At the recent Worldcon, there were several rounds of the usual Save the Magazines Chorus: short fiction is the lifeblood of the genre, it’s where we get our new writers, etc. With the usual subtextual implication that I am a Bad Person because I don’t read or subscribe to any SF magazines.
(The most annoying version with a rant-by-proxy at the Hugo Awards. This bugged me all the more because the author in question didn’t make the trip, and it really doesn’t seem right to make somebody else deliver your mini-tirade about the state of the short fiction market. If you can’t make the ceremony, your speech really ought to be limited to “Sorry I couldn’t make it, I’m honored to win, thanks to my editor/agent/mother/God,” and that’s about it.)
Anyway, having heard this an awful lot, and not having read SF magazines regularly in ten or fifteen years, I decided to see what I’m missing. I picked up copies of the two SF magazines they had at Borders the other day– Analog and Asimov’s, and I would’ve bought F & SF if they’d had a copy– and I plan to read everything in them, to see if they’re something I ought to be subscribing to. And, of course, I have this blog, so I’ll be posting the findings here.
First up is Analog, both because of alphabetical order, and because Asimov’s is a double issue, and will take much longer to read. This is the November 2007 issue, with a fairly generic moon base cover advertising stories by Barry B. Longyear, H.G. Strathmann, John G. Hemry, and Richard A. Lovett. Analog is apparently the magazine of middle initials.
So, having read it, what do I think? Well, I’m not going to be subscribing any time soon…
To start on a positive note, the piece by Richard A. Lovett on the search for archaeological evidence of the first domestication of horses is terrific. It’s a very nice pop-science article, and does a great job of conveying the state of the field, and more importantly the uncertainty inherent in attempting to figure out what happened five thousand years ago. It’s fascinating.
Other than that… It’s really pretty dire. The lead story is a dreadful novella by Barry B. Longyear which appears to have been written as a platform for a bunch of incontinent gorilla jokes. It’s ridiculously self-indulgent, and you can just hear the author cracking himself up as he piles on silly asides that go nowhere.
There’s also a fairly annoying “Probability Zero” column all about what a smart guy Stan Schmidt is, a trite and obvious story from Carl Frederick that doesn’t seem to have any significant SF content, a jokey throw-away story from Bud Sparhawk, and a novelette from H. G. Strathmann that starts off promisingly, but peters out into a sub-“Twilight Zone” twist ending.
The only halfway worthwhile fiction pieces in the issue are David Walton’s short story “Permission to Speak Freely,” which is a passable piece of lab lit, and John G. Hemry’s “These Are the Times,” a clever but slight time-travel story. All of the fiction has a very old-school feel– lots of crshingly obvious exposition in which characters explain things to each other, or omniscient narrators deliver little lectures on the background of events.
Maybe 40 of the 144 pages are worth reading, and the Longyear piece is so irritatingly bad that it offsets most of those. I don’t recommend it.
Now, of course, it’s a little unfair to be judging a magazine based only on one issue– this could be a bad issue. And depending on how busy I find myself, I may pick up the next issue as well, to get a bit more of a baseline. But based on the general type of fiction being presented here, I don’t think it likely that other issues would be more to my tastes.