REVIEW : SFX 158 (July 2007)

There's been quite a bit of movement of late in the world of mass market genre magazine publishing.  Recently I've reviewed the first issues of both SciFiNow and Death Ray.  However, as a basis for comparison, I thought I'd take a look at the new issue of SFX, the market leader, to see how it stacks up to the competition and because it has had a recent make-over and because this is the last issue of my subscription.

Long the market leader, SFX has settled down into something of a rut.  Nearly 160 issues in and we still have Couch Potato and Development Hell and the Spoiler Zone.  Since taking over as editor Dave Bradley has not been one to rock the boat and this is clearly a trend that is set to continue as despite having had a thorough design update, the magazine is actually largely unchanged.

Actually, that's not true.

Firstly, SFX now contains a lot of "audience participation" pieces.  In fact, the first fourteen pages of the magazine are made up of reader's letters, readers' opinions about upcoming movies and Ask the SFXperts, a section where people too lazy or stupid to use google and wikipedia write in to get "experts" to help them track down some half remembered book or series.  This section particularly smacks of filler, in one case someone writes in asking about where the name "Spaceman Spiff" comes from on the grounds that IMDb comes up empty.  If you google "Spaceman Spiff" you get nearly 100,000 hits, all of them pointing squarely at Calvin and Hobbes.  There are two obvious reasons for including this much reader-generated content; firstly, it costs SFX nothing and fills up plenty of space if SFX can get away with printing the opinions of some random geek from the SFX forums.  In fact, if you go to the forums you'll see SFX hacks actively encouraging people to talk about certain hot issues.  Secondly, dead tree specialist magazines ow have to compete with the immediacy and democracy of the internet, by publishing the opinions of SFX readers, SFX hopes to look more inclusive than a normal magazine.  You'll also note that the BBC are obsessed with this, shoe-horning it into every aspect of their news coverage.  The problem is that this displays a fundamental misunderstanding of why people buy magazines in the first place.  People buy magazines because they want to opinions of people who know more than they do.  If you start devoting huge swathes of your magazine to the opinions of normal fans then the normal fans will start to wonder why they're paying Future Publishing to hear opinions they could get for free from their mates.

Secondly, I almost w00t-ed when I got through the magazine (which will take you no more than half an hour it's so packed with adverts and photos) and noticed that I hadn't encountered Jayne Nelson's column.  Nelson is, to me, a signifier of the spiritual decay at the heart of SFX.  She's supposed to act as a counter-agent to the fannish Dave Langford (who predictably writes about people saying that Kurt Vonnegut wasn't SF) but in truth she comes across as a babbling imbecile.  Her columns usually contain the kind of thing that you mum might utter if she happened to be in the room with you while you were watching Star Trek.  This month, given the entirety of the SFF world to comment upon she decides to write about a website that statistically catalogues clothing styles.  Given that she is now included in the Spoiler Zone I thought that maybe she'd be told to write about a recent episode covered in the spoiler zone... a bit like what Grace Dent does for the Radio Times on Big Brother or The Apprentice, but no such luck.  While I'm on the subject I'll also ask what is the point of the Spoiler Zone?  A few months ago, Heroes won an award in the SFX readers poll despite Heroes not having been screened anywhere in the UK.  This suggests that SFX's readers are downloading their favourite shows en masse.  Given that they now have access to these shows at around the same time the Americans do, what is the point of the section?  This is an excellent example of Bradley's conservatism as an editor and his failure to keep up with the demographic and technological changes in his audience.

 

The magazine also contains two big feature pieces.  These are common to all of the mainstream genre magazines and I must admit I never bother reading them.  Frankly, I'm not that desperate to learn about the new Fantastic Four movie and even if it was a movie I wanted to see, I'd go and see it, I don't feel the need to read up about the film before-hand.  What is worse is that these pieces are invariably fluff and packed to the gills with PR guff (in fact, that's what these feature pieces should be called... "fluff n' guff").  So the interviews are all about how much the actors loved the parts and how much they all got on.  Frankly, it would be a lot cheaper and easier for all concerned if they just gave up the pretext and sold the features section as advertising space (or advertorial).  Bradley is no help here as he devotes his editorial to saying that actually the first Fantastic Four movie wasn't complete shit (when it so obviously was) and how we should all give Fox and Marvel the benefit of the doubt (because multinational corporations always deserve charity and a second chance).  I would so like one of these magazines to grow a pair and treat these feature pieces in the way that proper newspaper or music journalists would.  A proper journalist would go to the special screening, pick up the tote bag, spend 30 seconds talking to the PR people and then write a piece about how utterly pointless it is to make a second Fantastic Four movie.  I honestly do not see the point in these types of features.

My opinion is not improved by the coverage of the new Steven Moffat-penned adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde.  This is an excellent example of where these features go wrong as the entire article seems devoted to talking about the special effects and how Moffat has decided to "update" (read "piss about with") the original idea.  There's no sly intelligence asking what Moffat could possibly add to the original by allowing Hyde to leave Memento-style messages for each other, there's just fluff and make-up and pictures of a gurning James Nesbitt.

 

The reviews section is longer than it has been in the past (the section had undeniably shrunk over the years) and there are two other notable facts about it. 

Firstly, there's The SFX Pledge whereby the staff promise to be completely honest in what they write and be completely unaffected by hype.  It is interesting that this pledge appears in the reviews section but nowhere else.  Given the fluffy nature of the interviews and features it feels almost like an admission that most of the time the SFX staff are entirely enthralled by PR and hype.  Surely it should be taken as read that a reviewer will be honest in their opinion?  that SFX feels the need to promise to be honest has a similar effect to walking into a restaurant only to be assured by the waiter that nobody will piss in your soup.  The pledge is also intensely silly as it's impossible to promise to be unaffected by hype as the whole point of hype is that you don't realise you're affected by it.  When was the last time you heard someone be really enthusiastic about something but then admit that they only hold that opinion because the advertising was really good?  Besides, this pledge completely ignores the way that magazines do sway to the demands of PR.  If a reviews editor has been told that the latest blockbuster needs to get a five star review, his response tends not to be to give it to Angry McNee the man with "I hate EVERYTHING" tatooed on his penis only to gut the review when it's handed in.  Why go through all that trouble when you can simply hand the commission to the guy who loves the work of that particular director, actor or writer?

Secondly, the reviews are universally bland.  As a reviewer, I know that some films and books simply don't inspire.  The easiest reviews to write are those of pieces you either loved or hated with everything in between being substantially tougher as you try to communicate in an interesting way that the piece is okay if you like that kind of thing.  Every single review in this magazine feels like it's written by someone who is on his fiftieth review that month.  The reviews are heavy on facts (who played what, when and who wrote it) and plot summary and the conclusions are limp and uninspiring.  There's never an attempt to reach out to readers by saying that the book tries to do X but actually books A, B and C do it better.  There's no attempt to make a deeper interesting point about a series or praise a less obvious aspect of a work... it's just page after page of "it's okay if you like that kind of thing" with the odd joke thrown in.  Even when SFX relies upon one of its better writers such as noted novelists Tom Holt and Jon Courtenay Grimwood the results are disappointing as the editor gives himself the longest review while Grimwood gets about 250 words on De Pierre's complex Dark Space.  SFX is one of the few magazines where the names Tom Holt and Jon Courtenay Grimwood are likely to mean something to the readers so why the magazine does not crow their involvement is completely beyond me.  I would be honoured if either Tom Holt or Jon Courtenay Grimwood came and wrote for my magazine... you'd be hearing about it for weeks!

All in all, SFX is a magazine that feels run down and past its sell by date.  Desperately in need of a strong editor to re-invigorate its clearly drained staff and overhaul its increasingly pointless and limp regular sections, SFX instead limps complacently from issue to issue content to do what it has always done.  If Future do not do something soon about the magazine's direction then I really can't imagine it continuing to dominate a field with younger, hungrier and more edgy magazines such as Death Ray about.

UPDATE : In an earlier version of this post I mistakenly referred to the editor of SFX as "Dave Golder" whereas in fact I meant "Dave Bradley".  This was down to poor, late-night copy-editing on my part.  Too much writing late at night.  Dave Golder is a former editor of the magazine.

Comments

[Jamie]

I probably agree with many of your comments above, especially as I'm very much starting to like Death Ray. However, I feel it's only fair to point out that Dave Golder is no longer the editor, and Dave Bradley has been the editor for over year (with a brief stint of Golder filling in while Bradley was on a sabbatical).

I have to say that I think Bradley hasn't been great for the magazine; certain things have started to become particularly bland under his editorship. I got the impression that Golder had more of a passion and a sense of humour for and about the genre.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Eep... bad weekend for me evidently as I even checked to make sure that it was Bradley and not Golder. I'll modify it.

Thanks for pointing that out Jamie.

[Cassandra]

Hi - interesting stuff. I have to say I don't agree with you that SFX is that tired, although I am currently doing my own comparison of how well SFX fares with Deathray and Sci-Fi Now, and my initial feeling is Deathray will give it a run for its money.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I think SFX is definitely tired.

Funnily enough, the criticisms I leveled at the current SFX format (namely asking what is the point of a spoiler zone when everyone's downloading US stuff and why would you not publicise the fact that you have Jon Courtenay Grimwood writing for you) seem to have occured to the editor of Death Ray too.

Death Ray Issue 2 has no spoiler zone, the reviews are folded into the reviews section and Rob Grant's column is quite obviously featured.

I still want to take a look at the second issue of SciFiNow but it struck me as too desperate to ingratiate itself and therefore terrified of saying anything controversial or unexpected.

[Lee Harris]

I was also disapopinted by the first issue of SciFi Now, but the second issue (which I found to be much easier to find than issue 1) was far superior, and it's a shame that this wasn't its launch issue.

It seems to be very much a three-horse race at the moment, and I'm loathe to put cash on any one of them.

SFX have the obvious advantage of a huge current readership and established subscriber-base, as well as hoardes of industry contacts.

The two pretenders to the throne are very different animals, indeed. Despite the low-brow name and logo, DeathRay seems to be wanting to make its presence felt as a literary journal - not afraid to be intelligent. Also fighting against its name, SciFi Now is shouting its love of all things retro - if not from the rooftops, then at least from the fourteenth floor.

On the strength of issue 2 of both magazines, I'm seriously considering subscribing.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Lee :-)

I haven't seen issue two of SciFiNow but I felt the first issue was entirely insipid. It was the piece about Heroes that got up my nose... complete fluff piece and clearly written ages ago and therefore vague about plot. It just struck me as pandering "we like what you like so you should like us!"

I don't think it's fair to say that Death Ray has aspirations to being a literary journal. It's hardly NYRSF. It's a big, glossy, mainstream genre magazine but it's not afraid to hide the fact that its staff clearly know a bit about the genre. I'd say it was around the same level of cultishness as something like Empire (which is, after all, the market leader in the world of UK film mags).