Unabashed

Warren Ellis on the state of the big three of fantasy and scifi magazines:

ASIMOV’S, ANALOG, F&SF; they don’t think they need saving. I mean, they haven’t changed for years, have they? They’re not designed to be wanted because they don’t want to be wanted, not really. They want to be left alone to do their thing, and they don’t want any loud new people in the room. They serve a dwindling audience, and they have to be aware of that so they have to be in it to simply serve that audience, to provide that presumably cosy experience to their people until the last light goes out. Otherwise they would have done something different years ago. This is why those three magazines have a web presence that can charitably be described as vestigial.

The man has a point. I look at the covers of some of these magazines and I see images too similar to what I saw in 1985, or even earlier, cover art that wasn’t even progressive when Omni’s covers looked roughly the same in 1979. It’s sad to me, as a writer, because those are the shining three beacons of publishing success–at least in the short fiction market–for a speculative fiction author. Mr. Ellis is speculating on writing another article on what might be done to save them and I’ll be very interested to see it. For my own part I subscribe to both Asimov’s and F&SF, but I’m not particularly happy with either. Of course, I always believe they’d do much better if they’d publish some of my stuff :-)

Also see this article by the same man, and this one by someone else entirely (Cory Doctorow).

And I’ll end this in the same way Warren ended his article:

And then someone else asked me why there’s still an sf magazine called “Analog.”

Update: 10-24-07
John Scalzi has thrown his voice into the fray on this topic which has attracted a lot of attention. He’s given this useful quote, a bit of positive spin for a guy like me, who (so far) has no large readership or SFFWA publishing credits to his name:

I suspect it’s not that hard to raise consciousness of new work online to the level you’ll find in the pages of the Big Three, given their current circulation numbers. That gives emerging writers a way to build careers outside those magazines, and it means the Big Three run a further risk of isolating themselves, both from where science fiction literature is going, and from the audiences building around these new writers.

And Warren has added to his original thought with another post.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: markets, SFFWA, short fiction