Open for Submissions: A New Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Latter-day Saint Tradition

Introducing Further Light

Here’s the TLDR: You may have noticed that I love Latter-day Saint science fiction and fantasy (just a bit). I’m launching a magazine to collect both original fiction and commentary on speculative fiction from an LDS perspective. Introducing Further Light: Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Latter-day Saint Tradition.

Sound like something you’d be interested in? Here are some things you can do to help:

• Subscribe for free to Further Light for updates on our progress towards issue 1!

• Check out our submission guidelines and send something in.

• Send this post to anyone you know who might be interested in reading or submitting.

• Follow us on social media:
  Facebook: Further Light Magazine
  IG: @FurtherLightMag
  X: @FurtherLightMag
  Bluesky: @FurtherLightMag

• Consider a paid subscription to help fund our first issues. We’re paying authors an honorarium of $25, so your $50/year subscription will help us pay for two pieces. Once we start publishing, you’ll get online access to a piece each week, plus print issues mailed to you as we produce them. We’re shooting for print issues twice a year, starting in January.

• Volunteer to help out. If you have editing skills, art skills, graphic design skills, or just time to volunteer, I could use your help! Email editor@furtherlightmag.com and let me know how you could help.

And now for the backstory (you know we can backstory all day):

The idea for this magazine came at my presentation at LTUE last year on LDS theology in Ally Condie’s Matched and James Dashner’s The Maze Runner. An enthusiastic audience member asked where else they could read more stuff about speculative fiction written by Latter-day Saint authors. I mentioned of course a few scholarly friends I know, but I realized that little of their work is happening in the public humanities.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a similar experience. There are a lot of people out there—both within the Latter-day Saint community and outside of it—who are interested in why there’s so much science fiction and fantasy written by this particular small community and how the religion of these authors influences what they write.

After my LTUE audience member’s question, I began seeing amazing commentary on SFF from an LDS perspective almost everywhere I went and wishing I could send it back in time to this audience member: a paper at a BYU student symposium, posts on various LDS blogs and sites, academic work at conferences, discussions on various Discord servers. There are so many people producing fantastic work, but so much of this work isn’t publishable in other venues—it’s too devotional or too niche. I feel the same way about some of my fiction, and I know other authors have trouble placing their speculative fiction that’s too LDS.

So I’m starting this magazine with the hope of centralizing the conversation and building an audience for it. This is why Further Light is open to reprints. I want to gather great stories and commentary, even those written for other places, and make sure it gets seen by a community of people who are interested in how and why Latter-day Saints write fantastical fiction.

So please, share Further Light with the fantasy authors and readers in your life. I’m excited to see where we can go together.