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"Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's and Analog acquired

whartung

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.

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-...

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.

dcminter

I knew he was behind scientology, so I wasn't too surprised there. Heinlein wasn't completely unexpected (although his gullibility with Hubbard was). I was more thinking of Asimov turning out to be a serial groper.

I read a bio of John Wyndham shortly afterwards and I was so relieved that he seems to have been one of the good ones.

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...

http://www.williamflew.com/

FpUser

I am 60+, read a lot and at least 50% is science fiction

pfdietz

As I get older, I find it hard to maintain suspension of disbelief when reading SF. Too many of the tropes have grown old and stale. I also find it hard to maintain interest, since too many stories are describing a time beyond when I can reasonably believe I'll be alive.

It's also clear that predictions of the future in SF stories are no more connected to reality than are outright fantasy stories. So why not just read fantasy if you want escapism? The takeover of SF by fantasy should have been predictable.

FiatLuxDave

I believe that is referred to as the Silver Age of 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.

bigstrat2003

One 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.

ethbr1

As someone who bought originals of Gibson's omni stories... old issues are surprisingly cheap on eBay, if anyone is curious.

dr_kiszonka

Those magazines from the 70s and 80s look so good!

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.

jrootabega

Analog 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.

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!

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

fractallyte

Here's a more or less complete archive: https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/AST/ (Astounding) and 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.

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.

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.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/

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.

greesil

I 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.

coldpie

I think it's probably you. I've been a subscriber to Asimovs for 5+ years and every issue has at least one or two stories that make me say "wow." But I figure at some point I will have read enough stories that I'll run out of "wow"s. Maybe you're there already.

KerrAvon

No 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.

greesil

When I followed Charles Stross on Twitter I recall him often saying that we are living in the stupidest possible timeline.

pfdietz

We'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

The solution was obvious circa 1940 - 1970s. It wasn't science fiction, it was what was in place then.

DoneWithAllThat

I’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.