Seanan Mcguire Don’T Go Łukasz Orbitowski Dirtman H.L
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 21, June 2014 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, June 2014 FICTION Spores Seanan McGuire Don’t Go Łukasz Orbitowski Dirtman H.L. Nelson Machines of Concrete Light And Dark Michael Cisco NONFICTION The H Word: Nightmares in the Big City Brandon Massey Artist Gallery Leslie Ann O’Dell Artist Spotlight: Leslie Ann O’Dell Julia Sevin Interview: Mark Morris Lisa Morton AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Seanan McGuire Łukasz Orbitowski H.L. Nelson Michael Cisco MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editor © 2014 Nightmare Magazine Cover Art by Leslie Ann O’Dell www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR EDITORIAL, JUNE 2014 John Joseph Adams Welcome to issue twenty-one of Nightmare! Some good news to report this month on the awards front: “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” by Sam J. Miller (Nightmare, December 2013) has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award! The winners will be announced at Readercon in Burlington, MA on July 13, 2014. You can learn more about the award and see the full list of nominees (which includes a story from our sister-magazine, Lightspeed), at shirleyjacksonawards.org. Congratulations to Sam and to all of the other finalists! In other awards news, the Nebula Awards were presented in mid-May by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Lightspeed had four nominees this year: two finalists in the short story category and two in novelette. That of course meant that everyone knew going into it that— barring any ties—Lightspeed was going to lose at least twice. Overachievers that they are, they managed to lose all four! That makes Lightspeed 0-for-11 in the Nebulas all-time. But truly, it is an honor to be nominated, and hey—eleven Nebula nominations in just four years is not too shabby! • • • • Speaking of Lightspeed, this month marks the publication of its special, double-sized fourth anniversary issue—the guest-edited, crowdfunded phenomenon: Women Destroy Science Fiction! It was a project so monumental that it spawned two other special issues—Women Destroy Fantasy! and Women Destroy Horror! You’ll have to wait until October for those two specials, but Women Destroy Science Fiction! is available now—in both ebook and print formats! To learn more about the issue, or to order it, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/wdsf. • • • • In other news, my anthology Dead Man’s Hand came out last month, but it’s still so new it still has that new anthology smell! It’s full of weird-western goodness, and it has a great lineup, featuring all-new, never-before-published stories by Kelley Armstrong, Seanan McGuire, Elizabeth Bear, Alastair Reynolds, Jonathan Maberry, Joe R. Lansdale, Tad Williams, Hugh Howey, and many more. If you’d like a sneak peek at the anthology, the complete text of Rajan Khanna’s story, “Second Hand,” appears in Lightspeed’s May issue. Additionally, Fred Van Lente’s story in the May Lightspeed (“Willful Weapon”) takes place in the same world as his Dead Man’s Hand story, “Neversleeps.” Plus there’s a bunch of “free reads”—and additional information about the book—available at johnjosephadams.com/dead- mans-hand. Speaking of my anthologies, The End is Nigh, volume one of The Apocalypse Triptych, came out in March, but it was exclusive on Kindle for 90 days so we could take advantage of the Kindle Select program. If you’re a non-Kindle ebook reader, then we have some good news for you: Sometime in June, The End is Nigh should become available in other ebook marketplaces, like Nook, iBooks, Kobo, etc. To help celebrate that, we’re reprinting one of the stories from the anthology here in Nightmare—the one that seemed to be the consensus pick for creepiest damn thing in the book, “Spores” by Seanan McGuire. • • • • With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original fiction from Łukasz Orbitowski (“Don’t Go”) and H.L. Nelson (“Dirtman”), along with reprints Michael Cisco (“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark ”) and the aforementioned Seanan McGuire story, “Spores.” We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Mark Morris. That’s about all I have for you this month. Thanks for reading! John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, 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. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for eight Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine, and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION SPORES Seanan McGuire June 2028 Something in the lab smelled like nectarine jam. I looked up from the industrial autoclave, frowning as I sniffed the air. Unusual smells aren’t a good thing when you work in a high- security bio lab. No matter how pleasant the odor may seem, it indicates a deviance from the norm, and deviance is what gets people killed. I straightened. “Hello?” “Sorry, Megan.” The round, smiling face of one of my co- workers—Henry, from the Eden Project—poked around the wall separating the autoclave area from the rest of the lab. His hand followed, holding a paper plate groaning under the weight of a large wedge of, yes, nectarine pie. “We were just enjoying some of Johnny’s harvest.” I eyed the pie dubiously. Eating food that we had engineered always struck me as vaguely unhygienic. “Johnny baked that?” “Johnny baked it, and Johnny grew it,” Henry said, beaming. “The first orchard seeded with our Eden test subjects has been bearing good fruit. You want a slice?” “I’ll pass,” I said. Realizing that I was standing on the border of outright rudeness, I plastered a smile across my face and added, “Rachel’s planning something big for tonight’s dinner. She told me to bring my appetite.” Henry nodded, his own smile fading. It was clear he didn’t believe my excuse. It was just as clear that he would let me have it. “Well, we’re sorry if our festivities disturbed you.” “Don’t worry about it.” I gestured to the autoclave. “I need to unpack this before I head out.” “Sure, Megan,” he said. “Have a nice evening, okay?” He withdrew, vanishing around the cubicle wall and leaving me comfortably alone. I let out a slow breath, trying to recover the sense of serenity I’d had before strange smells and coworkers disrupted my task. It wasn’t easy, but I’d had plenty of practice at finding my center. Less than thirty seconds later, I was unpacking hot, sterile glassware and getting my side of the lab ready for the challenges of tomorrow. Project Eden was a side venture of the biotech firm where I, Henry, and several hundred others were employed. Only twenty-three scientists, technicians, and managers were appended to the project, including me, the internal safety monitor. It was my job to make sure the big brains didn’t destroy the world in their rush toward a hardier, easier to grow peach, or an apple that didn’t rot quite so quickly after it had been picked. On an official level, I was testing the air and lab surfaces for a committee-mandated parts per million of potential contaminants. On an unofficial level, I spent a lot of time sterilizing glassware, wiping down surfaces, and ordering new gloves, goggles, and lab coats. It was work that could have been done by someone with half my education and a quarter of my training, but the pay was good, and it gave me an outlet for the compulsions that had kept me out of field biology. Besides, the hours were great. I didn’t mind being a glorified monkey if it meant I got to work in a good, clean lab, doing work that would genuinely better the world while still allowing me to quit by four on Fridays. The team was still celebrating and eating pie when I finished putting the glassware away and left for the locker room. I hadn’t been kidding about Rachel telling me to save my appetite. It had been a long day, and I wanted nothing more than to spend an even longer night with my wife and daughter. • • • • Rachel was in her studio when I got home. She had a gallery show coming up and was hard at work on the pastels and impressionistic still lifes that were her bread and butter. I knocked on the wall to let her know I was there and kept walking toward the kitchen. It was her night to cook—that part was true—but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have a little snack before dinner. The farmers’ market was held on Tuesday afternoons. I had worked late Tuesday night, but I knew Rachel and Nikki had gone shopping, and Rachel had the best eye for produce.