LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy Story Podcast (Sci-Fi | Audiobook | Short Stories)

The spaceman shows up on a hot summer afternoon, not in the dead of night when you’re crouched in the garden peering through a telescope that shows you the endless glories and wonders of the night sky. There’s no spaceship making a bright arc against a star-spangled sky. Just a man in a spacesuit, standing at the edge of your hammock. | Copyright 2014 by E. Catherine Tobler. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They travelled all day, and at night came to rest by one of the large rocks that jut from the desert. The last caveat to voyagers before the plains of windswept sand. Here is what the boy heard: “Long ago, almost fifty years by official counting, there was a boy named Alladin." | Copyright 2014 by Tahmeed Shafiq. Narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A drink arrived that Culin hadn’t ordered. No one sent drinks to the crowded annex where Culin sat, crammed in with seven other people, all with contagion bands on their sleeves and matching tattoos on their arms. Sending drinks was an affectation Culin didn’t see much in the Dead Engine at all. | Copyright 2014 by An Owomoyela. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The piano player drums away with her left hand, dropping all five fingers onto the keys as if they weigh too much to hold up. The rhythms bounce off the rhythms of what her right hand does, what she sings. It’s like there’s three different people in that little skinny body, one running each hand, the third one singing. But they all know what they’re doing. | Copyright 2004 by Emma Bull. Originally published in THE FAERY REEL: TALES FROM THE TWILIGHT REALM. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s all over for humanity, and I’m heading east. On the seat beside me are an M1 carbine and a Thompson submachine gun. There’s a special reason for the Thompson. I traded an M16 and 200 rounds of ammo for it to a guy in Barstow. | Copyright 1980 by Howard Waldrop. Originally published in SHAYOL. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Remembering Cimmeria: I walk through the bazaar, between the stalls of the spice sellers, smelling turmeric and cloves, hearing the clash of bronze from the sellers of cooking pots, the bleat of goats from the butcher’s alley. Rugs hang from wooden racks, scarlet and indigo. In the corners of the alleys, men without legs perch on wooden carts, telling their stories to a crowd of ragged children, making coins disappear into the air. | Copyright 2014 by Theodora Goss. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Phil called the toll-free number he’d been given, and after the usual twenty-minute hold time, reached a human being who explained that the tow truck driver really did have the right to haul away his car. It didn’t matter that the car had been parked in his driveway or that it had been completely paid for, and it certainly didn’t matter that it was the only form of transportation he and his wife had for getting back and forth from work. | Copyright 2014 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I got the call in the middle of the week, when I came wheezing home from my uphill late-afternoon run. I didn’t recognize the voice on my computer’s answer-phone at first, although I thought it sounded like my best friend, Denise. There was no video feed, only the recording, and the words were so improbable they only confused me more. | Copyright 2000 by Tananarive Due. Originally published in DARK MATTER, edited by Sheree R. Thomas. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Emily Rankin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The kids know he’s coming to visit. They’ve been texting him to tell him about the snow and how cold it is, and they helpfully send links to their Amazon wish lists with pages of moon-eyed dolls and odd sets of dueling robots and creatures sold according to series. The things they like are incomprehensible to him, but they know he’s good for it. | Copyright 2014 by Heather Clitheroe. Narrated by Grover Gardner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of all the strange sights I had been privy to during my acquaintanceship with that illustrious detective, none was as disturbing as seeing my old friend covered in bees. Naturally I was not concerned; his manaccanite skin was impervious to harm and I myself was at a safe distance, ensconced behind the clerestory window at Shading Coil Cottage. | Copyright 2014 by Rhonda Eikamp. Narrated by Jonathan L. Howard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“You two ready?” I ask. “Yes, ma’am,” Gert says with forced brightness, and Rally nods quickly, a shake of motion behind her helmet’s faceplate. She’s nervous, but she always seems to be a little nervous, so I’m not too worried. | Copyright 2014 by Carrie Vaughn. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Master who came for Enri was wearing a relatively young body. Sadie guessed it was maybe fifty years old. It was healthy and in good condition, still handsome. It could last twenty years more, easily. | Copyright 2014 by N. K. Jemisin. Narrated by Bahni Turpin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

—I am hugely black and hopeful, I bounce on six legs along the mountains in the new warm! . . . Sing the changer, Sing the stranger! Will the changes change forever? . . . All my hums have words now. Another change! | Copyright 1973, 2001 by the Estate of Alice B. Sheldon. Previously published in THE ALIEN CONDITION and HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER. Reprinted by permission of Jeffrey D. Smith and the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Condensation covers the walls, dimpling into tiny individual drops that follow an almost fractal pattern, like someone has been writing out the secrets of the universe in the most transitory medium they can find. The smell of damp steel assaults my nose as I walk the hall, uncomfortable boots clumping heavily with every step I force myself to take. The space is tight, confined, unyielding; it is like living inside a coral reef, trapped by the limits of our own necessary shells. | Copyright 2014 by Seanan McGuire. Narrated by Janis Ian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The dead man sits in the corner of the chamber enclosed by spaceship on all sides. He takes up a lot of space. He has been there for three days. | Copyright 2014 by Kris Millering. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you ask me, I’m more like my mom than my dad. She and I love astronomy and the mysterious origins of the universe. Dad’s not only stuck on the past, he literally would move there if he could. Every summer he drags me along on his research trips to eras where sweaty-smelling people with wool bathing suits hole up in seaside deathtraps. | Copyright 2014 by Sandra McDonald. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The torch of the Statue of Liberty blazed with an unearthly light. The steamship lumbered through the retina-stinging nimbus which draped the colossal lady and her fortress pedestal in a luminescent haze. Cellach mac Rath crowded with the rest of the bedraggled masses on the deck and watched his destiny loom ever closer: the towers of Manhattan, garlanded with gargoyles and lit with the fires of a million lanterns. | Copyright 2014 by Fred Van Lente. Narrated by Sile Bermingham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quentin Ketterly stood in the Gold Star Saloon and lit his cheroot with one hand, the other resting lightly on his hip, very close to his waistcoat pocket. He stared across the room at the five men playing poker at a nearby table. His eyes tracked the movement of the cards that they held and played, though his mind was on another set of Cards entirely. | Copyright 2014 by Rajan Khanna. Originally published in DEAD MAN'S HAND, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author. | Podcast Audio courtesy of Brilliance Audio, publisher of the audiobook edition of DEAD MAN'S HAND. Narrated by Phil Gigante. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The surgery makes Tereshkova into a tank. In the war, she never showed any fear, not at Fulda, not even in the snows of Vogelsberg when the Americans dropped the first bomb. When Clinton and Yeltsin shook hands at Yalta, when the word came down to the 8th Guards Army to yield Frankfurt and withdraw to Soviet soil, Tereshkova spat into the dirt and said: “Too bad." | Copyright 2014 by Seth Dickinson. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That day, the world turned upside down. We didn’t know why it happened. Some of us wondered whether it was our fault. Whether we had been praying to the wrong gods, or whether we had said the wrong things. But it wasn’t like that—the world simply turned upside down. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you get ill after eating or touching something that didn’t make anyone else sick, you may be allergic to it. Especially if there’s a rash. Allergies are caused by your body rejecting substances it doesn’t like. There is no treatment but to avoid those substances. Fortunately, only a few types of allergies can kill you. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Valdez, you need to slow down,” Karin Larsen warned, each syllable crisply pronounced into a mic. “Stay behind the seekers. If you overrun them, you’re going to walk into a booby trap.” | Copyright 2014 by Linda Nagata. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1. Lord, it’s hot in this cabin. I could hard-boil an egg inside my mouth. What’s your name? 2. Have you ever poached an egg? The trick is white vinegar. Everyone forgets the white vinegar, and the blasted thing falls apart, and then they miss one of the greatest wonders of the world. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

RoboNinja. A name for garbled tongues and garbled times. Interstate mudlarks peer at him from beneath grotty brows as he passes, eyes the size of headlamps reflecting the gelid glow of his visor. He once tried obscuring the light with handfuls of ash, smeared across LEDs and his shining silver carapace like the penitential marks of a sect long forgotten. It had worked for a time, until the monsoon came mocking once more. Copyright 2014 by Lightspeed Magazine. Narrated by Lex Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The estate of Phalloon the so-called Illimitable was in most respects much like that of the budding thaumaturge Diomedo Obron, Erm Kaslo’s new employer: It had a large, solid house, some remote outbuildings, lawns and a lake, clumps of mature trees, and an all-enclosing wall. What made it different, Kaslo saw as he surveyed it from a hill in the middling distance, was a rocky prominence that stood in the estate’s northeast corner. Narrated by Alex Hyde-White. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I still remember that evening: In the heavy air, the plastic dragonflies hovered just below the eaves like miniature helicopters, drifting about slightly even though there was no wind. I came home, and Dad was already in the house but kept the lights off. The setting sun came in through cracks in the window, and his face seemed indescribably thin in the dim, yellow light, like a stranger’s. | Copyright 2014 by Chen Qiufan (translated by Ken Liu). Narrated by Alex Hyde-White. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“You have to puke it up,” said Cee. “You have to get down there and puke it up. I mean down past where you can feel it, you know?” She gestured earnestly at her chest. She had this old-fashioned cotton nightgown on, lace collar brilliant under the bathroom lights. Above the collar, her skin looked gray. Cee had bones like a bird. She was so beautiful. She was completely beautiful and fucked. Narrated by Emily Rankin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are one. We are three. We are sisters, together and individual. Past, present, future. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. One of us must have been born first, but the stories say there were always three, and so there were. Fate is too weighty a thing to be dealt by only one. | Copyright 2014 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Push! Push! Damn it, put your backs into it!” Kino Ye’s voice rose to a panicked screech as the four sweat-drenched soldiers strained against the spokes of the giant winch. “Push!” But one of the spokes snapped as the man leaning against it fell face-first into the sand, and the winch whipped around and tossed the other three men through the air to land sprawling on the beach a few paces away. | Copyright 2014 by Ken Liu. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Finally, Harry arrived at the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington with her mother and her older sister Victoria. Once they entered through the great gilt doorway, a friendly attendant waited to show them to the royal salon. Harry glimpsed, through another ornate archway, the main hall and the exhibition installed there. | © 2014 by Carrie Vaughn. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the end, the water goes black with the witch’s blood. Before this happens, the little mermaid understands that a deal is a deal, a bargain a bargain, and there can’t be reneging. But this isn’t reneging, she tells herself as she sinks down, down, down into water so black that in truth it would be difficult to discern witch’s blood within it even had a hundred witches been slaughtered in its depths. | © 2014 by Sunny Moraine. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So I guess the story begins, fittingly, with someone handing me a Coma rig and saying, play me. Two a.m. and I’m at this party in somebody’s trailer out in the trashy part of town. I’m stoned out of my mind and there’s something on the television, either one of those cheesy infomercials or some sort of comedy thing making fun of those cheesy infomercials, and I’m trying to figure out which. | © 2014 by Jessica Barber. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monica’s new baby was like a lot of new babies these days in that she was born a cube. She had no external or internal sexual organs, or for that matter organs of any kind, being just a warm solid filled with protoplasm. But she was, genetically at least, a girl, and one who resembled her mother as much as any cube possibly could. That wasn’t much in that she had no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no chin, no hair, nothing that could be charitably called a face or bodily features, not even any orifices larger than pores. | ©2014 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No one knows how many airlings there are, most likely not a great many, whatever a great many means. They inhabit the atmosphere, generally between a hundred and ten or twelve thousand feet above the ground, seldom clearly visible to human eyes, and leaving almost no trace of their presence. They swim in air as we do in water, but with far more ease, air being their native element. Slight motions of the whole body and the arms and legs move them gracefully through their three dimensions. | © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Originally published in TIN HOUSE. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was driving with my brother, the preacher, and my nephew, the preacher’s son, on I-65 just north of Bowling Green when we got a flat. It was Sunday night and we had been to visit Mother at the Home. We were in my car. The flat caused what you might call knowing groans since, as the old-fashioned one in my family (so they tell me), I fix my own tires, and my brother is always telling me to get radials and quit buying old tires. | © 1990 by Terry Bisson. Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

.@neiltyson calls them “space diatoms,” but I say “space whales.” They’re beaching themselves on our interstellar shores. Question is: why? —Tweet by @lilmeyer, January 7, 2021 | © 2014 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I came, the hope of my tribe, to the City of Absolutes, in the year of the zero plus two big and a nine. I sought Lena, the girl I had dreamed of as my fingers grew back and I drifted in the waters of Nagoda. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The dead have fads. I work in Deadtown, at a bar mostly frequented by the Dead. They call me PD for Pre-Dead. The Dead tip for shit because they just aren’t all that interested. That’s what I think. Cory, one of my regulars, says it isn’t like that. The Dead are interested fine, he said. They’re just poor. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everybody thinks that bartenders steal. You know what? They’re right. Maybe there’s an upright bartender someplace where it’s all parking lots and cornfields and traffic lights flashing yellow, but I doubt it. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chichi Raha is a fascinating place, its flowers and lakes unforgettable to all visitors. There, you cannot see a single inch of exposed soil because the land is covered by vegetation: the anua grass, as fine as silk thread; the kuqin tree, tall enough to scrape the clouds; and many varieties of unnameable, unimaginably strange fruits, exuding seductive aromas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Young General Washington rode alone on his white stallion through the vast forest of Yoosemitee. His battle-axe, Valleyforge, hung glistening from the pommel of his saddle, the blood fresh-scrubbed from its edge. He had slain too many soldiers in the war against the Gauls and American Natives, and was glad to be going home. Narrated by Vikas Adam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s the particular metallic rattle of the football slamming the garage door that is like a nail driven into Chester Barnes forehead. Slap badoom, slap badoom: that he can cope with. His hearing has adjusted to that long habituation of the rhythm of wall-to-foot-to-ball-to-wall. Slap baclang. With a resonating twang of internal springs in the door mechanism. Slap baclang buzz. Behind his head where he can’t see it. But the biggest torment is that he never knows when it is going to happen. A rhythm, a regular beat, you can adjust to that: The random slam of ball kicked hard into garage door is always a surprise, a jolt you can never prepare for. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Insect has never been in love. The Astronomer has never been alive. It is important that you understand this. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It wasn’t enough for my mother Juliet to be crazy. Of course not. She was always going to find a uniquely inconvenient way to drive us mad along with her. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ona watched her Teacher turn around. The helmetless Ms. Coron wore a dress that exposed the skin of her arms and legs in a way that she had taught the children was beautiful and natural. Intellectually, Ona understood that the frigid air in the classroom, cold enough to give her and the other children hypothermia even with brief exposure, was perfectly suited to the Teachers. But she couldn’t help shivering at the sight. The airtight heat-suit scraped over Ona’s scales, and the rustling noise reverberated loudly in her helmet. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki & Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter did a magic spell, and it worked fine. With no unintended consequences, and no weird side effects. Two days later, he was on the front page of the local newspaper: “The Miracle Conjurer.” Some blogs picked it up, and soon enough he was getting visits from CNN and MSNBC, and his local NPR station kept wanting to put him on. News crews were standing and talking in front of his house. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I first met Marvin several years ago, but you don’t have to know Marvin to know his story. That’s the sort of thing that’s just understood, that comes from living in Beaumont, Texas, where Marvin lived most all of his lives. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As late as ten years ago, a mad scientist with a dream could expect to turn a decent profit with his lesser inventions and build enough capital to put his (or her!) real plans into play. Those days are sadly over, although my father, fool that he was, claimed that they never existed. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erm Kaslo came to Cheddle on the Adelaine, a tramp freighter that didn’t mind taking passengers who didn’t mind the quality of the accommodations. He could have come on a liner, but he preferred, when working, to make his entrances unnoticed. Narrated by Barry J. Northern (for StarShipSofa). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Josephine had been up all night, her heart pounding, thinking about this day, about whether she would survive it. Now, out on the road and exposed on all sides, she was so scared she could barely breathe. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices