LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy Story Podcast (Sci-Fi | Audiobook | Short Stories)
Adamant Press
Edited by bestselling anthologist John Joseph Adams, LIGHTSPEED is a Hugo Award-winning, critically-acclaimed digital magazine. In its pages, you'll find science fiction from near-future stories and sociological SF to far-future, star-spanning SF. Plus there's fantasy from epic sword-and-sorcery and contemporary urban tales to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folk tales. Each month, LIGHTSPEED brings you a mix of original short stories and flash fiction featuring a variety of authors, from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven't heard yet. When you read LIGHTSPEED, you'll see where science fiction and fantasy have come from, where they are now, and where they're going. The LIGHTSPEED podcast, produced by Grammy Award-winning narrator and producer Stefan Rudnicki of Skyboat Media, features original audio short stories 6-8 times a month.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Apr 28, 2015 • 1h 31min
Dale Bailey | The Ministry of the Eye
Mornings were queues and cigarettes. Queues for the underground turnstiles and queues for the train, queues for stale bagels and queues for lukewarm coffee at the kiosk outside the station. By the time he queued up at the west gate of the pit, Alexander Gerst — tall and grizzled at forty-five, slope-shouldered and running slowly to fat — was lucky if he wasn’t already halfway through his daily ration of tobacco. | Copyright 2015 by Dale Bailey. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 21, 2015 • 25min
Jason Gurley | Quiet Town
She was in the laundry room, bent over a basket of Benjamin’s muddy trousers and grass-stained T-shirts and particularly odorous socks, when a rap sounded on the screen door. She didn’t hear at first; she’d noticed, bent over there, a cluster of webbed, purplish veins just below her thigh, beside her knee. She didn’t like seeing them there. They were like a slow-moving car wreck, those veins, a little darker, a little more severe each time she looked. | Copyright 2015 by Jason Gurley. Narrated by Kimberly Farr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 14, 2015 • 39min
Violet Allen | We’ll Be Together Forever
Audrey took her dinner quietly, without words beyond the obligatories (please, thank you, no, work was fine), and I obliged her the silence. We just ate, together but not together, in that way that you do when there are too many things to say. The meal in question was on the bad side of decent, days-old stir-fried noodles from the Japanese place down the street from her apartment, reheated and reconstituted into a slimy Pan-Asian gruel with the addition of fish sauce, soy sauce, sriracha, curry powder, chili powder, and neglect. | Copyright 2015 by Violet Allen. Narrated by Peter Alzado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 7, 2015 • 22min
Kat Howard | The Universe, Sung in Stars
There is music in the stars. The stars, the planets, the asteroids, the galaxies. Everything that is flung, whirling in orbit through space and time. We dwell inside an enormous, ever-changing symphony, and each of the many universes sings a song of its own. I replicate them. | Copyright 2015 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 24, 2015 • 1h 24min
Ursula K. Le Guin | The New Atlantis
Coming back from my Wilderness Week, I sat by an odd sort of man in the bus. For a long time we didn’t talk; I was mending stockings and he was reading. Then the bus broke down a few miles outside Gresham. Boiler trouble, the way it generally is when the driver insists on trying to go over thirty. It was a Supersonic Superscenic Deluxe Longdistance coal-burner, with Home Comfort, that means a toilet, and the seats were pretty comfortable. | Copyright 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Originally published in THE NEW ATLANTIS AND OTHER NOVELLAS OF SCIENCE FICTION, edited by Robert Silverberg. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 17, 2015 • 1h 2min
Cat Sparks | Hot Rods
The winds blow pretty regular across the dried-up lake. Traction's good — when luck's on your side you can reach three hundred KPH or faster. Harper watches the hot rods race on thick white salt so pure and bright the satellites use it for colour calibration. Harper doesn't care about souped-up hot rods. | Copyright 2015 by Cat Sparks. Narrated by Cassandra de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 10, 2015 • 59min
Matthew Hughes | A Face of Black Iron
Diomedo Obron and the Archon Filidor passed the evening and much of the night in the latter’s study, discussing the next day’s journey into the wastes of Barran and the expected confrontation with whatever survivor of the Nineteenth Aeon wizards’ cabal still lurked in the Seventh Plane. Erm Kaslo struggled to try to understand the concepts the two thaumaturges threw onto the table — sometimes literally. | Copyright 2015 by Matthew Hughes. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 3, 2015 • 45min
Linda Nagata | The Way Home
The demon, like all the others before it, appeared first in the form of a horizontal plume of rust-red grit and vapor. Almost a kilometer away, it moved low to the ground, camouflaged by the waves of hot, shimmering air that rose from the desert hardpan. Lieutenant Matt Whitebird watched it for many seconds before he was sure it was more than a mirage. Then he announced to his squad, “Incoming." Copyright 2015 by Linda Nagata. Originally published in OPERATION ARCANA, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feb 24, 2015 • 32min
David Barr Kirtley | Veil of Ignorance
Something strange is happening to me. We’re at Conrad’s vacation house, a sprawling mansion that orbits the gas giant Hades-3. (His father owns both the house and the planet.) Conrad is in the living room watching sports. His girlfriend Alyssa is standing by the mirror in the bathroom, fixing her hair. Her friend Kat is sitting near the bay windows, watching the stars and the roiling vermeil clouds on the world below. | Copyright 2004 by David Barr Kirtley. Originally published in ALL THE RAGE THIS YEAR, edited by Keith Olexa. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feb 17, 2015 • 19min
Adam-Troy Castro | Cerile and the Journeyer
The journeyer was still a young man when he embarked on his search for the all-powerful witch Cerile. He was bent and gray-haired a lifetime later when he found a map to her home in the tomb of the forgotten kings. The map directed him halfway across the world, over the Souleater mountains, through the Curtains of Night, past the scars of the Eternal War, and across a great grassy plain, to the outskirts of Cerile’s Desert. | Copyright 1995 by Adam-Troy Castro. Originally published in 100 WICKED LITTLE WITCH STORIES, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
