Lightspeed Magazine, November 2010

Lightspeed Magazine features all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. In our lead story this month, “Standard Loneliness Package,” Charles Yu—author of the debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe—takes us to a strange future in which those who don’t want to feel pain, don’t have to: You can hire someone else to do it...whether it’s suffering through a root canal, a migraine, or the loss of a loved one. “Faces in Revolving Souls” by Caitlín R. Kiernan depicts a future in which body modification has reached an extreme: not only can people modify their bodies, they can become a unique species entirely by incorporating attributes of other creatures into their own physiology. In “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim, poor eponymous Hwang is slipping through time, but that’s what you get when you try to use a time machine to solve your problems. For our final story this month, we present “Ej-Es” by Nancy Kress. In it, we follow a team of medicians who provide medical relief around the galaxy. But the people of Good Fortune prove challenging to communicate with...