Since its launch in 1995, SFX magazine has come to be a major player in British genre. Its large circulation and wide availability have allowed it to attract the kind of readers who might never have otherwise taken a direct interest in SF or fantasy. In fact, one could even argue that the rehabilitation of British attitudes towards genre that has resulted in Doctor Who returning to our screens was down to the likes of SFX discovering that niche does not necessarily mean inaccessible.
The man responsible for launching SFX was Matt Bielby, who also launched such titles as Total Film, PC Gamer, Amiga Power and the Official Playstation 2 Magazine. Now he returns to genre with not only a new mainstream genre magazine named Death Ray but also a new publishing company all of his own. Bielby’s return to genre comes at an interesting time as after twelve years of near complete domination, SFX has recently attracted competition in the shape of Imagine Publishing’s SciFiNow magazine. At such an interesting time in British genre magazine publishing, I caught up with Matt Bielby to ask him a few questions about publishing and the state of British SF.
Jonathan McCalmont: Congratulations on what I thought was a very promising first issue of Death Ray. What would you say differentiates Death Ray from other Science Fiction magazines?
Matt Bielby : Whenever I launch a magazine I'm happiest if it has some sort of point to it. It has to do more than simply copy whatever else already exists in a particular market. Back in 1995, when we launched SFX, that magazine was all about coming up with the most entertaining, least geeky science fiction title we could. And I think we succeeded - certainly, it's been far and away the most successful magazine of its type over the last decade or so.
To me, Death Ray is all about moving things on to the next stage - it's about taking things a little more seriously, it's about giving due respect to every aspect of the genre. If there's a criticism to be made of SFX, it's that it can all be a bit silly, and a bit predictable. Death Ray will, of course, run plenty of pages on Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, Heroes and so on – but we'll also find room for pieces on, for instance, comics guy Jim Steranko, pre-WW1 horror writer William Hope Hodgson, and even an SF ballet, as we did in our first issue. You'd be unlikely to find any of these subjects covered (or even mentioned) in the likes of SFX or SciFiNow anytime soon. You'll notice when Kurt Vonnegut died, we did a two page obituary/tribute, with quotes about him from contemporaries, a timeline of his life, and reviews of five of his most important books. SFX did a quarter of a page throwaway piece, and at SciFi Now I doubt they even mentioned him at all.
The company motto at Blackfish is 'We Go Deeper', and that sums up what we're trying to do, really. Provide a wider-ranging, more varied and generally smarter look at everything that science fiction and fantasy is and can be. I like to think we're the smarter choice, the broadsheet rather than the tabloid. Time will tell whether we're
going in the right direction, or succeeding in what it is we're trying to do.
JM : The first issue of Death Ray was also a first for its owners, the publishing company Black Fish. Do they have any other titles in the offing?
MB : If Death Ray does well - and the reaction so far makes me quietly confident that it will - there'll be more magazines. I've got a quite a list of new mags I'd like to do in the back of my head, with at least a couple I'm really desperate to do as soon as possible, but they won't be until next year at the earliest.
JM : For ages SFX was the only title of its kind in the UK. However, now within a couple of months it has two competitors. Is this a coincidence or does the publishing world smell blood in the water?
MB : I think the launch of Death Ray and SciFiNow at more or less the same time is one of those things that just happens, like two Robin Hood films or two flicks about giant meteors about to smash up the Earth. For me, I wanted to start my own publishing company, and I wanted the first magazine we did to be something I'd have a lot of fun doing. And I probably had as much fun launching SFX as I've ever had on any magazine.
JM : Do you think that the British magazine market is large enough to sustain three mainstream glossy genre magazines, or are one or more doomed to fold in the long run?
MB : Up until this point, Britain has had SFX, Starburst, TV Zone and others. Now there are two big new players. To be honest, it's not my job to predict what the market will support - it's my job to make sure that Death Ray is the very best offering in that market. My gut feeling, if pushed, is that in two years or so there'll be a couple
of decent-sized publications and a handful of smaller ones. I need to make sure that Death Ray is one of the big ones.
JM : What prompted you to want to start your own publishing company? there have been stories in the press recently about companies like Future struggling to keep their huge catalogues going and it's difficult to not see the internet with its free online magazines playing a part in this. You obviously still believe in dead tree media at a time when others are starting to lose faith.
MB : Unlike some people, but like many, I still believe in paper magazines. I like their portability, their physical qualities, their design, the ease with which you can read them. The internet is unbeatable for audience interaction, and for of-the-minute news. Paper products are better for reading longer pieces of writing, for combining lots of elements into a whole, and for pleasure – most of us sit in front of a screen all day, and don't want to do it at home for too long, thank you very much.
I like the idea that someone is actually buying a product that you've created - and I like the fact that they're still relatively cheap. Death Ray costs about the same as a pint and a half, and for the right person should provide considerably more pleasure.
JM : What would you say the differences were between the US and the UK genre magazine market? It's interesting that it's Britain and not America that has three glossy mainstream publications covering the SF and fantasy genres in general. why do you think that is?
MB : The US magazine market is a completely different beast to the UK one - far more subscription-orientated, with very low subs prices and a far higher proportion of income coming from advertising. In the US, Hachette Filipacchi recently shut the most prominent movie magazine, Premiere, because they couldn't make it pay. Meanwhile, in the UK, Empire and Total Film are still selling nicely, thank you very much. It's a completely different world, and the economics of the business are utterly different.
JM : New Golden Age, Teetering on the Brink or Rock Bottom; how would you rate British SF at the moment? is Britain punching above its weight?
MB : For me, right now, British SF is pretty healthy. There always have been, and continue to be, good British writers, but it does seem to me that science fiction writing is slightly more interesting now than it was a few years ago, though that might just be that my interest in science fiction novels has been re-ignited.
In mainstream American comics, a good 60% of the best writers and artists seem to be British, and although there aren't that many purely British science fiction and fantasy films – though we did have Sunshine and 28 Weeks Later just recently – lots of the big British SF and fantasy novels form the basis of big American movies: Harry
Potter, His Dark Materials, Narnia and so on.
Plus, since Doctor Who, we're in the best place British genre TV has been for some time – not just because we're got Life on Mars, Torchwood, Primeval and so on, but because the 13-episode series format is now becoming a legitimate thing to do on British TV, which means we could get more of the long-form American-style shows, with the high quality of writing those tend to demand. Of course, you might not like some of the work that's being done, but at least there's quite a lot of it about right now, which I love in itself – and which is, of course, excellent news for the magazine.
JM : As well as editing Death Ray, you were also the launch editor of SFX. What would you say has changed in SF and the publishing world in the 150 months or so between the launch of the two magazines?
MB : Gosh. An awful lot has changed. In publishing, the internet has obviously had an impact, though not so much on sales of SFX. In science fiction, the increasing power of the post-Star Wars generation in the worlds of TV and film - plus the relative cheapness of decent CG special effects - has meant it's now possible to do all those things (Lord of the Rings, say) it simply wasn't possible to do justice to before. It all puts science fiction (in the broadest sense) in a very good place, and I don't see it losing popularity anytime soon.
JM : In recent months there's been some quite heated discussion regarding the approach taken towards reviews by the more widely read genre publications. How would you characterise Death Ray's approach to writing reviews?
MB : At Death Ray I'm keen to try and establish Dark Stars, our review section, as the most comprehensive and entertaining thing it can possibly be. Reviews are out of five stars, with half stars used sparingly, and the big difference between this and any other mainstream SF review section is how much space, and how many words, we devote to it. In our first issue we dedicated 39 pages to reviews, covering everything from big films to cult DVDs to a science fiction-themed version of the ballet Sleeping Beauty – I don't think there are many other magazines that would cast the net so far. We also devoted almost 10 pages to book reviews, more than anyone else, with the longest reviews running to well over 1,000 words – again, nobody else devotes this much space to reviewing.
The opinions expressed in the reviews are, of necessity, those of the reviewer rather than the magazine as a whole, though there is some grey area here. On a big film or TV show, which many people on the team have seen, a number of opinions may go towards shaping the review as a whole, even though it is the work of a single individual. With books, say, this is more rare – within our time scale, it is unlikely for more than one person to have read any individual book. However, we do our best to make sure than each book, DVD, film or TV show is reviewed by somebody with an interest in, sympathy for and knowledge of that particular area.
Reviews will always be one of those areas which generate debate - chances are that any three friends will, on walking out of a film, have three different opinions. It's our job to make sure that the opinions we print are informed, reasonable and entertaining. Of course you won't always agree with them, but hopefully you'll agree that they're honest and fair.
JM : Aside from mentioning literary awards, SFX has always kept organised fandom at arm's length rather than acting as a gatekeeper to the wider world of genre. Was this a conscious decision during your tenure at SFX and is it a policy you'll be reconsidering for Death Ray?
MB : I can't speak for SFX after my tenure, but getting heavily involved in fandom is a tricky business for a magazine like SFX or even Death Ray. It takes up a lot of time - time you simply don't have on the schedules we work to - and you risk being over-influenced by extremely vocal minorities who can give you a false impression of the worth or popularity of a particular TV show or author or whatever. And it's tricky, anyway - what is fandom? The people who vote for Arthur C. Clarke awards? The people who go to WorldCons? People who run Buffy the Vampire Slayer websites? There are so many different fandoms, many of which have very little crossover with each other at all, that it can become quite a minefield.
All in all, then, I'd like to say that Death Ray will become more actively involved in fandom, but I don't know how true that would actually be. Ask me again in a year's time!
JM : Is the problem not simply social politics? lots of people like genre media but mainstream audiences tend to be horrified by the excesses of fandom. Hence you saying that one of the aims of SFX was for it to be as non-geeky as possible. Aren't magazines like SFX and Death Ray reliant upon the message that it's great to be really excited about genre but only so long as you focus that excitement in certain directions?
MB : I think Death Ray is, of course, about saying, 'It's great to be really excited about this particular genre'. But there are no caveats on that. People can do whatever they like - they can become as obsessive and/or dedicated to their particular slice of the vast science fiction and fantasy cake as they want to be. Or they can simply enjoy the genre, and not take their interest any further. The fact is, we're a magazine that's attempting to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and to evangelise the genre as a whole. It's not our job to become involved in the ‘excesses (or otherwise) of fandom' - it's our job to point people in the direction of what we feel to be good or worthwhile, and let them decide how far to take their interest.
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