Spec Magazine – Fall 2010 #82 vol 22 no 3

    Tags:

    The Fall 2010 issue of On Spec Magazine.

    This issue features short stories by S. A. Bolich (“An Infinity of Moments”), Wes Schofield (“The Time Travellers’ Convention”), Scott A. Ellis (“The Big Rock Candy Mountain”), Michael Kaler (“At the Here ‘n’ Now”), Shane Michael Arbuthnott (“Burning Things”), Ian Donald Keeling (“When Jack Colliander Died”), Catherine Knutsson (“Sky Falling”), Catherine MacLeod (“Water Breaks”), Ian Rogers (“The Bottle”), and T. T. Trestle (“Axioms + Ecstasy”); guest editorial by Jen Laface (“It’s All Geek To Me”); author interview by Roberta Laurie (“The So-Called Thoughts of T.T. Trestle”); artist supplement (“Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk”); editorial by Robin Carson (“Redux”); cover art by Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk (“Brekky”).

    Bull Spec #3

    Tags:

    Issue 3 (“Autumn 2010”) issue of Bull Spec, a quarterly magazine of speculative fiction.

    This issue features fiction by Katherine Sparrow (“Like Parchment in the Fire”), Melinda Thielbar (“You’re Almost Here”), Lavie Tidhar (“The Story of Listener and Yu-En”), Denali Hyatt (“Cityscape”), and David Steffen (“Turning Back the Clock”); very short fiction from Natania Barron (“Sand”) and Paul Celmer (“A Crowded Place”) with both translated into French by Gio Clairval and into Spanish by Itzel Leaf; an excerpt of David Drake’s novel The Legions of Fire; part 3 of 4 of Mike Gallagher’s graphic short story “Closed System”; interviews with Drake, Joe Haldeman, William Gibson, Brandon Sanders, and Paul T. Riddell; poetry, reviews, art, and more. Cover art by Jason Strutz.