6 ms·
"Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's and Analog acquired
- pfdietz 2y agoI didn't realize FaSF was teetering on the brink.
- alabastervlog 2y agoBasically all of fiction except romance/porn is withering fast.
- Henchman21 2y agoMy understanding is that romance/porn is mostly written by LLMs at this point. Its all just churned out crap to make a quick buck on Amazon. My elderly mother reads this genre endlessly and frequently wonders if there are editors at all!
- smcin 2y ago"mostly written by LLMs... on Amazon" Do you mean in e-books, print books, or subscription based sites, or some/all of those? I think you only mean e-books, on Amazon. Then if people object to that, just avoid e-books on Amazon. Stay with human-curated.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Then if people object to that, just avoid e-books on Amazon. Stay with human-curated. What does being an ebook have to do with it? You want to avoid self-published books. The typical self-published book is much worse than nothing. But most books are available as ebooks.
- smcin 2y agoThe only way most people are going to encounter self-published (e-)books being marketed to them is Kindle (Unlimited) or online stores. Brick-and-mortar stores wouldn't do this, it wouldn't even economically make sense to carry the stuff and it would damage their reputation.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoSo? You have your implication backwards. Here's an ebook on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC13Y0 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC13Y0 Why are you recommending that we avoid reading it?
- smcin 2y agoDo us a favor and don't misrepresent what I say. "Self-published author" connotes no-name author (or anonymous/pseudonymous) with no publishing history or reputation; whereas Neil Gaiman is already reputable and has sold 40+ million books. Statistically, the average e-book that Amazon tries to advertise to you is far more likely to be the former than the letter. And that was before the current wave of "pay to learn our system to get rich publishing e-books". I even have friends who tried it for a while. They hardly made any money.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Do us a favor and don't misrepresent what I say. Would you mind doing me the same favor, of not misrepresenting what you say? > "Self-published" connotes no-name author (or anonymous/pseudonymous) with no publishing history or reputation; whereas Neil Gaiman is already reputable and has sold 40 million books. ...is this relevant to something you've said? I'm the only one so far who's said something about self-published books. Your recommendation was to avoid ebooks. That recommendation was stupid. > Statistically, the average e-book that Amazon tries to advertise to you is far more likely to be the former than the letter. Well, I just opened the Amazon front page. These are the ebooks they're advertising to me: 1. The Summer Dragon, Todd Lockwood. Publisher: DAW 2. Beren and Lúthien, J.R.R. Tolkien (and Christopher Tolkien). Publisher: William Morrow (= HarperCollins) 3. Daughter of the Empire, Raymond Feist (and Janny Wurts). Publisher: Spectra (= Penguin) 4. The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu. Publisher: Saga Press (= Simon & Schuster) 5. An Inheritance of Ash & Blood, Jamie Edmundson. Publisher: Rarn, which does appear to be Jamie Edmundson's personal publishing company. This could fairly be considered self-published. It's also available on Kindle Unlimited, which is a red flag. The author appears to be fairly prolific, so he's not exactly lacking a publishing history. 6. Heir of Ra, M. Sasinowski. Publisher: Kingsmill Press. This is another publisher that appears to be a vehicle for a single author. Probably self-published. This book is at pains to point out the many awards it's won, probably because it's self-published. 7. The Anvil, Christopher Coates. Publisher: Next Chapter, which purports to "combine the professionalism and quality of traditional publishing with the creative freedom of independent publishing". They review your work before publishing it; not self-published. 8. The Book That Wouldn't Burn, Mark Lawrence. Publisher: Ace That concludes the front page. There are five books from major publishers, one from a minor publisher, and two most likely self-published. The biggest names appearing are J.R.R. Tolkien and Raymond Feist. Taking author quality into account, you appear to be roughly as likely to get Neil Gaiman as you are to get anything self-published. Ignoring it, you're far more likely to get something reputable than to get trash. Unless, of course, you want to read trash, in which case Amazon's recommendations will probably lean that way.
- throwaway81523 2y agoThe deal with Amazon is you pay a fixed monthly subscription fee to read an umlimited amount of crap on your Kindle (RMS calls that device a Swindle). So if you have some favorite authors or get recommendations from a subreddit or something, you can keep your reading appetite satiated without buying individual titles. Particularly, that lets you DNF (do not finish) a work without incurring expense, if you read a few pages and decide not to continue. The plan involved is called Kindle Unlimited and its terms for authors are quite onerous imho, but monopolies etc.
- KerrAvon 2y agoIf anyone needs an alternative: the current Kobo lineup is great. You can buy ebooks directly through the Kobo store, and they work well. And if you want to tinker with the OS, you can.
- Cpoll 2y ago> (RMS calls that device a Swindle) That's kind of a non-sequitur though; he's not calling it that because the subscription sucks.
- lmm 2y ago> My understanding is that romance/porn is mostly written by LLMs at this point. Its all just churned out crap to make a quick buck on Amazon. It's always been churned out crap, I don't see LLMs making much difference.
- mtVessel 2y agoI didn't realize they were still in print!
- Finnucane 2y agoGordon's had some issues--declining distribution (as with every magazine), and recently the printer he'd been using for a long time went out of business, and he had to scramble to find another.
- droideqa 2y agoAnybody reading this might appreciate ‘Astounding’[0]: “Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers—John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard—who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world. ” [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Astounding-Campbell-Heinlein-Hubbard-Science-ebook/dp/B074M6QRMP/ https://www.amazon.com/Astounding-Campbell-Heinlein-Hubbard-...
- righthand 2y agoBook: https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-campbell-isaac-asimov-robert-a-heinlein-l-ron-hubbard-and-the-golden-age-of-science-fiction-alec-nevala-lee/6438862?ean=9780062571953&next=t https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-campbell-isaa... Audio book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-campbell-isaac-asimov-robert-a-heinlen-l-ron-hubbard-and-the-golden-age-of-science-fiction-alec-nevala-lee/7392639?ean=9781538552063&next=t https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-campbell-isaa...
- Henchman21 2y agoI appreciate the non-Amazon links, thank you!
- dcminter 2y agoBe warned, I found it a bit depressing though. Never meet your heroes they say...
- ethbr1 2y agoI'm hazarding that a lot of the early scifi luminaries weren't the most well-adjusted humans?
- pfdietz 2y agoSome were even worse. I threw out (not sold) all my Marion Zimmer Bradley books when I found out. https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/aklqck/breendoggle_and_marion_zimmer_bradley_a_moral/ https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/aklqck/breendoggle_a...
- jasonthorsness 2y agoIn the 1990s my uncle gave me a ton of Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction from the 1970s of which I only still have maybe a half-dozen. Even in the 90s the perspective of the stories was super interesting and now even more so. Surprisingly they have almost no advertisement, just stories. I didn’t know they were still around!
- rom16384 2y agoI used to buy Analog on paper once in a while. A few years back I wanted to subscribe the digital version, but there wasn't a convenient way to do so, just closed platforms and drm'd readers, so I didn't subscribe. Don't make it hard for people to give you money. They could just email pdfs...
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoI made a post below on this, but I had previously subscribed to Analog via Amazon/Kindle. About two years ago Amazon killed all magazine subscriptions and forced the magazines to either make their issues available for free to "KindleUnlimited" subscribers ($10/mo) or get the hell off their platform. Analog and Asimov's took the hit, and are, to this day, available to read for free if you have Kindle Unlimited. There's no way this didn't lose them tons of money and wreck their cashflow. And, even though I personally benefitted, I'm still mad that Amazon did this & I'm surprised there wasn't more pushback from the magazines. They could have done a lot more to incentivize off-platform digital subscriptions.
- minihat 2y agoYou can subscribe to Asimovs and/or Analog on their website today and they give you a download link for PDF, epub every other month.
- jrootabega 2y agoAnalog has been an all-around pain in the ass. I subscribed to the paper version and didn't receive an issue within the timeframe they advertise. It's bimonthly, so it was quite a while. When I wrote them, they said "Oh, we always skip the current issue in case you bought it in a store." I asked them to include that on the website, but guess whether they gave a crap. When I let my subscription expire gracefully (because the overall quality of the writing and editing was bad), I got something like 6 - 10 letters warning me about it. They were the kind that scare elderly people with dementia into paying. They also included some dubious claims about renewing "now" and saving, but I couldn't work out how I would save anything if I did. So things have been bad for a long time.
- adamgordonbell 2y agoI got really into short sf fiction, reading years best collections and then seeing they were all from analog ect started reading them. The collections were better, just more filtered, but the history of these pulp magazines is amazing.
- BMc2020 2y agoThe golden age of science fiction is twelve... This is a good spot to post the omni magazine collection as well... http://www.williamflew.com/ http://www.williamflew.com/
- FpUser 2y agoI am 60+, read a lot and at least 50% is science fiction
- FiatLuxDave 2y agoI believe that is referred to as the Silver Age of science fiction ;)
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago63, and read fantasy, the most. I prefer fantasy, over scifi, because, in my opinion, with fantasy, the story is about characters in a fantastic world, while, in science fiction, the story is about a fantastic world, with characters in it. I do have trouble liking newer stuff, though, and end up rereading a lot of “classic” lit. I feel as if authors aren’t well-edited, anymore, and that can have devastating consequences on the quality of their work. I hope that AI editors may help, there. One of the things about these mags, is that they were a forge for great style. People learned to develop succinct, effective stories, and the editors for the publications could be brutal. They forced authors to be good.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoOne thing I've noticed is that sometimes modern authors are too married to their big ideas, and neglect the rest of the story. The example I like to point to this is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. She has fantastic ideas, really interesting stuff. But the plot is awful. There's just no interesting story there, and the ideas aren't enough to carry the book so it winds up being a bore to read. And I don't find that to be the only case of such a thing.
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- fallingfrog 2y agoWell it was nice while it lasted
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago> In a public post on the official Facebook page of Asimov's Science Fiction, the magazine's editor Sheila Williams said "We're excited about Asimov's future with our new owners. We have lots of great stories lined up. There's no change to our editorial staff. Our new owners are readers who love genre magazines and we're looking forward to working with them." Seems like things are going to be fine. In all honesty, Amazon cutting digital magazine subscriptions and shifting everything over to "KindleUnlimited" was hugely damaging to these magazines and probably outright killed their business model. The new owners are apparently fans who are keeping the thing going practically as a charity.
- KerrAvon 2y agoThis is very likely. Bezos’ early investment in political lobbying really paid off for them; bought them a judge who effectively killed competition from Apple, and they’ve been free of antitrust scrutiny since 2005. Won’t help them much under Musk’s governance, though.
- hnthrowaway0315 2y agoI never read any SF magazines, but "Analog Science Fiction and Fact" seems to be a super cool name for a SF magazine. What are the most popular Analog/Embedded hobbyist magazines out there? I know Pi has one or more, but I always feel Pi to be a bit too high level for my taste.
- zabzonk 2y agoOoh, I hadn't thought of these mags (sort of the size of a paperback) for years. I used to read Galaxy and Analog in the mid-70s. I wonder where people sell or will sell SF novels these days? They were published multi-part in the mags. I stopped reading them because I moved to London in the late 70s, and was frankly broke because of housing and other costs.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoSomeone tried to relaunch Galaxy last year. They produced an August 2024 issue, none since. No idea what's going on with it. The same people tried to do a relaunch of Worlds of If a year prior, just one issue too. I honestly don't know whether to wish luck to the people doing this, or if they'd just ruin them...
- HumblyTossed 2y agoNever got into these but loved AHMM for a while.
- DoneWithAllThat 2y agoI’m not sure how many people realize the number of great sci-fi stories that started as anthologies in these magazines. It’s a foundation of the entire genre that often goes entirely unappreciated.
- whartung 2y agoSomeone probably knows this in more detail, and I can easily get the magazine wrong. But I’ll share the anecdote, maybe it’ll ring someone else’s bell. Back in the day, talking 40s to 50s, Analog published a letter to the editor that was “from the future”. Several years in the future. The writer was commenting on the stories, the topics, the writers, etc. in that issue. Several years later (and I want to say it was, like, 9 years), Analog published that issue based on that letter. They contracted the authors and stories, the whole thing.
- sbierwagen 2y agoOne year later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fact#Post-war_years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fac... >In the November 1948 issue, Campbell published a letter to the editor by a reader named Richard A. Hoen that contained a detailed ranking of the contents of an issue "one year in the future". Campbell went along with the joke and contracted stories from most of the authors mentioned in the letter that would follow the Hoen's imaginary story titles. One of the best-known stories from that issue is "Gulf", by Heinlein. Other stories and articles were written by some of the most famous authors of the time: Asimov, Sturgeon, del Rey, van Vogt, de Camp, and the astronomer R. S. Richardson.
- mcswell 2y agoAnalog used to publish the rankings a few months after each issue came out. When the actual rankings for this issue came out, was there any correspondence to Hoen's prophesied rankings?
- themadturk 2y agoI read Analog avidly in the mid-to-late 60s (yeah, 12 being the golden age of science fiction). I only remember one story for sure I read there, Dean McLaughlin's A Hawk Among The Sparrows, but I'm pretty sure I caught some others serialized there during that era. Good to see these mags are still around.
- greesil 2y agoI was gifted an Asimov subscription back in the late 90s, and when I went to college stopped reading. I recently had subscribed again and found it not as good as I remembered. As a kid it was definitely hit or miss, but as an adult it's all misses. I can figure out if the magazine has changed, or if I have changed, or both. But, it feels like it has gone downhill. Honestly, the whole genre. Maybe it's hard to write sci fi now what we're actually living it. Or, anyone with talent has gone elsewhere.
- KerrAvon 2y agoNo idea if Asimov’s got worse, but what we’re living right now is so much stupider than any science fiction. AI, but it’s not actually intelligent and it often produces garbage. A fascist takeover of the US from the inside by the dumbest billionaires imaginable, because an entire segment of society got bored with their lives during pandemic lockdown and decided they’d rather live in an action movie than consensus reality. Nearly infinite computing power on a glass rectangle in your pocket, and it’s only made humanity stupider, again thanks to billionaires who are too stupid to understand where their money and power derives from. And how it can be taken away.
- pfdietz 2y agoWe're living in a time when chickens are coming home to roost. A nation can't sustain greatness by borrowing forever. SF could have helped people come to grips with this inevitability, but I guess it didn't.
- greesil 2y agoThe solution was obvious circa 1940 - 1970s. It wasn't science fiction, it was what was in place then.
- greesil 2y agoWhen I followed Charles Stross on Twitter I recall him often saying that we are living in the stupidest possible timeline.
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- throwaway81523 2y agoYikes. I wonder if they will use the back catalog of science fiction stories to train AI and give us new forms of dystopia.
- genewitch 2y agoWhat, you don't like the current dystopia?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mcswell 2y agoThere is a freely browsable and readable collection of stories from the 40s, 50s and 60s, and a few later, mostly from Analog, here: https://www.freesfonline.net/Magazines2.html https://www.freesfonline.net/Magazines2.html
- fractallyte 2y agoHere's a more or less complete archive: https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/AST/ https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/AST/ (Astounding) and https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/AN.htm https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/AN.htm (Analog). Luminist is one of the treasures of the Internet, right up there with Wikipedia and Archive - well worth donating to.
- dsign 2y agoI think we have killed science fiction with all sort of dumb things, but specially social media. And I don't mean that people spend more time on social media than reading (but they definitely do), but that in social media everybody is a bad critic, and that influences authors. Just to give an example, I put off for many years reading Larry Niven's ringworld series, because I read in Twitter that the book was sexist. Well, it was sexist, but so were things at the time, and Ringworld is an amazing book otherwise, with some actual science sprinkled here and there, a lot of humor, and it's relatively low on drama. Another science fiction killer was Hollywood. They want so much drama and special effects,and it should be appealing to people who don't know any science at all. Who knows, maybe AI slop will save us by making us value logical consistency in art, something that current transformers and LLMs are very bad at. But I have more faith on our top-of-the-line AIs becoming logically consistent way before popular culture shifts in that direction, since current economic forces press for smarter AIs and stupider people.
- yew 2y agoI think we should probably ban reading old books. They seem to infect people with bad ideas.
- bjelkeman-again 2y agoAnother SF&F magazine I enjoy is Clarkesworld. I met the editor at Worldcon last year and it was nice hearing about how they manage to publish online for free and still pay authors. https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/