Announcing LIGHTSPEED, a New Science Fiction Magazine

Lightspeed

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be the fiction editor of a new science fiction online magazine called LIGHTSPEED, which will be published by Prime Books. I’ll be leaving F&SF at the end of the year to take on this new role. The press release below has all the pertinent details.

Prime Books Announces LIGHTSPEED, a New Science Fiction Magazine

ROCKVILLE, MD, OCT. 16 — Prime Books, the award-winning independent press and publisher of Fantasy Magazine, announced today that in June 2010 it will launch a new online magazine called LIGHTSPEED (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), which will publish four science fiction short stories every month, along with an assortment of non-fiction features. LIGHTSPEED will be edited by John Joseph Adams, the bestselling editor of anthologies such as Wastelands and The Living Dead, and Andrea Kail, a writer, critic, and television producer who worked for thirteen years on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Adams will select and edit the fiction, while Kail will handle the non-fiction.

LIGHTSPEED will focus exclusively on science fiction. It will feature all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and writers will be encouraged to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope. New content will be posted twice a week, including one piece of fiction, and one piece of non-fiction. The fiction selections each month will consist of two original stories and two reprints, except for the debut issue, which will feature four original pieces of fiction. All of the non-fiction will be original.

LIGHTSPEED will open to fiction submissions and non-fiction queries on January 1, 2010. Guidelines for fiction and non-fiction will be available on LIGHTSPEED‘s website, www.lightspeedmagazine.com, by December 1, 2009.

About John Joseph Adams

John Joseph Adams (www.johnjosephadams.com) is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as By Blood We Live, Federations, The Living Dead (a World Fantasy Award finalist), and Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse. He has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble’s Unabashedly Bookish blog and his anthology The Living Dead was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. In addition to his editorial work, he is also currently a reviewer for Audible.com and a blogger for Tor.com.

About Andrea Kail

Andrea Kail (www.andreakail.com) is a graduate of the Dramatic Writing Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has spent the last two decades working from one end of New York’s television spectrum to the other: HBO, MTV, A&E, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, as well as thirteen years at NBC’s Emmy Award-winning Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Her fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, and her novella, “The Sun God at Dawn, Rising from a Lotus Blossom,” was a first-place winner in the Writers of the Future contest and appeared in Writers of the Future Vol. XXIII. Since 2005, Andrea has also been writing lively film criticism for such venues as Paradox Magazine and CinemaSpy.

About Prime Books

Prime Books (www.prime-books.com), edited and published by Hugo Award-nominee and World Fantasy Award-winner Sean Wallace, is an award-winning independent publishing house specializing in a mix of anthologies, collections, novels, and magazines. Some of its established and new authors/editors include John Joseph Adams, KJ Bishop, Philip K. Dick, Theodora Goss, Rich Horton, Nick Mamatas, Sarah Monette, Holly Phillips, Tim Pratt, Ekaterina Sedia, Catherynne M. Valente, and Jeff VanderMeer.

Contacts

Sean Wallace, publisher, sean@lightspeedmagazine.com

John Joseph Adams, fiction editor, john@lightspeedmagazine.com

Andrea Kail, non-fiction editor, andrea@lightspeedmagazine.com

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CapClave

I’ll be attending CapClave next weekend, Oct. 16-18, in Rockville, MD (near Washington, DC).

Two stories from my anthology Seeds of Change (“Spider the Artist” by Nnedi Okorafor and “Drinking Problem” by K.D. Wentworth) are nominated for the Washington Science Fiction Association’s Small Press Award, which is presented at CapClave.

Here are the program items I’ll be participating in:

Sat 1pm Montrose – New writers
Participants: Larry Hodges (m), John Joseph Adams, John Betancourt, Tad Daley, Scott Edelman, Shelia Williams

How did you get started in the field? How are you shaping your career? What advice would you give new writers?

Sat 5pm Montrose – New Media
Participants: Barbara Krasnoff (m), John Joseph Adams, John Andrews, Davey Beauchamp, Neil Clarke

Webcomics. Manga. YouTube videos. Pseudo- blogs (fiction in blog format). Twitter fiction. Podcasts. What are they? How do they work? How can I get them? How can I get involved? What’s worth the audience’s time?

Sat 9pm Plaza – Small Press Award
Participants: WSFA and the nominees

Who will win the annual WSFA small press award? Come and see. Celebrate with cake.

Sun 10am Montrose – The Editors Panel
Participants: Neil Clarke (m), John Joseph Adams, Christopher M. Cevasco, George Scithers, Ted White, Shelia Williams

What do editors look for? What trends are they seeing? What do they want to see in manuscripts? Do editors still work with writers and if so how?

Sun 3pm Montrose – Podcasting
Participants: Nobilis Reed (m), John Joseph Adams, Davey Beauchamp

What is podcasting? How can authors and readers make use of it? What podcasts would interest SF fans?

Sunday 11am (Dealer’s Room?) – Autographing

John Joseph Adams

Additionally, Prime Books (publisher of my anthologies Federations and Seeds of Change) will be having a party at some point during the convention, it looks like it’s going to be Saturday night. I’ll be helping out with that and likely present the whole party. When more information is available about that, I’ll post it here on the blog.

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Anthologies are Like a Box of Chocolates, and Apparently, I’m Willy Wonka

Reviewer Paul Goat Allen seems to be my biggest fan. In his recent blog post for Barnes & Noble’s BN.com, “The Candy Man Can: Or Why John Joseph Adams is Genre Fiction’s Willy Wonka,” he said so many kind things about me and my anthologies you’d think he was on the Night Shade payroll.

Here’s a taste:

  • “The reigning king of the anthology world is John Joseph Adams.”
  • “Every anthology this guy is associated with seems to turn to gold: and by gold I mean jaw-droppingly brilliant anthologies with no weak links that I’ll not only read again and again but treasure until the day I die.”
  • “[Wastelands] is arguably my favorite anthology of all time – just packed with speculative masterworks.”
  • The Living Dead was, simply put, the best collection of zombie fiction stories ever collected. … This anthology is, like Wastelands, one of my all-time favorite short story collections. Fans of zombie fiction shouldn’t just read this anthology – they should own it.”
  • “By Blood We Live [is] a killer collection of simply stellar vampire stories that just floored me from beginning to end. … Yet another masterful – dare I say perfect – anthology.”
     

And as if that wasn’t cool enough for one day, Allen’s article also inspired some…fan art?

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Way of the Wizard update

This is just a note to say that I’ve read everything submitted to The Way of the Wizard that was submitted on 9/10/09 or earlier. Submissions made during that period should have either received a rejection, or a note from me indicating that I’d like to hold onto your submission for further consideration.

I also just wanted to point out that there is no need to query me to see if your wizard story is wizardly enough for my purposes. Please just submit the story and I’ll make a judgment call when I read it. I’ve been getting a lot of queries posted to the guidelines thread, so I just wanted to clarify that there is no need to query. If you have a story that you think might qualify as a wizard story, and you’d like to submit it to the anthology, please do so.

(Don’t feel bad if you’re one of the folks who *did* query and please don’t post another comment or email me to apologize–it’s not necessary.) 

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The Game is Afoot!

Amazon.com is now showing stock of my new anthology The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which means the game is officially afoot!

Please note that if you’re going to go look for it in a brick & mortar store, there’s a good chance the book will be located in the mystery section, so if you don’t see it in SF/fantasy, be sure to look for it there.

If you’re on the fence about it, take a look at the anthology’s website, which features some interviews with the authors and several pieces of free fiction.

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Before the Apocalypse, There was Reggaetón

People sometimes ask me about the cover of Wastelands, wondering where they might have seen it before. Some of you may remember that when the cover (by Daniel Kvasznicza) was first revealed, I mentioned how the cover art had been previously used as a backdrop on a rap album or something. It took me a while, but I finally got more of a complete picture (so to speak) as to the history of the image.

First, it was actually first used as the backdrop for an animated film that screened in Austria in 2004. Then Sony licensed the image for use on the album King of Kings by Don Omar (actually Reggaetón, not rap). Here it is:

On the cover, it’s hardly visible at all, though on the second image, which looks to be the back of the CD case, it’s obviously much more visible.

The image has also been posted online in various venues to illustrate posts about post-apocalyptic scenarios, such as at io9.com and elsewhere.

So there you have it. The brief, sordid history behind the Wastelands cover.

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