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There is a new online magazine in town, and this one focuses exclusively on science fiction.
Lightspeed Magazine, launched in June, is helmed by Fantasy Magazine and Prime Books publisher and award-winning editor Sean Wallace, with editorial support from John Joseph Adams (Fiction), Andrea Kail (Nonfiction), Stefan Rudnicki (Audio), and Jordan Hamessley and Christie Yant (assistant editors). A glance at the magazine’s impressive staff box shows that aside from showcasing fiction, Lighspeed also publishes nonfiction pieces, which can be read as companion pieces to its fiction offerings, and serves up a podcast, featuring one or two stories each month in audio format.
A fiction and a nonfiction piece is posted online for free every week, but readers have the option to buy the complete issue in ebook form at any time, even if there’s only one story for that month available on the website. The magazine’s regular monthly publication schedule (following this debut issue) will include two pieces of original fiction and two fiction reprints, along with four nonfiction articles. Fiction (and podcasts, when applicable) will go live on Tuesdays, nonfiction on Thursdays.
According to Adams, “Here you can expect to see all types of science fiction, from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and we encourage our writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.”
It was a promise delivered in Lightspeed’s maiden issue, which features four all-new, never-before-published stories from Vylar Kaftan, Jack McDevitt, David Barr Kirtley, and Carrie Vaughn. The magazine as a whole has been well received--see a review at Tor.com and the Secret Lair, even at SF Signal though the reviewer felt let down by the non-fiction; Locus doesn't so much as review the entire magazine as each individual story.
Let's take our own look at these initial offerings shall we? (Spoiler warning of course, although no endings are really given away, but all the stories for June are available online now, so feel free to read them first.)
I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno
Vylar Kaftan’s story contains hard science, but is as soft and gentle as any love letter. The story makes a running reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity, and to the thought experiment, Twin Paradox. The unnamed female protagonist has known “him” (also unnamed) ever since they are children. He enters the military, she enters the Peace Corps, and despite the fact that they are standing on opposite poles they end up as roommates and lovers. Then he travels to Alpha Centauri, and she stays put and gets married to another man, becomes a widow, rears her children, ages. Then he comes back. While she was born three years later than him, now, after his high-speed travel, he is half her age.
While reading this, I could not help but think of Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, of how physics can be made poetic and magical by a skillful writer, a writer who is awed, a writer who feels. Physics is indeed poetic and magical (when you approach the speed of light, your mass increases and time slows down--time slows down, how can you not be awed by this fact?), and Kaftan creates something just as beautiful. The protagonist writes, “My world is doubling every year. Somewhere in old Italy, Galileo is searching the skies with his telescope, wondering why his life doesn’t feel as full as it should. It’s because I have it all, four centuries later—his life, and millions of others.”
Jerry is conducting a press conference for NASA, several days before the Minerva lift-off, or the Return to the Moon, when one of the reporters shows him a story being run by a tabloid, the Bedrock. “The Russians released more lunar orbital pictures from the sixties,” the reporter tells him. “They’ve got one here from the far side of the Moon. If you can believe this, there’s a dome back there.” Jerry shrugs off the picture as a doctored image, but it spreads like wildfire. The tabloid article eventually dies, like most news reports, but now even Jerry is hooked – what is that dome, and where did it come from?
This is a very compelling story by Jack McDevitt. I found that I couldn’t read the final paragraphs fast enough.
Lynx, a catman, awakes before dawn and hikes west. While trying to find a way to get into the canyon, he comes upon an abomination – a dogman.
I always approach stories featuring talking animals with wariness, and, at times, lowered expectations. Stories like this tend to fall into one of two extremes--either they're genius, or a complete waste of time. Thank goodness this story was spun by the able hands of David Barr Kirtley. Whimsical, tragic, and endearing are the words I'd use to describe it. My favorite passage: “Lion’s faith was like fire—it gave intensity to everything he did, but it was a fire that was raging out of control and would someday consume him. And Tiger’s faith was like a mountain—immense, solid, and immovable. But Lynx realized that his own faith was more like the wasteland itself, existing only in the absence of anything else.”
It is all about quotas, says Marie of the Amaryllis, a fishing vessel that provides a portion of the sixty percent of protein needed by a whole region. It is all about quotas, because you are only supposed to get what you need, not how much you catch, and to want more poses the risk of overfishing and eventual starvation--and is, above all, a show of disrespect to the committee and the community.
But Nina, a young member of Marie’s crew, wants them to double their quotas. She wants an extra mouth to feed. She wants a child.
Stories about fishing crews and the sea usually tend to be war cries for individualism and freedom, so it is with great interest that I read Carrie Vaughn’s story about living with limited resources, restrictions, and that nagging fear of being a burden to others. Yet the story ended on a touching, optimistic note that I did not see coming at all.
Moving over to Lightspeed’s nonfiction pieces, Mike Brotherton talks about speed, Nascar and NASA (NASACAR?) in “Is There Anyone Out There Who Wants To Go Fast?”, Amanda Rose Levy discusses the options we have for saving our dying planet in “Every Step We Take”, Carol Pinchefsky lists the “Top Ten Reasons Why Uplifted Animals Don’t Make Good Pets”, and Genevieve Valentine talks about the Last Man on the Moon, astronomer Eugene Cernan, in “The High Untresspassed Sanctity of Space: Seven True Stories about Eugene Cernan”.
Valentine’s article, my favorite among the nonfiction pieces, is filled with information I have never heard of before. For example: “Eugene Cernan becomes the second American to walk in space, during a two-hour EVA that, because of a lack of handholds on the outside of the craft, forces him to expend unexpected energy to perform even simple maneuvers. By the time he returns to the Gemini, he has zero visibility through his fogged visor, and his heart rate is 180 beats per minute. (During his post-flight checkup, it’s determined he lost thirteen pounds in three days.)” Wow. This is amazing stuff, and it's exciting to learn about.
Lightspeed’s June issue is a collection of grade-A fiction and nonfiction pieces – every one of them is a worthwhile read. This is one reader definitely and eagerly looking forward to the next batch.
[Image Source: Art by Vitaly S. Alexius, image from Amazon. Copyright holder/s maintain appropriate rights.]
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