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

We were in the mines when the world was falling apart. I remember, the earth was cracking, and the plants were going limp, and the world looked dark blue, less full of life. | © 2024 Osahon Ize-Iyamu. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can someone get the doors? Thanks. Please remember we’re on an honor system for chairs—if you’ve eaten today, please leave them for someone who hasn’t. We don’t need another fainting incident. | © 2024 by Gabriela Santiago. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Lightspeed Fantasy Short Shots episode features "The Terrible Secret of The Immortal Bards" by Adam-Troy Castro (© 2024 by Adam-Troy Castro), narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and "A Superior Knot" by Ash Huang (© 2024 by Ash Huang, narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mother used to say I am a child of the river. I never understood her. I thought I would be a child of the wind, like her. | © 2024 by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is the year 3048 and you still hate your job. | © 2024 by Archita Mittra. Narrated by Arthur Morey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Lightspeed Science Fiction Short Shots episode features "Resistance" by Cat Rambo (© 2024 by Cat Rambo), narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and "Under the Skin" by Deborah L. Davitt (© 2024 by Deborah L. Davitt), narrated by Nan McNamara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We drove out to Joshua Tree for the star party—a gathering of amateur astronomers under a clear, dark sky. It was Holly’s idea, an impromptu adventure on a Friday after work: “Hey, Lou, do you want to go look at the moon tonight?” | © 2024 by Dominique Dickey. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Buddy and I abandoned our hydrogen nomad at the edge of the wastelands before trudging around the rusted chain-link perimeter of the abandoned fairgrounds, waiting for the blast of steam and guttural earthly moan to escape from the fractured soil, signifying that it was clear to enter the area. | © 2024 by Richard Thomas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Lightspeed Fantasy Short Shots episode features "Mud Maidens Rise" by K.A. Wiggins (© 2024 by K.A. Wiggins), narrated by Nan McNamara and "What's in a Name" by Matthew Hughes (© 2024 by Matthew Hughes), narrated by Arthur Morey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Next war, the angel decided, he was going to sit out. Before the dust settled, before hosts rose and fell depending on their actions and inclinations, he fled. Cowardice, maybe. More like pragmatism, he rationalized. | © 2024 by Carrie Vaughn. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The simulation blossomed around Nadja Gavrić like a hypercube unpacking itself into three dimensions. | © 2024 by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko. Narrated by Susan Hanfield, with Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anything can be bought or sold at the Night Market. A dozen hummingbird tongues curled like tiny snails, basted in honey and chili oil and served on a silver tray. A mermaid’s song, caught in an antique bottle of smoked glass. | © 2024 by Vanessa Fogg. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Lightspeed Science Fiction Short Shots episode features "The Only Writing Advice You'll Ever Need to Survive Eldritch Horrors" by Aimee Picchi (© 2024 by Aimee Picchi), narrated by Susan Hanfield and "The Aliens Said They Want to Party" by Joel William David Buxton (© 2024 by Joel William David Buxton), narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Lightspeed Fantasy Short Shots episode features "Songs of the Sorrow of Thorns" by Amayah Perveen (© 2024 by Amayah Perveen), narrated by Susan Hanfield and "A Guide on How to meet the Deity of Many Faces" by Oyedotun Damilola Muees (© 2024 by Oyedotun Damilola Muees), narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You’re asleep in dreams of your father holding your head underwater, so the call from Magnolia Assisted Living goes to voicemail. | © 2024 by Dominique Dickey. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today makes it a decade and a day I have been keeping tabs on you. I started by watching your mother, monitoring all her movements while she housed you. There’s no better time to relay this message but now. | © 2024 by Oyedotun Damilola Muees. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve never been so busy. The cave where we work used to be calm and, if not entirely devoid of sound, then split only by the crash of waves at high tide and the occasional cry of a woman who didn’t listen when we said listen this will hurt this will hurt this will hurt. Or maybe she did listen, but she thought we meant physical pain, when what we meant was your heart your heart your heart. | © 2024 by Shanna Germain. Read by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The trouble started after my husband reported a strange Zoom call at work. | © 2024 by Dominica Phetteplace. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The towering granite shoulders of the mountain god braced against the blue heavens above. Eero’s eyes remained closed beneath his glacial mask, his body swathed in a cloak of green trees. | © 2024 by Deborah L. Davitt. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Udo Gehler saw his next opponent was the Virgin Bitch of the Resistance and didn’t even blink. | © 2024 by Andrea Kriz. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are a near-infinite number of strange and marvelous worlds in this Universe, and in all of them there are Cats. | © 2024 by Megan Chee. Read by Scott Peterson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dawn shot a quiver of cirrus that smeared like sunscreen across the sky. Bini had been awake for hours, back aching. She was too old for this shit. | © 2024 by dave ring. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deep in the abyss of the Unholy Bazaar, in a shop that reeked of death and god-blood, Sparrow lay screaming in a web of rope and unbreakable silk. | © 2024 by Varsha Dinesh. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I want to tell you everything. I should tell you that you’re the greatest accomplishment our people have ever produced. I should tell you that you’re loved. | © 2024 by Ash Howell. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The night before the comet hit, Richard Milhous Nixon awoke restless and well before dawn. | © 2024 by P H Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

She should go back inside the watchpod. Maree and Blaise didn’t have to be dead. | © 2024 by Nisi Shawl. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gemma checks and rechecks the stories and songs, but she can’t find anything that says you have to go back. | © 2024 by Marissa Lingen. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So much for Shapcott’s harbinger of astronautical doom. He hasn’t seen her at all. Or anyone, obviously. | © 2024 by Stephen Geigen-Miller. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I joined The Ministry in 2009. Before that, I worked in grocery stores, pawn shops, and liquor stores. | © 2024 by Ben Peek. Narrated by Ruth Wallman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration. The first time you get our message, you only find one thread. It mimics your language in its simplest form, a single strand of words laid end to end. You will have to work hard if you want to understand us properly. You must learn to hold more than one thread of language simultaneously in your mind. | © 2024 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, Ruth Wallman, Alison Belle Bewes, and Caroline M. Yoachim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As with Robert Johnson, a lot of people who believed in the devil also believed that Jack Malagan had made a deal with him. | © 2024 by Rory Harper. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lester swung his chainsaw, mowing a path through the mob of needle-toothed quantum parasites, while Kit batted clean-up with her Louisville Slugger. Across the plain of dark rock, their destination: a whirling, gnashing portal that could doom all humanity. It wasn’t ideal timing for an awkward conversation, but it never was. | © 2024 by Rich Larson. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome, Stranger! This is a story for you, you who wait for my words to fall into your ear, so that we can share being and become more than we are alone. | © 2024 by Vandana Singh. Narrated by Annette Oliveira, with Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of us remember what Mother’s Day was like before we became sterile: flowers and candy for living mothers and tears for dead ones and anger at bad ones, and women who couldn’t be mothers or who’d lost children marinating in grief, and nobody really profiting from any of it except Hallmark and the restaurants and florists. | © 2024 by Susan Palwick. Narrated by Judy Young Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is a city called Salemo. Salemo sits atop a cliffside at the edge of a sea. | © 2024 by David Marino. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jo drives urgently as they race toward the star, not sure how far to go, racing because the baby is coming tonight, now, and He (a He, of course) is supposed to be born under the star, that’s how the story goes. | © 2024 by David Anaxagoras. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I know you’ve been following me since I left school, boarded the train, and took to the alley. Why didn’t I run? | © 2024 by Modupeoluwa Shelle. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Audio Recording, “Lydia and Ecco at Insight,” February 3, 2134 I didn’t run. If the boy had not called to you, you would have run. I would not have run. | © 2024 by Endria Isa Richardson. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, this is awkward. We aren’t at the stage in our relationship where I’d feel comfortable revising your life-poem on the fly. Even as a backup plan . . . yet here we are. | © 2024 by Mitchell Shanklin. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeanne Calment said she was 122, but there were questions. The records from 1875 were shaky, some of them deliberately burned. Tanaka Kane, 119, was on firmer ground, and then there were loads of others in the hundred-teens. | © 2024 by Marissa Lingen. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To be fair, the first one is work, so he doesn’t even get to pick his outfit. But an olive-scented breeze squirrels joyfully through his hair; waiters bring out little triangles of flatbread smeared with soft, spicy cheese; and the wine has a buttery quality he hasn’t encountered in decades. It’s marvelous. It’s been such a long time since he attended a wedding. At the last one, Thor ate so many of the hors d’oeuvres that he hadn’t been able to finish his dinner. Nate wants to tell Thor how good the hors d’oeuvres are at this wedding, but he’s not sure they’re quite there yet.| © 2024 by Sharang Biswas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human, that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,” which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a cruel dislike for it, the kind of man who will not be coming back.... | © 2024 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

True love’s kiss works miracles. Everyone knows the story: The sculptor who carved a perfect woman, his own creation, and when he fell in love with her (and how could he have failed to fall in love with her, his own creation?) and kissed her (for how could he fail to kiss her, loving her as truly as he did?) then the gods in their mercies and compassions granted her life, that she might return his love. | © 2024 by P H Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You don’t know why you ask because you already know he can’t answer. A body is only a body when it has all its parts. And he—that beloved man you once hiked through Angkor Wat’s abandoned halls and root-choked courtyards with, who once pulled you from the dizzying edge of the Queens-Manhattan skywalk—is now just an unsightly array of incomplete parts. | © 2024 by Angela Liu. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story as it is told in the dry valleys north of Averon, where the only roads run down to the Cricket River and the only power is the freehold of Skadar, begins with a merchant envoy from the southern coast who traveled from Averon. | © 2024 by Alex Irvine. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was born normal enough, except that I was four days late, which isn’t so much, and slightly jaundiced, which isn’t unusual, and had a raccoon for an arm, which is admittedly strange. It wasn’t my whole arm---I was human to the elbow. And it wasn’t a whole raccoon. | © 2024 by Will McMahon. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The last picture that Karu has of her father alive is on the day of her graduation. She has this big smile that by the placing of her dimples makes it obvious that she is his daughter. He stands next to her holding her waist in the space between his biceps and his lower arm. And her mother who is half an inch shorter than her stands on her left side. | © 2024 by Shingai Njeri Kagunda. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was a long fall in-system from the warp point, so Va Sojourner had plenty of time to observe. She found a peace in her observations that was expensive or painful to scratch out anywhere else, when she had to organize herself around the demands and expectations of everyone around her. | © 2024 by Phoebe Barton. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You’ve been driving for hours and I wish you would stop. You clutch the steering wheel so hard, your knuckles pop white, your palms slick with sweat and desperation. Sunken, glassy, your eyes flick between the fuel gauge, the endless road, and the trembling land through which we pass. | © 2024 by KT Bryski. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the third evening of every week, dozens come to Stalactite Keep to hear the storyteller teach about the place beyond Wonderland. Tonight, with only dewdrops of honeycomb light seeping through the cells of the sky, Creed told them of toys. | © 2024 by Wen-yi Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices