Welcome to issue fifty-two of Lightspeed!

Good news, everyone: Lightspeed won a Hugo!

The 2014 Hugo Awards were presented at Worldcon in London last month. Prior to this year, it’s been my great honor to have been nominated for six Hugo Awards for editing: three for Lightspeed in the Semiprozine category and three for myself personally in the Best Editor (Short Form) category. Up until now, both Lightspeed and myself had each been 0-3 in our respective categories.

If you’re reading this editorial then you probably already know that this year both Lightspeed and I were again nominated in the two aforementioned categories. But now THE STREAK HAS BEEN BROKEN: Lightspeed won the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine! I immediately started a new losing streak by losing the Best Editor (Short Form) award to Ellen Datlow, but naturally I’m thrilled that Lightspeed took home the prize. And honestly if I’d had to choose which of the two categories I would win, I would definitely have chosen Lightspeed winning Best Semiprozine, so I’m not even a little bit sad.

I wasn’t able to be in London for Worldcon this year to accept the award in person, but Lightspeed’s Podcast Producer, Stefan Rudnicki, was there and accepted on behalf of the magazine.

Here’s our Hugo, in the hands of Stefan himself:

Photo by GilesG Photography

Isn’t it glorious?

Here’s a zoomed-in shot of the Hugo itself so you can see the plaque.

Photo by GilesG Photography

Thanks again so much to everyone who reads and who voted for Lightspeed, and, of course, to all of the amazing authors who have helped make it possible by allowing us to feature their work. We salute you!

Lightspeed might seem like it’s a one-man show, but it very much is not—it’s a huge collaborative project, and it could not exist if not for the diligent efforts of many, many individuals behind the scenes, including Wendy N. Wagner, Christie Yant, Rich Horton, Stefan Rudnicki, Robyn Lupo, Jim Freund, Karen Jones, Andrew Liptak, Jude Griffin, Laurel Amberdine, Dana Watson, Anthony Cardno, Jeremiah Tolbert, and many others. Let us all also salute them.

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In other happy news, our sister magazine Nightmare is now available as a subscription via Amazon.com! The Kindle Periodicals division has been closed to new magazines for quite a while now (and has been since before Nightmare launched), but by employing some witchcraft we were able to get the doors unlocked just long enough for us to slip into the castle. Amazon subscriptions are billed monthly, at $1.99 per issue, and are available now. To learn more, please visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe.

Speaking of subscriptions, we’ve also made a change to the way our lightspeedmagazine.com ebookstore subscriptions work. We’re discontinuing the bill-you-every-month subscription option in favor of a more traditional type of magazine subscription; now when you subscribe, you’ll sign up for a six ($17.94), twelve ($35.88), or twenty-four ($71.76) month subscription and then will only be billed once per subscription term. This change is going to make it a lot easier for us to process subscriptions and should help improve our cashflow, which of course we’ll use to make Lightspeed even more awesome. If you’re a current subscriber, you don’t need to do anything; when your current subscription runs out, we’ll just send you an email to remind you to renew and then you’ll be presented with the new subscription options at that time.

To learn more about these and our other subscription options, please visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.

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In anthology news, the next installment of The Apocalypse Triptych—the apocalyptic anthology series I’m co-editing with Hugh Howey—is now available. The new volume, The End is Now, focuses on life during the apocalypse. The first volume, The End is Nigh (about life before the apocalypse) is also available. If you’d like a preview of the new anthology, you’re in luck: You can read Tananarive Due’s The End is Now story in this very issue! Pop over to johnjosephadams.com/apocalypse-triptych for more information about the book.

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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 Saundra Mitchell (“Starfall”) and Sam J. Miller (“We Are the Cloud”), along with SF reprints from the new anthologies: Monstrous Affections (Holly Black’s “Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind)”) and the aforementioned The End is Now (Tananarive Due’s “Herd Immunity”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Sarah Pinsker (“No Lonely Seafarer”) and Matthew Hughes (“Under the Scab”), and fantasy reprints by Aliette de Bodard (“Prayers of Forges and Furnaces”) and Rhys Hughes (“Eternal Horizon”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with authors Mary Robinette Kowal and Diana Gabaldon.

For our ebook readers, we also have a reprint of the novella “Giliad” by Gregory Feeley, and novel excerpts from The Brothers Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard and The Necromancer Candle by Randy McCharles.

Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. This month, make sure to look for the aforementioned The Necromancer Candle by Randy McCharles. Learn more from EDGE at edgewebsite.com.

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