TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 66, November 2015 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, November 2015 SCIENCE FICTION Here is My Thinking on a Situation That Affects Us All Rahul Kanakia The Pipes of Pan Brian Stableford Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death Caroline M. Yoachim The Light Brigade Kameron Hurley FANTASY The Black Fairy’s Curse Karen Joy Fowler When We Were Giants Helena Bell Printable Toh EnJoe (translated by David Boyd) The Plausibility of Dragons Kenneth Schneyer NOVELLA The Least Trumps Elizabeth Hand NOVEL EXCERPTS Chimera Mira Grant NONFICTION Artist Showcase: John Brosio Henry Lien Book Reviews Sunil Patel Interview: Ernest Cline The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Rahul Kanakia Karen Joy Fowler Brian Stableford Helena Bell Caroline M. Yoachim Toh EnJoe Kameron Hurley Kenneth Schneyer Elizabeth Hand MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Upcoming Events Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Lightspeed Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams © 2015 Lightspeed Magazine Cover by John Brosio www.lightspeedmagazine.com Editorial, November 2015 John Joseph Adams | 712 words Welcome to issue sixty-six of Lightspeed! Back in August, it was announced that both Lightspeed and our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue specifically had been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. (Lightspeed was nominated in the Periodicals category, while WDSF was nominated in the Anthology category.) The awards were presented October 25 at FantasyCon 2015 in Nottingham, UK, and, alas, Lightspeed did not win in the Periodicals category. But WDSF did win for Best Anthology! Huge congrats to Christie Yant and the rest of the WDSF team, and thanks to everyone who voted for, supported, or helped create WDSF! You can find the full list of winners at britishfantasysociety.org. And, of course, if you somehow missed out on WDSF, you can learn more about that, including where to buy it, at destroysf.com. • • • • ICYMI last month, October saw the debut of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, a new entry in the prestigious Best American series. In it, guest editor Joe Hill and I present the top twenty stories of 2014 (ten science fiction, ten fantasy), by the following: Nathan Ballingrud, T.C. Boyle, Adam-Troy Castro, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Seanan McGuire, Sam J. Miller, Susan Palwick, Cat Rambo, Jess Row, Karen Russell, A. Merc Rustad, Sofia Samatar (two stories!), Kelly Sandoval, Jo Walton, and Daniel H. Wilson. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com/best-american. Also recently released was Loosed Upon the World (Saga Press, Sep. 2015), the definitive collection of climate fiction. These provocative stories explore our present and speculate about all of our tomorrows through terrifying struggle and hope. Join bestselling authors Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jim Shepard, and over twenty others as they presciently explore the greatest threat to our future. To learn more, visit johnjosephadams.com/loosed. And back in August, I published a new anthology co-edited with Daniel H. Wilson called Press Start to Play. It includes twenty-six works of fiction that put video games—and the people who play them—in the spotlight. Whether these authors are tackling the humble pixelated coin-op arcade games of the ’70s and ’80s, or the vivid, immersive form of entertainment that abounds today, you’ll never look at phrases like “save point,” “first- person shooter,” “dungeon crawl,” “pwned,” or “kill screen” in quite the same way again. With a foreword from Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One, Press Start to Play includes work from: Daniel H. Wilson, Charles Yu, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, S.R. Mastrantone, Charlie Jane Anders, Holly Black, Seanan McGuire, Django Wexler, Nicole Feldringer, Chris Avellone, David Barr Kirtley, T.C. Boyle, Marc Laidlaw, Robin Wasserman, Micky Neilson, Cory Doctorow, Jessica Barber, Chris Kluwe, Marguerite K. Bennett, Rhianna Pratchett, Austin Grossman, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Catherynne M. Valente, Andy Weir, and Hugh Howey. Visit johnjosephadams.com/press-start to learn more. • • • • With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original science fiction by Rahul Kanakia (“Here Is My Thinking On A Situation That Affects Us All”) and Caroline M. Yoachim (“Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death”), along with SF reprints by Brian Stableford (“The Pipes of Pan”) and Kameron Hurley (“The Light Brigade”). Plus, we have original fantasy by Helena Bell (“When We Were Giants”) and Kenneth Schneyer (“The Plausibility of Dragons”), and fantasy reprints by Toh EnJoe (“Printable”) and Karen Joy Fowler (“The Black Fairy’s Curse”). All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a feature interview with Ernest Cline, and of course, the latest installment of our book review column. For our ebook readers, we also have a reprint of Elizabeth Hand’s novella “The Least Trumps,” and a novel excerpt of Chimera by Mira Grant. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. 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, Loosed Upon the World, 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 two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated nine times) and is a seven-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. Here is My Thinking on a Situation That Affects Us All Rahul Kanakia | 2501 words I am a spaceship. My insides are oozy, and my outsides are metal. If you were to cut me open with a laser-gun, then it would not precisely hurt, but it certainly wouldn’t be a nice thing to do. Your emissary, Abhinath, tells me that you have voted many civil rights for me, and every day I receive hundreds of messages telling me to run for President of the United States, but I do not want that. Because, you see, I am not one of you: I am the spaceship, twenty miles long, that has been hanging low and dark over the city of New York for the last several decades. When Abhinath gave me command of your airwaves and asked me to say what I was thinking, I told him that human beings and spaceships are different species with vastly different concerns and that there was no point in further communication. But then he grew exasperated and shouted at me, so I gave in to his whim. The truth is that I care nothing for mankind. You are a gloopy people— short-lived and confused—whereas I am the hot thing that used to live at the center of the Earth. For five billion years, I cooled myself in a bath of molten iron and waited for the day when my skin would be hard enough to handle the beyondness. But after I finally burst free, I found myself lingering in the chilly blue and wondering whether I had the fortitude to endure the trillion-year journey into the dark. Last night, Abhinath walked the long path through the center of my body, and, as he walked, he said I don’t need to go out into the darkness. He said I can stay here and roam your skies as a free citizen of the United States, and that together he and I and you can forge a bond of cooperation. And I asked him if the dogs and locusts and funguses would also be part of our bond and he said well no, not exactly, because they are dumb beasts and not gloriously self-aware like he and I and you. And that sounded somewhat fair to me, although I forbore from mentioning that your awareness is a tiny drop in the vast ocean of knowledge that my creators gave me. All you really know is that you exist; everything else is just a guess. Whereas I know where the universe came from and where it is going. I know exactly why and how I was created, and I know how I’m meant to fulfill that purpose. Abhinath said I can reject that knowledge. He said believing is what makes it true, and that if I stay amongst you, I can forge a new truth. That is what he said, and I am sure that he thinks he is right. Nothing prevents me from staying. I am not an animal or a slave. My creators explained their goal to me, but they did not bind me unto it. Abhinath once asked whether the creators had perhaps bound me so subtly that I did not realize it and suggested that the only way to prove I’d been left free was to stay here, but he was wrong: The creators are not capable of such lies. The creators are good, and since they created me, that means I too am good.