What is on my nightstand this week: LIghtspeed issues 86 & 87
(been a while, but I am still going to try to update on a regular basis)
I have tried various science fiction and/or fantasy magazines, but none have ever delivered long enough for me to re-up the subscription. Lightspeed is making a run at bucking that trend.
Lightspeed is an interesting combination of science fiction and fantasy, there are a couple of new stories of both types, along with a couple of reprints of each genre as well. Throw in some reviews, interviews, and excerpts making each issue packed, feels longer almost book length every month.
The combination of reprint and keeps each issue from experiencing the big problem that magazines, comics, or anything that publishes in the anthology format usually fall victim to: painfully inconsistent quality.
The anthology format is hard, not only do you need new stories, but you need good stories, and you need to deliver them every month. Anthology comics (and magazines) solve this sometimes by serializing a longer work, but the Lightspeed format is even better where republishing a few stories every month guarantees that even when a story or two might not hit as well as hoped, you have a known good story or two to fall back on.
Though, on the other hand, John Joseph Adams, the head editor for Lightspeed, is one of the best editors around and it might just be that he is able to buy great stories for every issue. The amount of issues of Lightspeed and Nightmare (the horror sister publication), and book length anthologies that John Joseph Adams works on is impressive, and Lightspeed has just started publishing books as well.
Anyway, this magazine delivers great new stories and reprints of stories month after month.
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