Lightspeed Magazine, December 2011 (Lightspeed Magazine, #19)

Lightspeed Magazine features all kinds of science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between.

In our December 2011 issue, Vylar Kaftan returns to our pages with “The Sighted Watchmaker,” a story about a being coming face-to-face with her race’s long-dead creator, and the choice it must make as it guides its own creation to sentience.

In “After the Days of Dead-Eye ‘Dee,” author Pat Cadigan introduces us to a tough old woman who has been pushed aside one time too many, and the alien who dares to approach her.

Andrew Penn Romine makes his professional debut with “The Parting Glass,” in which an aging Augment gets the chance of a lifetime—but the price might be more than advertised when he considers the source.

And finally, Sir Arthur C. Clarke gives us the story of Captain Robert Singh, tasked with averting world-wide disaster from an asteroid strike in “The Hammer of God.”