The Fates of Magazines

Arley Sorg's "By the Numbers" column in the March-April 2023 MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION is titled "The Lifespan of a Magazine." After rereading the LOCUS "Magazine Summary" for the year 1989, he decided to explore statistics that might answer the question implied in the title. "Do magazines just pop up and die out all the time, or does it only feel that way?" Of the professional magazines discussed in that LOCUS issue, only the big three—ANALOG, ASIMOV'S, and FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION—survive today. FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION holds the distinction of having published continuously for over seventy years, a bona fide "miracle," as Sorg says. He summarizes the rise and fall of a variety of notable periodicals, print and electronic, professional and semi-pro. As a criterion for "notability," he cites the Hugos and other prestigious awards won or finaled for by the magazines or stories they published.

Some of his conclusions: Notability is no guarantee of longevity. Neither, it seems from his numbers, is the involvement of a big-name editor or the payment of high per-word rates to authors. Financial problems, although a frequent cause of death for magazines, aren't the only reason. Interpersonal conflicts have destroyed some. On the other hand, changes in editorship or ownership don't necessarily mean a periodical is doomed to a short life. And both print and electronic venues are vulnerable.

I was surprised not to see any mention of CEMETERY DANCE, which has published stories by many distinguished authors. Although it hasn't released a new issue in a couple of years, it thrived for a long time, its website remains live (with back issues for sale), and the company regularly publishes limited-edition books.

This topic raises the question of what qualifies as continuity. WEIRD TALES, as mentioned in the article, opened and closed several times under different ownership and even had a hiatus of almost two decades. At one point the "magazine" consisted of a few paperback anthologies edited by Lin Carter. (No relation. He accepted a story from me for his incarnation of WEIRD TALES but died before he got around to printing it; it was later published in an anthology called THE SHUB-NIGGURATH CYCLE.) Yet the current WEIRD TALES claims continuity with the vintage pulp magazine founded in 1923. In what sense can the present-day publication be considered the "same" periodical, other than sharing the name?

Sorg's final message: "Support the magazines and authors you love. It just might help them stick around."

This issue of FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION will stay on newstands until April 24, so if you want to read about the lifespans of periodicals in meticulous detail, you have time to pick up a copy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Trazzles and Tweedlers

While re-shelving our books in our newly redecorated basement "library," I came across WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE? (2001), a collection of essays from ANALOG by the long-time editor of the magazine, Stanley Schmidt. While most of the stories in ANALOG don't excite me, because I don't really get into "hard science fiction" (a term Schmidt doesn't like; he maintains that rigorously science-based SF should be called simply "science fiction"), I've always loved the editorials. My favorite article in WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE?, "Bold and Timid Prophets," contemplates how visions of the future (in both factual predictive writings and fiction) typically measure up to the actual development of culture and technology. Often a story set in the future imagines the technology as a perfected version of the cutting-edge inventions of the present day. For example, a nineteenth-century speculative novel might envision the twentieth century as powered by highly advanced steam engines. Making an imaginative leap into a world filled with devices that do things impossible in the current state of knowledge is much harder.

Schmidt illustrates this problem by starting the essay with an ordinary letter written in the late 1990s as it would appear to a reader in the 1860s. He substitutes a nonsense word for every term that didn't exist then (or combines familiar words in ways that would have made no sense in the mid-nineteenth century, such as "answering machine"). (I think he cheated a bit with "pilot." Boats had pilots for a very long time before airplanes began to need them.) "Plane" becomes "trazzle"; "computer" becomes "tweedler." "Fooba" substitutes for "e-mail" and "zilp" for "fax." Even where the nineteenth-century reader could recognize all the words, many of the sentences would appear to express impossibilities. How could parents know the sex of a baby in utero? How could a person travel a total of 20,000 miles in only one month? How could a human heart be transplanted? How could a transatlantic trip take "just a few hours"?

Doubtless the distant future will include inventions and achievements we can't currently imagine because they'll depend on discoveries and technologies unknown to us, just as the nineteenth century couldn't predict the practical applications of electromagnetic theory and quantum mechanics. Even the boldest and best of classic SF writers get things amusingly wrong when writing about the not-so-distant future. "Where's my flying car?" illustrates one well-known unfulfilled prediction. Personally, I shudder at the thought of flying cars being anything other than toys for the rich. Autonomous ground cars, which now seem just over the horizon, sound much more desirable. What I really want, however, is my housecleaning robot, which Heinlein in THE DOOR INTO SUMMER expected by 1970. Also, in HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, Heinlein envisioned a near future with a moon colony—and slide rules. The social structures portrayed in some of his juvenile novels are even less "bold" than the concept of slide rules on the moon—the families of the twenty-first century look like suburban American households of the 1950s—but, in light of his posthumously published first novel, FOR US, THE LIVING, that absence of innovation probably wasn't his fault. I suspect editors of books for teenagers in the 1950s wouldn't have accepted anything unconventional in that area.

Schmidt concludes that "well-balanced science fiction" needs "both extrapolation—things you can clearly see are possible—and innovation—the things you can't see how to do, but also can't prove impossible." That's one thing I like about J. D. Robb's Eve Dallas mysteries; their vision of the 2060s strikes me as convincingly futuristic but also plausible in terms of current technological and social trends.

WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE? addresses a variety of other intriguing topics, such as the definitions of "intelligence" and "human," why we haven't been contacted by aliens (the Fermi Paradox), the proliferation of unrealistically exaggerated fears of marginal hazards, etc. Fortunately, Amazon offers numerous used copies of this fascinating collection.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt