New Science Fiction Magazine: Lightspeed

After all those announcement of magazines closing, and the general down feeling of the genre short fiction market, it’s exciting to be able to announce a new magazine. Lightspeed is a new monthly online science fiction magazine from Prime Books that will launch in June 2010.

John Joseph Adams (current assistant editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as well as the editor of many excellent anthologies such as The Living Dead and Federations) will select and edit the magazine’s fiction, and Andrea Kail (a former Late Night With Conan O’Brien producer) will handle the nonfiction. Adams will be leaving his post at F&SF at the end of the year to focus on the magazine as well as his other editorial projects.

I don’t know about you, but I think this is pretty exciting news. Adams has shown himself as a worthy editor and I think Lightspeed will make a great companion to Prime Books’ consistently strong (and appropriately named) online fantasy fiction magazine: Fantasy Magazine. I know the official launch is a ways off, but it’s still good to hear about a new magazine starting, particularly one with as good a pedigree as this one has.