Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 191 (April 2026)

LIGHTSPEED is a digital science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF-and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales.

Welcome to issue 191 of LIGHTSPEED! If you love a Weird West adventure, then you are in luck, because we are serializing Ashok K. Banker's novelette "Six-Gun Vixen and the Machinist of Doom Valley," a new story of kidnapping, body modifications, and a most lovable half-wolf, half-horse steed. If the name "Six-Gun Vixen" rings a bell, it's because she first appeared in "Six-Gun Vixen and the Dead Coon Trashgang" all the way back in our eighty-first issue. The fantasy fun continues with two great flash stories: "Hell Is Empty" from J.R. Dawson and "Time Management" from P.A. Cornell. Our SF flash includes "Dad Died on Discord" by Andrew Dana Hudson and "Update on Rules for the Spatiotemporal Use of Campus Spaces" by Andrea Kriz. Our first piece of original SF this month is V.M. Ayala's "Saint Zero of the Hollows and the Eagle Knight." Dr. Justin C. Key returns to our pages with "Empathetic Psychosis," a speculative story about helping treat mental illness.