TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 62, July 2015 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, July 2015 SCIENCE FICTION Crazy Rhythm Carrie Vaughn Life on the Moon Tony Daniel The Consciousness Problem Mary Robinette Kowal Violation of the TrueNet Security Act Taiyo Fujii FANTASY Adventures in the Ghost Trade Liz Williams Saltwater Railroad Andrea Hairston Ana’s Tag William Alexander NOVELLA Dapple Eleanor Arnason NOVEL EXCERPTS Wylding Hall Elizabeth Hand Dark Orbit Carolyn Ives Gilman NONFICTION Interview: Kelly Link The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Book Reviews Andrew Liptak Artist Gallery Euclase Artist Spotlight: Euclase Henry Lien AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Carrie Vaughn Tony Daniel Mary Robinette Kowal Taiyo Fujii Liz Williams Andrea Hairston William Alexander Eleanor Arnason MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editor © 2015 Lightspeed Magazine Cover Art by Euclase Ebook Design by John Joseph Adams www.lightspeedmagazine.com Editorial, July 2015 John Joseph Adams | 550 words Welcome to issue sixty-two of Lightspeed! The Nebulas were presented at the 50th annual Nebula Awards Weekend, held this year in Chicago, Illinois, June 4–7. We’re sorry to say that “We Are the Cloud” by Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed, September 2014) did not win the Nebula Award for best novelette; that honor went to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s excellent story, from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, “A Guide to the Fruits Of Hawaii.” Congrats to Alaya and to all of the other Nebula nominees, and of course congrats again to Sam for being nominated. Sam’s nomination brings Lightspeed’s lifetime Nebula nomination total to twelve since we launched in June 2010, and we’ve now lost twelve in a row. That’s right, folks: We’re perfect at losing! You can find the full slate of nominees and winners at sfwa.org. • • • • ICYMI last month, June saw the release of our latest special issue: Queers Destroy Science Fiction! We brought together a team of terrific queer creators and editors, led by Guest Editor and best-selling author Seanan McGuire. We have eleven pieces of original science fiction by exciting SF authors, including Susan Jane Bigelow, Chaz Brenchley, John Chu, Felicia Davin, Amal El-Mohtar, and Kate Galey. QDSF also has a special flash fiction section curated by Hugo-nominated editor, Sigrid Ellis, including flash from E. Saxey, Charles Payseur, Claudine Griggs, Erica L. Satifka, Bogi Takács, Sarah Pinsker, JY Yang, and others. Our nonfiction editor, Mark Oshiro, has brought us some incredible essays and articles, and of course we have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, plus more than twenty personal essays by queer creators about their experiences reading and writing science fiction as a queer person. All that and more! To learn more about the issue, visit our special Destroy projects website at destroysf.com. • • • • With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original science fiction by Carrie Vaughn (“Crazy Rhythm”) and Taiyo Fujii (“Violation of the TrueNet Security Act”), along with SF reprints by Tony Daniel (“Life on the Moon”) and Mary Robinette Kowal (“The Consciousness Problem”). Plus, we have something a little different this month. We’ll have fantasy reprints by Liz Williams (“Adventures in the Ghost Trade”) and William Alexander (“Ana’s Tag”), but instead of two original fantasy short stories, we have a single fantasy novelette by Andrea Hairston (“Saltwater Railroad”), which is about twice the length of a regular Lightspeed story. So, although you are getting three stories instead of four this month, the novelette is the length of two full-length short stories, so you’re still getting the same amount of fiction. We hope you enjoy this minor deviation from our usual offerings, and rest assured we will return to our regularly scheduled programming next month. All that plus spotlights on our authors and cover artist, as well as a feature interview with Kelly Link, and the latest installment of our book review column. For our ebook readers, we also have reprint of the novella “Dapple,” by Eleanor Arnason, and a pair of novel excerpts, including a selection from Dark Orbit, by Carolyn Ives Gilman, and Wylding Hall, by Elizabeth Hand. 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, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent and forthcoming projects include: Loosed Upon the World, 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 nine 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. Crazy Rhythm Carrie Vaughn | 7142 words Art by Reiko Murakami George was about to declare his undying love for Annabell when the front of the train station fell over. Ross, the actor playing George, yelped and dashed away, his army cap flying off. Arlene — Annabell — merely put her hands on her hips and glared at the offending backdrop, a piece of dressed-up plywood that looked very much like the front of a train station, until it collapsed and revealed the braces behind it. “Cut!” Granger yelled, and the cameramen stopped cranking amidst an air of grumbling. When the director paced three steps, threw his hat on the ground, and looked for me, I was ready for him. “Margie! What the hell is that?” “Set broke, boss,” I said, tucking my clipboard under my arm. “Well, fix it! All right, people, take fifteen, don’t go anywhere,” Granger called across the set. Ross was having vapors, falling over, complaining of his brush with death while a gaggle of women extras dressed as train passengers rushed over to comfort him. Arlene rolled her eyes at me. What could I do but shrug? Shattered Spring was filming on the backlot, which we’d completely taken over — scene shop, studios, exteriors, everything. We should have been able to knock the film out in a month or two at most — down the block, Ben-Hur was serving as an object lesson as to what happened when you went over schedule, over budget, over everything. I was determined that wouldn’t happen to us. But I hadn’t counted on Granger. Inside the warehouse where the scene shop was located, I searched the piles of lumber, sawhorses, tools and benches, and clouds of sawdust for the head carpenter. “Palmer? Palmer!” He’d never hear me over the sound of sawing coming from the back of the room. “Hullo, miss, did you need something?” I didn’t recognize the young man who appeared from around a pile of plywood signs waiting to be repainted for their next incarnation as fake billboards or shop fronts or picket fences or castle walls, even though I knew most of Palmer’s crew. With his lanky frame and fresh face, he couldn’t have been very old, mid-twenties tops, same as me. But he had a tiredness in the lines around his eyes. He wore a cotton shirt, denim overalls, and a grease-stained cap. “Who’re you?” I demanded. “New mechanic. Mr. Palmer hired me last week.” The guy had an English accent, working class, round and polite. “Where is he?” “He, um, stepped out for a moment.” Which could have meant anything, from going for supplies to sneaking a drink at some dive. “Mechanic, eh? Can you nail a backdrop back into place?” “Yes — that is, should do,” he said. “Well, come on.” I waved for him to follow me outside the warehouse. “Where you from?” “Hull. In England.” “Yes, I got that much. Been in the States long?” “Several years, since . well, several years.” “Did Palmer warn you that working here will ruin pictures for you forever? Takes all the magic out of it.” “Oh, I don’t think so. Makes it even more magic, I think, when you wonder how you’ll ever get a picture out of all this.” He waved his arm to take in the cluttered lot with its rows of cameras, half-built sets, collection of cars, a handful of incongruous horses munching on hay, the equally incongruous actors in army uniforms, and a handful of Roman centurions who must have wandered over from Ben-Hur. “I think so, too,” I said, grinning in spite of myself. “Some advice — tell Granger it’ll take twice as long as you expect, and when you finish in half the time, he’ll be impressed.” “Just like the army, then.” Ah, that was where those worried creases came from. “You were in the war?” He ducked away and didn’t answer, and I didn’t push. At the injured backdrop, he pulled a hammer from his tool belt and handful of nails from a pocket and found the splintered bracket. “Wood’s rotten,” he said, pointing. “It was bound to give out sooner or later. I’ll have set to right in a moment. Make that two moments.” The lines around his eyes crinkled handsomely when he smiled.