The Blue Ey'd Hag

I have to admit, I'm not sure what you're frustrated about exactly -- that there is no one with deep pockets, or that someone is silly enough to believe that there would be anyone out there willing to pay a living wage to people for running a webzine.

I mean, yeah, sci fi did it for a while, but stopped long after it was clear there was no profit in it.

I wish the state of the industry was indeed such that two excellent editors were employed!

I do appreciate what Gardner says in his interview about the differences between sf and fantasy. It's a line few people care about these days, but one that has always seemed important to me.

I have only two words to describe how this worked out the last time such a program existed: "Galaxy Online". The problem here is that while it'd be great if someone came along and subsidized a genre magazine of this sort, the reality is that you're always dependent upon those handouts unless there's some possibility of it making money to defray its costs. Dozois's whining (and let's face it, it's whining from a wanker who thinks he's a lot more important to the flow of the universe than he really is) is right up there with the twits who figure that Twentieth Century Fox should subsidize another Serenity movie: it presumes that publishing, like moviemaking, is a holy calling that should attract all sorts of financiers with more money than brains. I've seen what happens when people try to use that argument, and it doesn't turn out all that well.

I know: I'd love to see Ellen Datlow fully employed for a magazine that appreciated her talent, but the problem here is that there's no market for literary science fiction magazines any more. If there was, then Conde Nast and Time Warner would be punching each other in the back of the head to be the first to offer one. One of the first things that Hasbro did when it bought Wizards of the Coast was to shut down the WoC-published Amazing Stories, and you might remember that abortive revival five years ago. Sovereign Media shut down Science Fiction Age nearly nine years ago, when it was still barely profitable but before it became unprofitable. Tomorrow SF was a joke from the beginning, and Algis Budrys discovered exactly how many people were actually reading each issue when he tried to charge for online subscriptions. And then there's OMNI, which was a sugar daddy publication: Bob Guccione could afford to keep it going while Penthouse was making lots of money, but Bob decided to cut off the gravy train just before online porn pretty much killed his entire magazine empire.

Of course, a lot of this problem lies with the people who want to see more genre magazines. Dozois wants to be an editor again now that he's discovered the number of people who put up with him solely because they wanted to get published in Asimov's vastly exceeds the number of people who don't want to set him on fire on sight. In a way, he and a lot of other editors helped catalyze the current situation with genre magazines, where the only people bothering to buy them are those wanting to submit to the slush pile. (Even then, if the Cat Piss Men can get free copies or snag the submission address from the Web site, there's no reason to buy a copy at all.) Ten years ago, I kept pointing out that any of the magazines that wanted to stay alive were going to have to find new readers in a more aggressive fashion than sending out editors to conventions, and we can see exactly how many people bothered to listen to me.

At this point, I'm figuring that the genre magazine has had a good run, and now it's time to let it die with dignity and honor. Oh, sure, you'll always have some never-were like Gabe Chouinard who'll continue to announce new print and online venues that amazingly fall apart after the first issue. You'll always see some egomaniac who assumes that it's still 1988 and all you need is a stolen copy of Adobe GoLive and enough money to print one issue to start a magazine empire. The simple fact is that, outside of the idjits who still obsessively read Locus and Writer's Digest and Publisher's Weekly, nobody has any reason to care about the fate of the science fiction magazine, and they sure as hell aren't being given a reason. Well, they're being given the same reasons as they're being given reasons by Cat Piss Men as to why we need manned planetary exploration, and they're just as unconvincing and entitlement-driven. Until that changes, each magazine that ceases publication is just another death twitch on the periodical corpse.

Not only is he one of the two best editors, he's humble too!

If you want to draw Middle Schoolers (per the Asimov's comment) or anyone else for that matter, it helps if you publish content that interests them. Now, this may sound snarky but the real fact is that you'd be hard pressed to get many students to read ANYTHING.

Forex, where I teach, it is a daily battle to get them to read the textbooks and not just in my class but in the other classes as well. My peers report endless frustration with students who are not doing the assigned reading for discussions. And I know they are not reading the text in my class because their test performance shows as much.

The problem, in part, is apathy. It isn't just a genre problem. It is a problem period.

The other part of the problem, and I've made this point elsewhere, is that I frequently hand samples of what is published in the mags and webzines to people who are nominally interested in science fiction. Granted, they are video game players and media SF readers.

Result? They put it down after about a page and say, "Boring."

No one on the short story side of the house likes to hear that but it is a fact as well. Most of the short story consumers tend to be, well, other writers and writer aspirants.

Until you fix that problem, decline is going to be the headline of this story.

S. F. Murphy
On the Outer Marches