Welcome to issue 158 of Lightspeed Magazine!

We’re kicking off this month with a short story by JB Park, “Six Months After All Life on Titan Died,” that takes the idea of ChatGPT and imagines what we’ll do with it in the distant future. If you loved the Ents and the Entwives in The Lord of the Rings, you’ll definitely enjoy Ashok Banker’s new SF short “The Bodhi Tree Asks Only For The Safe Return Of Her Beloved,” told from the perspective of, well, a tree! We also have two terrific flash pieces: “Death Is Better” from Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe and “The United Systems Goodwill Concert Series and the Greatest Performance of All Time” by James Van Pelt.

Our fantasy shorts include “Starpoop,” by Sandra McDonald, a meditation on dementia and social media fame. We also have a new story by Isha Karki: “Muna in Barish,” the story of a young writer struggling against discrimination. We also have a flash story (“The Real Worlds”) from Lauren Bajek, and another (“Monsters of the Drunken Shore”) from Nic Anstett.

Of course we have author spotlight interviews with our writers, and our review team has been hard at work finding all the best new reads. Speaking of reviews, we’re so happy for Aigner Loren Wilson, who has been nominated for an Ignyte Award for her literary criticism!

If you’re an ebook reader, don’t miss the excerpt from The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei—and thanks for purchasing or subscribing!

Publisher’s Note: Kindle Periodicals is Closing, and We Need Your Support More Than Ever.

Many of you have likely already heard about the new existential threat to Lightspeed and all of the other digital magazines in the SF/F/H field: the impending closure, in September, of Amazon’s Kindle Periodicals program. They will be transitioning some magazines into Kindle Unlimited, and so in some respects things may continue as normal if you subscribe via Kindle Periodicals—but this shift will cut severely into the finances of any magazine currently using the service; Lightspeed, for instance, will see our largest source of funding cut it in half. (For additional information about this seismic shift, you can see Neil Clarke’s deep dive into the details at neil-clarke.com/amazon-kindle-subscriptions.)

What We Can Do About This

The best thing you can do if you are a Kindle Periodicals subscriber is to migrate your subscription over to one of our other subscription options. Currently, we have the following options available:

1. Subscribe direct via our website: We have options for 6 month, 12 month, 24 month, and Lifetime subscriptions. We’re in the process of also bringing back the pay-as-you-go monthly subscriptions (i.e., the way Kindle Periodicals currently works) as well. Your issues can be delivered to your Kindle or Kindle app of choice the same way they are via Kindle Periodicals, though they’d appear on your device as regular eBooks rather than the special “periodical” format Kindle Periodicals forced us to use.
2. Subscribe via Weightless Books: Weightless Books’s subscriptions work exactly like our Direct subscriptions, though they only have 6 and 12 month options.
3. Become a Patreon patron: If you just want to support Lightspeed and the other Adamant Press magazines (without getting ebooks in return), you can become one of our Patrons at Patreon. You’d be able to choose any amount that you’d like to pledge to support us, either monthly or annually.

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/support for more info about all of the above.

Why We Need Your Support

There are no big companies supporting or funding Adamant Press’s magazines—and Adamant itself is kind of a two-person show—so the magazines really rely on reader support. Because of that, it’s vital for us to keep as many Kindle Periodicals subscribers—which the vast majority of our subscribers are—as possible during this upheaval. So, please—if you care about the continuation of Lightspeed and any other genre magazines you subscribe to, please take this to heart and help us make this transition.

Thank You for Being a Subscriber

Thanks so much for your generous support over the months or years you’ve been a subscriber. Together, we can ensure that Lightspeed will continue coming to you every month for many years to come.