The current edition of Asimov’s is a double issue, for October and November. This is apprently an annual thing, but whatever the reason for it, I got a magazine with twice as many stories as usual, which probably creates a false impression of the worth of the magazine. I’ll have to check out a regular-size version in the future.
This is also probably the end of the Magazine Experiment, because I can’t find anywhere to buy F&SF around here: their return policy is sufficiently obnoxious that the local SF specialty store won’t carry it, and neither Borders nor Barnes & Noble had any copies. I’m open to suggestions of other magazines that I really ought to check out, but as I understand it, Analog, Asimov’s and F & SF are the big three in the field.
Despite a number of comments to the previous magazine experiment post telling me to expect dark and depressing stories, I didn’t find it that bad.
In fact, from a fiction perspective, this was actually pretty good. There’s a good Greg Egan story about math– it may or may not make sense, but it was a good read. Robert Reed’s homage to/ riff on “Nightfall” is well done, and just to be cute, they’ve reprinted the original Asimov story, which is, of course, excellent if you ignore the clunky bits. And the first quarter of Allen M. Steele’s serialized next novel was pretty good. I haven’t read any of his books, but I might take a look at them, the next time I’m in the store.
Of course, there are a bunch of lesser stories as well. There are horror-ish contributions from Carol Emshwiller and Susan Forest that didn’t do much for me, and a fairly saccharine story from Carl Frederick, who’s having a banner month in the SF magazines. Liz Williams and Chris Butler have stories that really don’t make any sense to me, and Lisa Goldstein’s alternate history about Georges Melies didn’t really resolve into anything. None of them were actively bad , just sort of… forgettable.
There’s also a bunch of poetry, that I generally ignored.
Really, save for one column that was so awesomely bad as to deserve its own post, this was a pretty reasonable magazine. As I said, though, it’s a special double issue, so I’m not sure it’s really representative of the general quality– I’ll have to see some regular-size issues before I think about subscribing.