Welcome to issue fifty-nine of Lightspeed!

In case you missed it, just a reminder that last month saw the publication of Operation Arcana, my new anthology of military fantasy, which was published by Baen on March 3. Operation Arcana contains sixteen never-before-published tales (about 100,000 words of material), from Glen Cook, Myke Cole, Genevieve Valentine, Elizabeth Moon, Django Wexler, Weston Ochse, Yoon Ha Lee, Jonathan Maberry, Tobias S. Buckell & David Klecha, Ari Marmell, Tanya Huff, Carrie Vaughn, T.C. McCarthy, Simon R. Green, Seanan McGuire, and Linda Nagata. The stories run the gamut from military epic fantasy to military urban fantasy to military historical fantasy — and everything in between. You’ll find a reprint of Linda Nagata’s story, “The Way Home,” in the March issue of Lightspeed. If you’d like to learn more about the book, read additional stories from the anthology for free online, or read interviews with the authors, visit my Operation Arcana website at johnjosephadams.com/operation-arcana.

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Also recently released was Wastelands 2, the sequel to my bestselling — and first! — anthology, Wastelands. It contains nearly 200,000 words of fiction, including stories by George R.R. Martin, Seanan McGuire, Hugh Howey, Nancy Kress, David Brin, Ann Aguirre, Paolo Bacigalupi, Lauren Beukes, and Junot Díaz, among others. Learn more about it at johnjosephadams.com/wastelands-2.

Speaking of Wastelands, Titan also just recently released the original Wastelands in mass market paperback edition. So if you’ve been wanting to read it all these years and just couldn’t abide paying more than $7.99 for it, now’s your chance!

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In other anthology news, The End Has Come, the third and final volume of The Apocalypse Triptych, which I’m editing with Hugh Howey, will be coming out a bit later than initially anticipated. Due to various factors, Hugh and I decided it would be best for us to delay the release of The End Has Come by another month, so instead of April 1, it’ll come out May 1. (We had previously already delayed it from March 1 to April 1.) Initially, the delay was just to put some space between the release of Wastelands 2 and Operation Arcana, but then we ran into some additional issues that made us decide that delaying the book another month would be the best thing for it. Sorry to disappoint all of you who have been patiently waiting for the book, but we do hope that this will be the last delay before publication.

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With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month:

We have original science fiction by Kat Howard (“The Universe, Sung in Stars”) and Jason Gurley (“Quiet Town”), along with SF reprints by Carolyn Ives Gilman (“The Invisible Hand Rolls the Dice”) and John Barnes (“The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Violet Allen (“We’ll Be Together Forever”) and Dale Bailey (“The Ministry of the Eye”), and fantasy reprints by Sonya Taaffe (“A Wolf in Iceland is the Child of a Lie”) and Ken Liu (“The Ussuri Bear”).

This month, we’re excited to share a feature interview with Chris Williams, the co-director of Disney’s Big Hero 6. We also have our latest book review column, an interview with this month’s fantastic cover artist, and of course interviews with all our authors.

For our ebook readers, we also have a novella reprint from Kate Elliott (“On the Dying Winds of the Old Year and the Birthing Winds of the New”) and three novel excerpts, including The Rebirths of Tao, by Wesley Chu, The Grace of Kings, by Ken Liu, and a sponsored excerpt from Acheron Books, Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets by Alessio Lanterna (translated by Kate Mitchell).

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at Acheron Books, the first publishing house to produce Italian fantasy, science fiction and horror fiction and distribute it worldwide in the English language in ebook format. Learn more at acheronbooks.com.

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading!