Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 159 (August 2023), page 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 159 (August 2023)
FROM THE EDITOR
Editorial: August 2023
SCIENCE FICTION
The Things You Can Maintain Yourself
Benjamin C. Kinney
The Letters They Left Behind
Scott Edelman
Monopticon
Dani Atkinson
In the Nest Beneath the Mountain-Tree, Your Sisters Dance
Lowry Poletti
FANTASY
The Blade and the Bloodwright
Sloane Leong
All the Colours of the Death Knell
Russell Hemmell
The Boy Who Ran from His Faerie Heart
David Anaxagoras
You Will Not Live to See M/M Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension
Isabel J. Kim
EXCERPTS
Garden of the Cursed
Katy Rose Pool
NONFICTION
Book Review: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology
Arley Sorg
Book Review: The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Aigner Loren Wilson
Book Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi
Chris Kluwe
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS
Sloane Leong
Scott Edelman
David Anaxagoras
Lowry Poletti
MISCELLANY
Coming Attractions
Stay Connected
Subscriptions and Ebooks
Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard
About the Lightspeed Team
Also Edited by John Joseph Adams
© 2023 Lightspeed Magazine
Cover by Ardea-studio / Shutterstock
www.lightspeedmagazine.com
Published by Adamant Press
Editorial: August 2023
John Joseph Adams | 714 words
Welcome to issue 159 of Lightspeed Magazine!
Scott Edelman returns to our pages with a new piece of science fiction: “The Letters They Left Behind,” the story of a mother torn between her love for her daughter and her duty to her planet. Lowry Poletti writes about the complexity of relationships, human or not, in the story “In the Nest Beneath the Mountain-Tree, Your Sisters Dance.” Our flash stories include “The Things You Can Maintain Yourself” by Benjamin C. Kinney and “Monopticon” from Dani Atkinson.
Our original fantasy shorts include a bloodthirsty tale of dark magic in Sloane Leong’s new story “The Blade and the Bloodwright.” David Anaxagoras mixes faerie with prescribed burns in his short story “The Boy Who Ran from His Faerie Heart.” We also have a flash story (“All the Colours of the Death Knell”) from Russell Hemmell, and another (“You Will Not Live to See M/M Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension”) from Isabel J. Kim.
All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with book reviews from our terrific review team. Our ebook readers will also enjoy a book excerpt from Katy Rose Pool’s new novel, Garden of the Cursed.
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Publisher’s Note: Kindle Periodicals is Closing, and We Need Your Support More Than Ever.
Many of you have likely already heard about the new existential threat to Lightspeed and all of the other digital magazines in the SF/F/H field: the impending closure, in September, of Amazon’s Kindle Periodicals program. They will be transitioning some magazines into Kindle Unlimited, and so in some respects things may continue as normal if you subscribe via Kindle Periodicals—but this shift will cut severely into the finances of any magazine currently using the service; Lightspeed, for instance, will see our largest source of funding cut it in half. (For additional information about this seismic shift, you can see Neil Clarke’s deep dive into the details at neil-clarke.com/amazon-kindle-subscriptions.)
What We Can Do About This
The best thing you can do if you are a Kindle Periodicals subscriber is to migrate your subscription over to one of our other subscription options. Currently, we have the following options available:
Subscribe direct via our website: We have options for 6 month, 12 month, 24 month, and Lifetime subscriptions. We’re in the process of also bringing back the pay-as-you-go monthly subscriptions (i.e., the way Kindle Periodicals currently works) as well. Your issues can be delivered to your Kindle or Kindle app of choice the same way they are via Kindle Periodicals, though they’d appear on your device as regular eBooks rather than the special “periodical” format Kindle Periodicals forced us to use.
Subscribe via Weightless Books: Weightless Books’s subscriptions work exactly like our Direct subscriptions, though they only have 6 and 12 month options.
Become a Patreon patron: If you just want to support Lightspeed and the other Adamant Press magazines (without getting ebooks in return), you can become one of our Patrons at Patreon. You’d be able to choose any amount that you’d like to pledge to support us, either monthly or annually.
Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/support for more info about all of the above.
Why We Need Your Support
There are no big companies supporting or funding Adamant Press’s magazines—and Adamant itself is kind of a two-person show—so the magazines really rely on reader support. Because of that, it’s vital for us to keep as many Kindle Periodicals subscribers—which the vast majority of our subscribers are—as possible during this upheaval. So, please—if you care about the continuation of Lightspeed and any other genre magazines you subscribe to, please take this to heart and help us make this transition.
Thank You for Being a Subscriber
Thanks so much for your generous support over the months or years you’ve been a subscriber. Together, we can ensure that Lightspeed will continue coming to you every month for many years to come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than forty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent anthologies include Out There Screaming (with Jordan Peele), The Far Reaches (from Amazon Original Stories), Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, A People’s Future of the United States, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. A two-time Hugo Award-winner, John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lately, he’s been working as an editor on various roleplaying game books for Kobold Press and Monte Cook Games and as a contributing game designer on books such as Tome of Heroes. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.
The Things You Can Maintain Yourself
Benjamin C. Kinney | 967 words
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Please see our important Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.
* * *
Jill wiped xylem from her gloves and closed her car’s leafy hood. She’d kept Snapdragon on the road for almost twenty years, and if the world would leave her alone, she could keep him alive for five more, easy.
It wouldn’t, and she couldn’t. No amount of repairs today would spare Snapdragon from the weeding, or her from the pain of uprooting a thing she loved.
She’d do what needed doing. Somehow.
She set down her toolbox, rubbed Snapdragon’s flower-petal roof, and let him trundle the ten feet from her backyard to the communal pasture. He nestled in alongside the other cars, oblivious to the way his boxy patchwork body stood out against the other cars’ sleek single-plant designs. Snapdragon extended his quickroots and wrapped them around the fertilizer spigot like the rest.
The cars looked all alike in the dimming light. Sunset above, but its colors weren’t what they used to be. Some things’ time had come and gone, like the crimson and orange of a polluted sky.
A sledgehammer and a box of car-grade targetpoison sat on her back porch. She picked up a beer instead. Time enough for another drink for them both, in the warm fleeting evening of September in Oregon.
Maudlin. She wasn’t going to die anytime soon. Never give up, and do what needs doing, no matter how many people give up on you.
Old Xavier waved to her from a garden across the pasture. Jill took a swig of beer, the bottle blocking her face. Her boys would’ve been horrified to see her ignore their so-called “grandpa,” but they’d find reasons to yell at her no matter what she did. This wasn’t the kind of day when she could handle conversation with other people.
Snapdragon’s time was up, no matter how well she’d kept him. Forty years of biotech had done their job. Atmospheric carbon was at its lowest level in three hundred years. The climate models said: time to shift from reduction to stabilization. Every year, ten percent of the old high-capture cars had to come off the roads.
Snapdragon was a ’79, from the era when they made cars you could repair with some biotools and know-how. Jill had replaced every part she could name. A new transmission after a hundred and fifty thousand miles. New chairs after the mess with her younger son’s boyfriend. She’d even managed a new computer, because the company was kind enough to release their seed code when they went out of business.
Modern cars were a single plant rather than a symbiotic collecti
Her phone chirped on the porch railing with the woodwind ringtone she’d set for family.
They could be calling for nothing. Banalities, arguments, the usual. Or they could be calling to comfort her. The car retirement lottery was public.
The phone fell quiet after the eighth ring. Jill swirled her half-empty bottle and took another sip.
Xavier cleared his throat. “Evening.”
He’d crossed the pasture, and leaned on his walker at the border of her backyard. Hell. If he couldn’t move any further, it was her problem, and she’d do what needed doing. She called out, “How’s your walker? Are my grafts holding up?”
Xavier took that as permission to enter her garden. Once he was halfway across, he said, “Better than ever. Nobody grows ‘em like you.” The walker’s oaksteel feet were grafted to springy roots, gripping wheels that kept him level over the uneven ground.
She smiled ruefully. “You con artist. What’s got you sweet-talking your way onto my property?”
Xavier stopped at her porch step. “Heard Snapdragon’s number came up in the lottery.”
Jill shrugged. “Had to happen eventually. At this point, all the volunteers already did.”
“They give you a replacement, don’t they?”
“I guess. Don’t trust anything you can’t maintain yourself.” She wagged her empty bottle at him. “Want a beer?”
“Oh no, I only ever ask for one favor per trip. Can’t push my luck, at my age.”
Jill raised her eyebrows and let him ask.
He said, “Can you come by tomorrow and move some boxes?”
Jill scraped a thumbnail against the beer bottle’s embossed logo. “Don’t tell me you’re moving out. Those group homes—”
“Hey, you fight that out with my grand-niece.” Xavier gave a lopsided smile. “She’s coming to stay for a few weeks, and I need some help cleaning out the guest room.” He pointed his chin at another neighbor’s house. “Adem’s coming over, but it’ll go faster with two strong backs.”
“Of course. But if you do move out of here, I won’t stop my boys from chasing you down.”
He tapped his walker against the porch rails, in front of the targetpoison box. “You want me to take care of Snapdragon? I know how much you loved him. Go for a walk on Sunday, and I’ll have a mulch receipt for you. You can borrow my car while you pick out a new one.”
“Nah. It’s my problem.”
He nodded. “If you say so.”
Jill took a deep breath. Pure sweet Portland air, with the lingering crispness before the clouds set in for autumn. The first stars glittered into view above. More than her childhood nights had ever held. Clean skies, and a city where every streetlamp and building focused their lights down only where they were needed.
“Sunday might be a good day for a walk,” she said. “Tell Adem to come over tomorrow at eight, all right? We’ll do what needs doing.”
She’d miss Snapdragon. There was real satisfaction in the work of hands and brain, in taking your own problems apart and solving them. But some things in this world were bigger than a woman alone.
©2023 by Benjamin C. Kinney.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Benjamin C. Kinney is a neuroscientist, SFF writer, and assistant editor of the science fiction podcast Escape Pod. He’s created cyborg monkeys, magnetically altered the activity of the human brain, and generally done his part to make the world as science fictional as possible. His short stories have appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, Sunday Morning Transport, and many other excellent places, and you can find them all at benjaminckinney.com. You can find him across social media @BenCKinney, and he is represented by Marisa Cleveland of the Seymour Agency.
The Letters They Left Behind
Scott Edelman | 7461 words
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Please see our important Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.
* * *
My dearest Evie—
I am so terribly sorry, my darling daughter, but by the time you read this letter, I will be gone. I wish I could have delayed my departure long enough to attend your high school graduation as I always promised I would, but the timing was outside of my control.
And so I’m taking a few of my final (for now) moments on Earth to put down on paper what I’ve already told you to your face. Or told you to your back anyway, when you had your arms crossed and shoulders hunched and I wasn’t sure whether you were even listening.
But please, my not-so-little girl, remember this—
When your name is called, and you take the stage to receive your diploma, I hope you’ll pause, I hope you’ll look up, I hope you’ll know in the moment that though I’ll be millions of miles away—millions of miles, can you believe it?—I’ll be with you still. Because I, also, keeping track of when that moment will occur, will be pausing, will be looking—looking back at the planet I left behind, a planet which at that moment might seem for me no more than a speck—and thinking of you.
But that’s only one of my hopes.
I hope, once you’re older, you’ll understand why this had to be.
I hope you’ll agree that what the alien Visitors offered—not just to me, not just to you, but to every living creature on Earth—is a greater gift than the time together the two of us lost.
I hope you’ll someday add your name to their registry as well, entering the lottery to the stars as I did, and are lucky enough to be selected, too, so you can also see what’s out there.
I hope you’ll be sure in your heart, as I am, that the wonders to come will outnumber the ones we will have left behind.
Those wonders are more than what they tell me I’ll experience personally out in the void, and what you’d experience if you were to follow. Because believe me, that alone would never have been enough to separate me from you. I’m not making this choice selfishly. But if our parting will make the world a better place for you? Build you a future I alone could never construct?
What loving parent wouldn’t make that sacrifice?
I can only imagine how the world—and how you—will change during my absence. Oh, the miracles they’ve promised to turn over to our planet if a handful of us would agree to travel the universe with them!
Pollution-free power.
The end of hunger.
The death of cancer.
And so much more.
For me to leave with the Visitors means you’ll get to live a life on Earth which never could have existed without them. How could I not do this?
I did this for you, Evie.
I did it for you.
Though I won’t be there, at least not physically, for the major milestones which you’ll surely achieve over the next few years—I have no idea how long this trip will take, since from what I’ve learned so far during my brief orientation, the aliens’ concept of time doesn’t seem to be the same as ours—a mother’s love will always be there. Which is why I wrote out and packed these letters in your favorite lunchbox before leaving—the one with the rainbow girls and their flying horses.
You have always been my rainbow girl. You know that, right?
I also know what you’re thinking. I can almost see the roll of your eyes, hear your voice as you say, “Letters? Really, Mom? Who puts their thoughts down on paper anymore? Couldn’t you just record some video the way a normal person would do?”
But you know me. I’m kind of old-fashioned that way. Even though I’ll be gone, I want you to be able to pretend I’m still there with you, continuing to leave notes each morning on the kitchen table the way I used to do . . . well, after I’d push away the insides of the microwave or whatever kitchen gadget you’d taken apart with promises to put it back again once your tinkering was done. (And you always did, you always did.) Which is why I’ve marked the flaps of these envelopes so you’ll know to open each one at the appropriate time as each milestone of your life comes to pass.
Be a good girl, Evie. And know that I love you.
Missing you so much right now it’s as if I’m already among the stars,
