Editorial
The Art of Survival, the Survival of Art

The short-story magazine market has been in a bit of a slump lately—though a case could be made that the magazine market has been in a slump as long as I've been alive. (Don't blame me—that doesn't make it my fault!) There have been fewer SF periodicals published with each successive decade. And the first years of this new century have had their own share of cancellations.

Amazing Stories, which started publishing in 1926 (and which first coined the phrase "scientifiction," the name for our field before it eventually morphed into "science fiction"), announced a hiatus early last year and hasn't put out a new issue since. Absolute Magnitude, with its most recent issue dated Summer 2003, seems to have ceased publication, though no official annoucement has been made. The SCI FICTION archives live on, but no new stories have been pixelated since it closed up shop in late 2005. And then there's a cancellation I take more personally—that of Science Fiction Age, which I edited for eight years up until early 2000.

Put these facts together and I would be within my rights to make this column a gloomy one. But I'm not going to turn this into a cliched essay proclaiming the death of the science-fiction magazine. That's not where I want to go right now. Because in the midst of death, there are also always stories of survival. So I'd like, instead, to celebrate some good news for SF publishing. Two celebrated science-fiction magazines are currently celebrating milestone anniversaries, and if you're not celebrating along with them, you should be.

The older of the two is Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, launched in 1977 after Joel Davis, the publisher of Davis Publications (which already put out Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine), persuaded Isaac Asimov to lend his name to an SF title. As Asimov wrote back then in his first editorial, which has now been reprinted in the 30th-anniversary issue, "Life is risky for magazines in these days of television and paperbacks." If anything, the risks have increased, because there's now more competition than ever, thanks to computer games, the Web and other distractions.

But Asimov's overcame those risks. It has persevered, and over three decades, stories originally published in its pages have won 44 Hugo and 25 Nebula awards. Many have managed to win both, and some, such as "Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson and "Even the Queen," by Connie Willis, have even done more than just win awards—they have become classics. And for finding stories such as those over the years, the magazine's editors have received a total of 17 Hugo awards for best editor.

All of those editors are on display here in the 30th-anniversary issue, providing reminiscences of their tenure there, from the first, George Scithers ("Ah—those were the fun times!") to the current, Sheila Williams ("Starting professional life as an editorial assistant in a small company was an educational and nurturing experience. ... At first, I felt like I was making every single mistake that could be made at once.")

The contributors to the April/May double issue offer sidebars to accompany their short stories, praising both the magazine (Allen M. Steele: "I read the first issue of Asimov's when I was a high school senior, and, since even then I was an aspiring science fiction writer, I looked forward to the day that I'd find my own stories in this magazine") and its namesake (Gene Wolfe: "There was never a quicker man with a quip, nor a man more concerned to see that his quips gave no one serious pain").

With fiction by those luminaries as well as other Asimov's regulars, such as Robert Silverberg, Mike Resnick, Nancy Kress and others, you should make sure to crash this anniversary bash.

Two can play at this game

Meanwhile, over in the United Kingdom, five years after the launch of Asimov's, a publishing collective that included such SF notables as John Clute, Malcolm Edwards, Colin Greenland, Roz Kaveney and David Pringle founded Interzone in 1982. It was born of a different publishing philosophy.

Where Asimov's was created with an intent to deliver the sort of story for which its founder was well known (he wrote as much in that first editorial, stating that "it won't surprise you to hear that we will lean toward hard science fiction, and toward the reasonably straightforward in the way of style"), it was the point of Interzone to push the science-fiction envelope, to experiment in style and content in a way that was seen only intermitently once SF's New Wave movement waned. Interzone quickly became the gathering place for such stories.

It was a much riskier origin, and as multiple-Hugo-winner David Langford writes in the magazine's April 2007 issue, "When Interzone was launched in Spring 1982, the gloomier British SF pundits reckoned it would last about four issues." Yet 25 years later, Interzone has also survived.

Bruce Sterling once stated that "the existence of Interzone has brought British SF back from its deathbed." I don't know that I'd go quite that far, for the resurgence of British SF on the world stage can also be ascribed to the popularity of the modern space-opera novel there, but it has certainly been responsible for much of the important short fiction coming out of the United Kingdom. It has introduced to the world such important stories as "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" by Michael Blumlein and "The Unconquered Country" by Geoff Ryman. A perennial Hugo nominee for many years, it finally took home the trophy in 1995.

The issue celebrating the magazine's 25th anniversary will be out next month, containing stories by M. John Harrison, Gwyneth Jones, Alastair Reynolds and others, reminiscences by Arthur C. Clarke ("That may be a speck of time amidst the eras that science fiction writers dabble in, but staying in business for this long is no mean accomplishment"), Michael Moorcock ("In my view, the magazine has never been better and, on its record, can cheerfully look forward to celebrating its half-century") and more, plus various other quarter-century retrospectives. I 've been lucky enough to see an advance PDF, but once it's out, you should make sure to find a hard copy on the newsstands. Interzone's rich history is worth celebrating, and the history it currently continues to make is worth witnessing as well.

Each of these magazines has survived many changes—in editors, in owners, in the very way the magazine business operates. If you want to help them continue to survive so they can reach future anniversaries, you know what you have to do—subscribe. And while you're at it, don't forget about Analog and F&SF and Realms of Fantasy and Strange Horizons and the other fine fiction magazines out there, whether they're celebrating anniversaries or not, that keep the short story—and hope—alive.