REVIEW : Death Ray issue 2 (July 2007)

As I went to have my haircut near Forbidden Planet today (I get my haircut by the man with the worst haircut in the world... it's a bit like going to a doctor with lung cancer and gout) and having found no books worth buying I picked up the second issue of Blackfish Publishing's Deathray Magazine (yes... I know there's a space but people who google for it don't necessarily and yes... I am that cynical thank you) and felt compelled to write a follow up review to talk about how the magazine is getting along.  I also wanted to pick up SciFiNow but somewhat ominously I couldn't find a copy.

Visually, Death Ray's second issue is much the same as the first one.  We have lots of glossy pictures, we have articles that break down into different components and snake in and around each other and then disappear before popping up at the end of the magazine.  The design style is modern and full of big blocks of bold primary colour that scream energy and make Death Ray a seemingly intentionally busy and neurologically stimulating read.  I'm sure there's some psychological basis for this approach to design but love it or loathe it, it is bold and it is miles away from the minimalism and elegance of literary, design or fashion magazines.

The features are an interesting blend of approaches.  Much like the last issue of SFX there is a feature on the new Fantastic Four but rather than cobbling together a piece based on press releases and short interviews, they have a long interview with The Shield's Michael Chiklis who plays the Thing and while the interview is quite tame and hardly the type of thing you'd find in the Paris Review it talks a bit about the Shield and about Chiklis in general so it manages to come across as less advertorial than SFX's coverage of the same film.  Similarly, there's a big feature on Doctor Who's effects team.  These features are in themselves quite interesting as they seem to attempt to tick two boxes at the same team.  One the one hand you have PR friendly features on Big Media events but in both cases the features come at the event from an interesting angle, thereby making them interesting to people who aren't interested in the Fantastic Four or in praising Doctor Who.  Indeed, of the two other features, only the one on Shrek comes close to being advertorial fluff n' guff and it is immediately compensated for by a lengthy feature on Michael Moorcock.  The Moorcock piece includes a lengthy interview and some pieces on his more enduring books.  It even asks questions about the New Wave and Moorcock's old magazine New Worlds.

The key difference between Death Ray and its rivals SFX and SciFiNow is the tone it is written in.  Death Ray's writers know more about SF than the average reader is likely to but rather than patronising them or pandering to them, Death Ray plays the tole of the elder brother or the guy in the cool record shop in suggesting that if you like some of the stuff that's popular now then chances are you'll also like other, less well known, pieces of SF.  However, despite being intelligent, Death Ray never strays across the line into smugness, elitism or humourlessness.  In an interview with one of the writers of Life on Mars, the interviewer lapses into a Gene Hunt impression and calls the writer a "fairy boy", prompting the writer to not dignify him with a response.  A section called Time Trap has two writers making jokes about the Sf output of 1973 and while there are genuinely funny lines like summarising Arthur C. Clarke's Rendez-vous with Rama as "And there is much scaling of kitchen worktops", it manages to be informative too unlike similar sections such as SFX's Couch Potato that features writers making sneery, unfunny and definitely uninformative comments about old films and series.

Indeed, Death Ray's approach to writing about genre is crystalised in the Deep Thought section.  Deep Thought invites Death Ray staff and others to write about issues in SF that interest them, regardless if they're from the present or the past.  This month gives us a nice little piece by MJ Simpson on the British Horror Revival and its roots in Blairite Britain, Red Dwarf's Rob Grant talks about the nature of SF,  Matt Bielby talks of his love of 70's psychedelic spaceship design and Garth Haley gives us a great piece on how the War on Terror is filtering through to US comics such as Marvel's Civil War. Informative, eclectic, funny and genuinely clever, Deep Thought is easily my favourite section of the magazine.

Another pleasant surprise is that, if anything, Death Ray's reviews section Dark Stars.  Firstly, the section itself is huge at 35 pages (apparently the next issue of SFX will have 22 pages of reviews).  Secondly, the issue's two biggest releases (Spiderman 3 and Ian McDonald's Brasyl) span two whole pages each.  I'm not sure of word counts but these must be around the 1000-1500 word mark.  The reviews are fun, informative and completely accessible.  Lee Hart's review of Spiderman 3 is profoundly wrong-headed but he makes his point well enough that it made me think about my own views rather than roll my eyes.  Death Ray also continues to review a wider array of things than you'd expect so we have a review of a Jean-Luc Godard box set as well as a number of cult DVDs with SF links.  The book reviews are also decent and even fearless as they give the new Steven Erikson (quite the darling of the fantasy set) a grilling on its gratuitous and impenetrable use of fantasy names.

Death Ray is, simply put, everything that I want from a mainstream genre magazine.  It's reach is wide, it's knowledge is deep and reading it genuinely leaves me knowing more about SF than I did before I picked the magazine up.  Whether it will manage to keep these high standards up and whether it is managing to draw enough readers are big issues for the magazine's future obviously, but I honestly hope that it's doing as well as it deserves to do as this magazine should be read by everyone with an interesting in the fields of SF.

Comments

[Martin]

How come I can never find this when I go into Forbidden Planet? Is it upstairs?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Yeah... all the magazines are upstairs.

You walk in and instead of going down the stairs to your right you walk past the Tshirts and the magazine area is there. I was there Yesterday and there were loads of copies.

[Martin]

all the magazines are upstairs.

The literary ones - Interzone, etc - are downstairs with the books. Whenever I go in there I kind of assume the upstairs bit doesn't exist.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Some of the smaller press ones are downstairs but most of the magazines are upstairs. Stuff like Locus is downstairs too but if you're looking for magazines they're first and foremost upstairs.