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TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 56, January 2015 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, January 2015 SCIENCE FICTION Beautiful Boys Theodora Goss He Came From a Place of Openness and Truth Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam More Adventures on Other Planets Michael Cassutt Men of Unborrowed Vision Jeremiah Tolbert FANTASY Headwater LLC Sequoia Nagamatsu The Lonely Heart Aliette de Bodard The Archon Matthew Hughes Maiden, Mother, Crone Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky NOVELLA The Choice Paul McAuley NOVEL EXCERPTS A Darker Shade of Magic V.E. Schwab The Galaxy Game Karen Lord NONFICTION Interview: David X. Cohen The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Book Reviews Andrew Liptak Artist Gallery Zelda Devon Artist Spotlight: Zelda Devon Henry Lien AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Theodora Goss Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam Michael Cassutt Jeremiah Tolbert Sequoia Nagamatsu Aliette de Bodard Matthew Hughes Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky Paul McAuley MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Kickstarter Alert: Queers Destroy Science Fiction! Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editor © 2015 Lightspeed Magazine Cover Art by Zelda Devon and Kurt Huggins Ebook Design by John Joseph Adams www.lightspeedmagazine.com Editorial, January 2015 John Joseph Adams Welcome to issue fifty-six of Lightspeed! This month marks the start of our next big project. Last year, we asked women to destroy science fiction, and they did — spectacularly — in our crowdfunded, all-women special issue, Women Destroy Science Fiction!. Never ones to rest on our laurels, we thought it best to continue with that fine tradition and engage in a little more destructive behavior. Thus, this year’s anniversary issue will be Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, guest edited by Seanan McGuire. As with Women Destroy Science Fiction!, we’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign in support of Queers Destroy Science Fiction!. We’ll publish the issue whether the campaign is successful or not, but the campaign will determine how big and awesome we make the issue. If we raise just $5000, we’ll be able to make the special issue a special double-sized issue, and if we raise even more than that, we have a couple of really excellent stretch goals lined up as well. Our two biggest stretch goals are the same as last year: If we receive enough pledges, we’ll not only publish Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, we’ll also publish Queers Destroy Fantasy! and Queers Destroy Horror! special issues as well. Joining guest editor Seanan McGuire will be a team of wonderful queer creatives, including Steve Berman (reprint editor), Wendy N. Wagner (managing editor), Mark Oshiro (nonfiction editor), Sigrid Ellis (flash fiction editor), Cecil Baldwin (podcast host), Paul Boehmer (podcast producer), Elizabeth Leggett (art director/cover artist), and more! The Queers Destroy Science Fiction! Kickstarter campaign will run from January 15 – February 15. To learn more, visit destroysf.com/queers. • • • • With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original science fiction by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam (“He Came From a Place of Openness and Truth”) and Jeremiah Tolbert (“Men of Unborrowed Vision”), along with SF reprints by Theodora Goss (“Beautiful Boys”) and Michael Cassutt (“More Adventures on Other Planets”). Plus, we have original fantasy by Sequoia Nagamatsu (“Headwater LLC”) and Matthew Hughes (“The Archon,” a Kaslo Chronicles tale), and fantasy reprints by Aliette de Bodard (“The Lonely Heart”) and Rachel Swirsky and Ann Leckie (“Mother, Maiden, Crone”). We also have a feature interview with David X. Cohen, Executive Producer of the critically-acclaimed animated series Futurama, along with our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, and the launch our new book review column. For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive novella reprint of “The Choice,” by Paul McAuley, and novel excerpts from The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord and A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab. Our issue this month is sponsored by our friends at Tor Books. This month, be sure to look for the aforementioned A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab. Learn more at Tor- Forge.com. Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading! ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Lightspeed, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Operation Arcana, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Nightmare Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. Beautiful Boys Theodora Goss You know who I’m talking about. You can see them on Sunday afternoons, in places like Knoxville, Tennessee or Flagstaff, Arizona, playing pool or with their elbows on the bar, drinking a beer before they head out into the dusty sunlight and get into their pickups, onto their motorcycles. Some of them have dogs. Some of their dogs wear bandanas around their necks. Some of them, before they leave, put a quarter into the jukebox and dance slowly with the waitresses, the pretty one and then the other one. Then they drive or ride down the road, heading over the mountains or through the desert, toward the next town. And one of the waitresses, the other one, the brunette who is a little chubby, feels a sharp ache in her chest. Like the constriction that begins a panic attack. • • • • “Beautiful Boys” is a technical as well as a descriptive term. Think of them as another species, Pueri Pulchri. Pueri Pulchri cor meum furati sunt. The Beautiful Boys have stolen my heart. • • • • They look like the models in cigarette ads. Lean, muscular, as though they can work with their hands. As though they had shaved yesterday. As though they had just ridden a horse in a cattle drive, or dug a trench with a backhoe. They smell of aftershave and cigarette smoke. • • • • That night, when she makes love to her boyfriend, who works at the gas station, the other waitress will think of him. She and her boyfriend have been together since high school. She will imagine making love to him instead of her boyfriend: the smell of aftershave and cigarettes, the feel of his skin under her hands, smooth and muscled. The rasp of his stubble as he kisses her. She will imagine him entering her and cry aloud, and her boyfriend will congratulate himself. Afterward, she will stare into the darkness and cry silently, until she falls asleep on the damp pillow. • • • • Would statistics help? They range from 5’11” to 6’2”, between 165 and 195 pounds. They can be any race, any color. They often finish high school, but seldom finish college. On a college campus, they have almost unlimited access to what they need: fertile women. But they seldom stay for more than a couple of semesters. They are more likely than human males to engage in criminal activities. They sell drugs, rob liquor stores and banks, but are seldom rapists. Sex, for them, is a matter of survival. They need to ensure that the seed has been implanted. They seldom hold jobs for more than six months at a time. You can see them on construction sites, working as ranch hands, in video stores. Anything temporary. They seldom marry, and those marriages inevitably end in desertion or divorce. They move on quickly. They always move on. I believe that on this planet, their lifespan is approximately seven years. I have never seen a Beautiful Boy older than twenty-nine. • • • • Oscar Guest is not his real name. He had all the characteristics. Tall, brown skin, high cheekbones: a mixture of Mexican and American Indian ancestry. Black hair pulled back into a ponytail, black eyes with the sort of lashes that sell romance novels or perfume. He was wearing a t-shirt printed with the logo of a rock band and faded jeans. “I hear you’re paying $300 to participate in a study,” he said. It’s a lot of money, particularly considering our grant. But we choose our test subjects carefully. They have to fit the physical and aesthetic criteria (male, 5’11”-6’2”, 165-195 pounds, unusually attractive). Even then, only about 2% of those we test are Beautiful Boys. I could tell he was one of them at once. I’ve developed a sort of sensitivity. But of course that identification would have to be verified by testing. • • • • Sometimes, the Beautiful Boy doesn’t move on immediately. Sometimes, he stays around after the dance. He gets a job in construction, starts dating the pretty waitress. If she insists, they might even get married. By the time he leaves, she’s pregnant. As far as we know, Beautiful Boys mate and reproduce like human males. Based on anecdotal evidence, we suspect they’re superior lovers, but that data has not been verified. We are writing a grant to study their reproductive cycle. However, we are still at the stage of identifying them, of convincing the general population that they are here, among us, an alien species.

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