Lightspeed Magazine July 2010

Grabbed the second issue of Lightspeed Magazine last night. I’ve been reading Miéville’s Kraken but I’m finding it to be not something I’m enjoying. Surprising, in fact. So I figured some short fiction would be a good palate cleanser.

Overall I thought this issue was a little meatier than the first issue. I liked it, but the first issue definitely felt light, particularly with the non-fiction. This issue upgrades that portion. The non-fiction is still much less substantial than I’d like, but it’s an improvement.

All these items will be up at Lightspeed’s web site by the end of the month. I paid for my issue, so I get to read them a bit early.

No Time Like the Present by Carol Emshwiller

Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount is one of my favorite novels of all time. I’ve also seen her talk a few times at WisCon, and she impressed me every time. This is one of her more normal science fiction stories. It’s a time travel story told from a little bit of an unusual viewpoint; the people in the time being visited. Shows very much how odd people from the future would be.

Top Five Time Travel Nightmares by Carol Pinchefsky

A very unsatisfying review of five time travel issues that repeatedly come up. Stuff anyone who’s thought about time travel at all will have thought of.

Manumission by Tobias S. Buckell

Kind of an origin story for Pepper, a character who appeared in Buckell’s Xenowealth series (Crystal Rain, etc.). He’s a bionic man doing what bionic men do, fight for their masters. Here he has only one memory of himself, that of someone using racial epithets against him. The rest has been wiped by ShinnCo, which has booby-trapped Pepper’s equipment so that he’ll die if he doesn’t follow their orders. Can he win his freedom by killing for them? Nothing particularly deep here, but a well written plot and I don’t think I could ever get enough of Pepper. He’s super human but not so much that I thought he’d necessarily win.

You Are the Person You Are Now by The Evil Monkey (of Neurotopia

Non-fiction piece about what can be done with memory and what we know about it. I’d say about Wikipedia level of detail.

The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball by Genevieve Valentine

Kind of a nice take on zeppelins. Along with like a billion other things in steampunk, they’ve been somewhat fetishized. Here Valentine looks at the people who make them go. The conductors of the story work inside the helium balloons, which (like astronauts) makes them taller and weaker. As noted in the author profile that follows, a lot of the industrial age society that steampunk centers itself on was built on the backs of workers who didn’t get to see the benefits of its wonders.

A Very Brief History of Airships by Gregory K. H. Bryant

Another Wikipedia level overview of the history of dirigibles. Interesting, but only because I know very little about the machines.

…For a Single Yesterday by George R. R. Martin

A third story where memories play a part. Emshwiller’s story also uses memory, but in a more minor way. This is post-nuclear-war survivors making their way. Although this is not a David Brin Postman or Cormac McCarthy Road style man trying to hold onto humanity or civilization in the face of relentless barbarity. The conflict here is really about moving on when your life has been upended. One of the members of a small hippie like commune has lost the love of his life in the blast, and now he has to find a way to go on.

Music Is Science Fiction: An Interview With The Lisps by Desirina Boskovich

So the Lisps have made a steampunk musical or some such thing. I don’t know much about the musical and this didn’t really tell me. So it’s really really hard to get interested in the behind-the-music interview with the band that created it. But if you’ve seen one of the 5 showings (or maybe series of showings, I’m not sure), maybe this’ll be your thing. I wish the writer had established more of a baseline of this musical.

One minor improvement. This time around the cover art inside wasn’t fuzzy when displayed on my Nook. Maybe they have a better resolution for the cover, or maybe Nook improved image display with the 1.4 release. Either way, it was nice.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: July 2010 (#2)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)