Cover story by Peter S. Beagle, "The Vanishing"
"The Sin Hypothesis" by Elizabeth Lustig
"Tekkai Exhales His Avatar" by Tony Pi
"The Urn of Ravalos" by Rebecca Day
Part Two of "The Absence of Stars" by Greg Siewert

Plus text and an audio reading by Orson Scott Card of "The Man in the Tree," from his forthcoming novel, "The Lost Gate"

"Free Seas," a Tale For The Young and Unafraid by David Lubar

Also an Interview with Tanith Lee (by Darrell Schweitzer)

Some news, in case you hadn't heard:

1) Effective immediately, IGMS will be released on a bi-monthly basis, publishing for January, March, May, July, September, and November.

2) The number of stories published in each issue will be reduced from 7 to 5; however, the total number of stories published each year will increase from 28 to 30.

3) Instead of writing a new story for each issue (which he was having a hard time keeping up with), from now on Orson Scott Card will record a story as an audio file for each issue. If you bought issue 9 or 10 with the expectation that there would be a new Orson Scott Card story in it, fear not; that commitment will still be met (and hopefully soon, now that the latest screenplay for the Ender’s Game movie has been completed). However, having an audio file takes advantage of things a print magazine cannot do, and also allows Orson to stay active in the magazine on a more timely basis, with a commitment that takes a few hours of his time instead of a few weeks. The audio story he records might be one of his own previously published stories; it might be a story by another author published in IGMS; or it might be something from a novel-in-progress, as will be the case with issue 11 when he reads an early chapter from The Lost Gate (to be published in the future by Del Rey).

4) There will still be an author interview in every issue, and the monthly columns will still be free. Each story will still come with its own custom illustration.

Well, that’s what’s happening at IGMS. As much as I like to ramble on and on and on and on, I think that’s enough for you to digest in one sitting. If you have any thoughts or questions about any of this, please drop us a line via the contact page on our website or comment right here.

Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show

P.S. As usual, I've collected essays from the authors in the upcoming issue and will post them here on my blog www.SideShowFreaks.blogspot.com

Feel free to drop by next week and catch The Story Behind The Stories, where the authors talk about the creation of their tales.

P.P.S. If you've a story submitted to IGMS, please give me a little extra time to get to it; with the changes we've made to the publication schedule, we should have already started work on issue 12, so I've got a bit of artificially created catching up to do. It's a good problem to have, but still one I have to prioritize.