Switching from the War for South Ossetia to a slightly less depressing subject, here’s Warren Ellis on the slow death of the science fiction magazine:
Don’t be daft. Of course print isn’t dead. I make a reasonable living off it. Over in the world of words-and-pictures, I can write 44 pages that do little more than fetishise the English longbow and make a profit. The peculiarities of distributing comics through a firm-sale system — one that is actually open to sf magazines, too, though I don’t doubt the process is difficult for them — have kept the Anglophone medium alive in all its weird breadth for almost thirty years now. Additional distribution systems are of course required, because that market is dependent on new stories opening faster than old stores die, and that’s not a trick that’s yet been pulled off to anyone’s satisfaction. And, you know, I could list a dozen other things wrong with it. And have. But when everyone else is muttering that Print Is Dead, comics continues to quietly move millions of units a month. Last month, I wrote a comic that did in excess of 100,000 copies on firm sale.
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All of which is to say: when I run the sf magazine figures, I’m not saying that Print Is Dead. I’m not even saying that No-One Wants Short Fiction. I’m saying, I’m afraid, that something is wrong with those magazines. Not even, necessarily, with the content. That’s entirely subjective. The objective view seems to me to be inescapable: the packaging and marketing just isn’t working. And I think it’s
probably too late for them now.
I know why the magazines are dying: because they’re incredibly dull and have been for decades while they have ceased to be the centre of the genre for even longer. I’ve been reading science fiction since I could read, at first throught the local library and later the local second hand bookshop and even the specialised science fiction bookshop, but it was books I read, not magazines. There were no sf magazines
were I grew up, just science fiction books talking about them in awe so imagine my disappointment when I got my hands on my first ever sf magazine and it was this dull, grey, tiny wodge of newsprint. There was no need for the stories to be crap, as the magazine itself had already turned me off, looking like nothing so much as some granny orientated low rent Reader’s Digest clone.
To be honest, in my occasional samplings of the socalled big three science fiction magazines, — Analog, The Magazine of Science Fiction and Asimov — I’ve never been particularly impressed by the quality of either the stories or the editorial content. To read the best short story science fiction you don’t need the magazines, you just need to read one or more of the various Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. If these magazines die, I won’t mourn them.
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