At the recent Worldcon, there were several rounds of the usual Save the Magazines Chorus: short fiction is the lifeblood of the genre, it's where we get our new writers, etc. With the usual subtextual implication that I am a Bad Person because I don't read or subscribe to any SF magazines.
(The most annoying version with a rant-by-proxy at the Hugo Awards. This bugged me all the more because the author in question didn't make the trip, and it really doesn't seem right to make somebody else deliver your mini-tirade about the state of the short fiction market. If you can't make the ceremony, your speech really ought to be limited to "Sorry I couldn't make it, I'm honored to win, thanks to my editor/agent/mother/God," and that's about it.)
Anyway, having heard this an awful lot, and not having read SF magazines regularly in ten or fifteen years, I decided to see what I'm missing. I picked up copies of the two SF magazines they had at Borders the other day-- Analog and Asimov's, and I would've bought F & SF if they'd had a copy-- and I plan to read everything in them, to see if they're something I ought to be subscribing to. And, of course, I have this blog, so I'll be posting the findings here.
First up is Analog, both because of alphabetical order, and because Asimov's is a double issue, and will take much longer to read. This is the November 2007 issue, with a fairly generic moon base cover advertising stories by Barry B. Longyear, H.G. Strathmann, John G. Hemry, and Richard A. Lovett. Analog is apparently the magazine of middle initials.
So, having read it, what do I think? Well, I'm not going to be subscribing any time soon...
To start on a positive note, the piece by Richard A. Lovett on the search for archaeological evidence of the first domestication of horses is terrific. It's a very nice pop-science article, and does a great job of conveying the state of the field, and more importantly the uncertainty inherent in attempting to figure out what happened five thousand years ago. It's fascinating.
Other than that... It's really pretty dire. The lead story is a dreadful novella by Barry B. Longyear which appears to have been written as a platform for a bunch of incontinent gorilla jokes. It's ridiculously self-indulgent, and you can just hear the author cracking himself up as he piles on silly asides that go nowhere.
There's also a fairly annoying "Probability Zero" column all about what a smart guy Stan Schmidt is, a trite and obvious story from Carl Frederick that doesn't seem to have any significant SF content, a jokey throw-away story from Bud Sparhawk, and a novelette from H. G. Strathmann that starts off promisingly, but peters out into a sub-"Twilight Zone" twist ending.
The only halfway worthwhile fiction pieces in the issue are David Walton's short story "Permission to Speak Freely," which is a passable piece of lab lit, and John G. Hemry's "These Are the Times," a clever but slight time-travel story. All of the fiction has a very old-school feel-- lots of crshingly obvious exposition in which characters explain things to each other, or omniscient narrators deliver little lectures on the background of events.
Maybe 40 of the 144 pages are worth reading, and the Longyear piece is so irritatingly bad that it offsets most of those. I don't recommend it.
Now, of course, it's a little unfair to be judging a magazine based only on one issue-- this could be a bad issue. And depending on how busy I find myself, I may pick up the next issue as well, to get a bit more of a baseline. But based on the general type of fiction being presented here, I don't think it likely that other issues would be more to my tastes.
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I also have not picked up one of those in many years. But I grew up on Sirius, a Croatian magazine that won every award possible while it lasted. Before I left for the USA I gave my (almost) complete collection to a good friend who sold it for hefty money and lived off of that money for a couple of months (with, at the time, husband and two kids).
Sirius was absolutely amazing. I wonder if anyone will try to put all of it online one of these days.
I also have not picked up one of those in many years. But I grew up on Sirius, a Croatian magazine that won every award possible while it lasted. Before I left for the USA I gave my (almost) complete collection to a good friend who sold it for hefty money and lived off of that money for a couple of months (with, at the time, husband and two kids).
Sirius was absolutely amazing. I wonder if anyone will try to put all of it online one of these days.
My own experience with Analog was rather like your own. On average, there was one story per magazine that was worth reading, sometimes two. Not worth it.
Expect Asimov's to have better writing, but a lot of the stories are really really dark. 'Cuz slashing your wrists makes it serious literature.
I deeply agree with the Hugo ranter that there is a crisis with professional short fiction markets. This is not solved by a proliferation and churning of semiprofessional and ink-stained technopeasant venues.
Was the Hugo Award ceremony an appropriate place to vent? I analogize this to Lewis Black's rant at Sunday 16 Sep 07's Emmy Award Ceremony, condemning on-screen text promoting coming shows and squeezing already too-fast-scrolling credits at the end of a show: "...We don't care about the next show. We are watching this show." As the audience cheered and laughed, he skewered network Executives: "What is it you do, except come up with bad ideas?"
I happen to have my copy of the Nov 2007 Analog in my left hand while typing with my right hand. There, set it down.
I agree with Chad in his praise of Richard A. Lovett's nonfiction herein, and David Walton's short story "Permission to Speak Freely," and John G. Hemry's "These Are the Times."
The latter is, to me, more than "a clever but slight time-travel story." Having taught "Time Machines" as a course several times, and many times re-read the great book by Paul Nahin [Nahin, P.J., 1999, Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. New York: AIP Press, Springer] I found the story to be VERY clever, and in the great progression of quintessentially American Time Travel stories by Mark Twain and Robert Heinlein.
The Barry B. Longyear is one of a series of stories in the same universe with the same characters, whom one either hates or likes as intentionally light but nontrivial. How does one take light stories from authors who also write classics -- as with Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, the Piers Anthony of Macroscope, or the barry Longyear of "Enemy Mine," his story made into a major motion picture by Fox, starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr.? One must take them lightly and read them fast.
Every issue of Analog has other valuable features, not to be overlooked -- The Editor's Page, The Reference Library, Brass Tacks, and the like.
I keep extending my Analog subscription, though my Asimov's stopped years ago when they missed mailing me an issue and refused to replace the missing issue or to refiund my subscription. Not every story in Asimov's is depressing, although few are set in the future or in Space, and most are closer to mundane lit in style. Some stories in Asimov's and F&SF are brilliant. If you can afford subscriptions, it is reasonable to read the 1 or 2 good stories per issue, and then pass it on to one of your students as a bonus for good classroom discussion or test scores.
Analog has the more straightforward, hard-sf stories, but with less literary quality, and it has gotten more uneven over time. Asimov's (oddly enough, considering its namesake) prints more literary science fiction which can be difficult or depressing or pointless reads - I've literally skipped stories in there when I'm eight pages in and still can't find any narrative thread.
I think the best parts of Analog are the non-fiction columns, including very literate and high-level work by John G. Cramer. His Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics gets lots of attention (including of course a substantial Wikipedia article) as a major "interpretational contender." Some of the work he puts in Analog are genuine new ideas and proposals, not just "popular science writing" about what others are doing, science news, etc. I mean, there's really a significant chance something you read there is a new contribution to some extent. That Editor Stanley Schmidt has a Ph.D. in physics, and having such work in their magazine, says a lot about Analog. Frankly, I think the hit or miss quality of the fiction is secondary.
Check out Cramer's website: Link
I read all three magazines all through high school and college, but as grad school wore on, my taste became more discriminating and my tolerance for wasting time on bad stories became considerably lower. When I realized that I had at least a three-month backlog of all three magazines sitting unread on my desk, I cancelled my subscriptions. Now, if I want short fiction, I generally buy volumes of collected short fiction by authors I know I already like.
I'm not quite sure why the signal-to-noise ratio in the magazines is as bad as it is. Some of it can be explained by simple variation in taste among readers, but the sheer awfulness of some of the stories I read near the end of my magazine-reading days suggests that perhaps there just isn't enough publication-worth short fiction being written, and that editors are forced to make do with the least terrible of a bad crop.
Chad, have you considered picking up Subterranean? I grabbed a subscription last year* and have enjoyed it a good amount since then.
I think with any of these magazines, it's a given that the quality will be rather uneven. I remember it being this was when I regularly read Asimov's and Analog way back in the dawn of time, or the 1980s. I cultivate a willingness to abandon or skim stories I don't like as a result, which works well enough. And once in a while, I'm surprised by something I didn't think I would enjoy.
Second Neil B.'s motion on the great Dr. John G. Cramer.
I disagree politely with Nick's theory that: "there just isn't enough publication-worth short fiction being written, and that editors are forced to make do with the least terrible of a bad crop."
One of the major feedback loops in the trendy bubbly publishing industry is:
(1) Publishers say: "We just print what the readers demand";
(2) Editors say: "We just buy, from the submissions of writers, what the Publishers say that the readers demand";
(3) Writers say: "We just write and submit what the editors tell us in rejection or acceptance letters that they want to buy";
(4) Readers say: "Cancel my subscription; this is not what I want to read."
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Counterexamples in Nick's theory include all the award-winning stories and books that were rejected MANY times. See, for instance:
Of the great Madeleine L'Engle, who died so recently, The New York Times wrote: "A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by 26 publishers before editors at Farrar, Straus & Giroux read it and enthusiastically accepted it. It proved to be her masterpiece, winning the John Newbery Medal as the best children's book of 1963 and selling, so far, eight million copies. It is now in its 69th printing."
No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov
By DAVID OSHINSKY
The New York Times
Published: September 9, 2007
A trove of rejection files from Alfred A. Knopf Inc. includes dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges ("utterly untranslatable") and Sylvia Plath ("There certainly isn't enough genuine talent for us to take notice").
Greg Benford told me with glee that he was once castigated by a magazine editor, at the Hugo Winners party (or maybe the Nebula Winners party, I forget): "Why don't you ever send me a story like that one?"
Benford was able to correctly reply: "In fact, I did send you that very story, and you rejected it."
Since my wife and I are in the Analog Mafia (Making A Frequent Appearance In Analog) we are favorably disposed the Stan Schmidt's taste, as his checks never bounce. Yet several of what we consider our very best stories have been politely rejected there. Stan sends very thoughful and clear "near miss" rejection letters. In one case, I actually quoted from his rejection letter (something akin to "ending too downbeat for our readers") for a story of mine, when I sent it to Algis Budrys. Budrys sent a contract, check, and a note saying that he'd bought plenty of stories more downbeat than this one. The story received more written Nebula recommendations that year than any other short story, including those by giants of the field, and thus was the Nebula Semifinalist.
There is perhaps more good short fiction being written now than ever before in history. However, as I say, the Publishing industry is badly broken.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact's AnLab Awards were presented April 25, 2008 Austin, Texas at a Breakfast celebration during the 2008 Nebula Awards weekend.
The winners are:
Best Novella: "Murder in Parliament Street," Barry Longyear, who accepted for himself.
[ummm.... and this makes you think what?]
Best Novelette: "Quaestions Super Caelo et Mundo," Michael Flynn, who gave his acceptance speech in Latin.
Best Short Story: "The Astronaut," Brian Plante, who was not present.
Best Fact Article: "The Ice Age That Wasn't," Richard A. Lovett, who accepted in English
Posted May 8, 2008 on SFWA News