"Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's and Analog acquired
61 comments
·March 5, 2025whartung
sbierwagen
One year later.
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
Analog 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?
droideqa
Anybody 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-...
righthand
Book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-campbell-isaa...
Audio book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-campbell-isaa...
Henchman21
I appreciate the non-Amazon links, thank you!
dcminter
Be warned, I found it a bit depressing though. Never meet your heroes they say...
ethbr1
I'm hazarding that a lot of the early scifi luminaries weren't the most well-adjusted humans?
mcswell
Campbell was a racist, and I believe bought into the theory that smokers smoked because their bodies were trying to prevent or fight off lung cancer. He also appeared to be a believer in psi. He attracted (and doubtless encouraged) authors who shared those beliefs. If you go back and read the stories from the 50s and 60s, the heroes were invariably heavy smokers, and many of the stories involved telepathy, telekinesis, etc. The role of women in the stories was usually secondary (and the boy got the girl in the end), although that was probably true of most scifi back then. I don't recall any stories in Analog where the hero was other than a white man.
pfdietz
Some 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_a...
KerrAvon
I found the the Hubbard sections most unpleasant, but I also knew the least about him.
rendaw
Asimov was controversial?
mperham
He was a known harasser at cons.
KerrAvon
His writings weren’t controversial, though, except to anti-science nuts.
jimbob45
Nobody was saying this prior to the Foundation TV series coming out. It seems like marketing wanted to drum up some controversy for their series because the allegations would have required evidence from 40 years prior. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, but definitively saying so either way makes it seem like you have an agenda.
BMc2020
The golden age of science fiction is twelve...
This is a good spot to post the omni magazine collection as well...
dr_kiszonka
Those magazines from the 70s and 80s look so good!
ethbr1
As someone who bought originals of Gibson's omni stories... old issues are surprisingly cheap on eBay, if anyone is curious.
FpUser
I am 60+, read a lot and at least 50% is science fiction
ChrisMarshallNY
63, 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.
FiatLuxDave
I believe that is referred to as the Silver Age of science fiction ;)
rom16384
I 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
I 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
You can subscribe to Asimovs and/or Analog on their website today and they give you a download link for PDF, epub every other month.
jasonthorsness
In 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!
bjelkeman-again
Another 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.
mcswell
There 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
adamgordonbell
I 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.
themadturk
I 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.
hnthrowaway0315
I 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.
dsign
I 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.
null
Someone 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.