Short stories published in Lightspeed
Launched in 2010, Lightspeed is a monthly American science fiction and fantasy magazine. It has previously published Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, Ted Chiang, and Ken Liu, and has twice won the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine.
Listing 71 stories.
A young girl obsessed with birdsong and other music finds a witch who helps her become a powerful and magical musician presiding over a remote coastal village. She becomes dissatisfied with the limits of her powers and decides to seek more.
In the far future, a human veteran adopts a war soldier, developing an unlikely friendship that helps each of them cope with the trauma of combat.
In the far future, a Welsh woman temporarily moves to a space colony on a distant planet with her husband, Owen. The woman regals her space-born daughter with tales of the wonders of Earth, and her daughter develops a great longing for Earth that eventually puts her life at risk.
In a fantasy world, as punishment for staring at a naked goddess, a king-mage is reborn as a mortal. Several other cursed demigods hatch a plan to be reborn as children of the naked goddess, who is in love with the king-mage.
An immortal woman who can turn herself into water at will mourns the loss of her latest lover, while drugged-out humans perform sacrifices on beloved memories and each other on the beach below her.
A female cyborg must delve into a client's mind to rescue her partner's consciousness after a job gone wrong, but she doesn't realize that the security system inside this mind was created to be a copy of herself at her most bitter and bloodthirsty.
In a futuristic world where hardly a trace of natural life exists untouched by human interference, a Citizen makes an unprecedented choice that brings a slew of notoriety and ethical questions.
In the distant future, a female steward aboard a ship traveling through space attempts to save the lives of the crew members who ostracized her.
In a dystopian universe where roaming brains must purchase their bodies, a solitary female brain is forced to make a choice about her dream of the perfect human body when the unexpected happens.
When a man marries a princess from Cimmeria, a country he believes he imagined into existence, he must come to terms with a culture that recognizes twins as a single person—a primary and their shadow—and the lengths a shadow twin would go to in order to become their own person.