Hacker Remix

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

120 points by ilamont 4 days ago | 71 comments

whartung 14 hours ago

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 13 hours ago

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 11 hours ago

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 18 hours ago

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-...

righthand 17 hours ago

Book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-campbell-isaa...

Audio book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-campbell-isaa...

Henchman21 14 hours ago

I appreciate the non-Amazon links, thank you!

dcminter 15 hours ago

Be warned, I found it a bit depressing though. Never meet your heroes they say...

ethbr1 15 hours ago

I'm hazarding that a lot of the early scifi luminaries weren't the most well-adjusted humans?

mcswell 11 hours ago

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.

southernplaces7 2 minutes ago

>Campbell was a racist

Back in the 50s? Most people of all kinds were, either implicitly or explicitly, even those who could have known and embraced better with a bit of context improvement.

Judging the people of the past by all the biases and ingrained assumptions of their time is myopic at best and a dumb path to disregarding a lot of wonderful knowledge too.

No human is free of at least some absurd ideas, it doesn't necessarily make the rest of what they create or say worth denigrating.

I'd hate to imagine all of us in the early 21st century only being mocked because of certain absurd things we surely take for granted as truths today.

dmurray 35 minutes ago

Asimov's Susan Calvin stories first appeared in Analog (when it was called Astounding, but already under Campbell).

swombat 15 minutes ago

Granted, he did. At the same time, Asimov was well known to be a groper, and even wrote a satire book called "The sensuous dirty old man" which would probably have landed better as satire had he not been fairly well known in scifi circles to be in fact a dirty old man.

There were some decent scifi authors at the time - not least, Ursula K LeGuin.

sbierwagen 10 hours ago

>although that was probably true of most scifi back then

In 1950? That was true of all media, including novels written by women. Is Dagny Taggart the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged?

r0uv3n 10 hours ago

Arguably Bayta is the lead in The Mule maybe? But of course the basic plot was very much influenced by Campbell still

pfdietz 15 hours ago

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 13 hours ago

I found the the Hubbard sections most unpleasant, but I also knew the least about him.

dcminter 2 hours ago

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 15 hours ago

Asimov was controversial?

mperham 14 hours ago

He was a known harasser at cons.

KerrAvon 13 hours ago

His writings weren’t controversial, though, except to anti-science nuts.

jimbob45 13 hours ago

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.

zimpenfish 5 hours ago

> Nobody was saying this prior to the Foundation TV series coming out.

I knew about this back in the 90s. It's always been out there whenever Asimov is mentioned.

Finnucane 11 hours ago

Lol, Asimov's reputation for being, shall we say, physically inappropriate with women at SF conventions goes back, well, for literally as long as there have been conventions.

BMc2020 17 hours ago

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/

dr_kiszonka 7 hours ago

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

ethbr1 15 hours ago

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

FpUser 16 hours ago

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

ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago

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.

FiatLuxDave 13 hours ago

I believe that is referred to as the Silver Age of science fiction ;)

pfdietz 3 hours ago

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.

rom16384 17 hours ago

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 16 hours ago

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.

jrootabega 3 hours ago

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.

minihat 15 hours ago

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.