REVIEW - Death Ray issue 8 (Christmas 2007)

Back in May and July of this year I reviewed the first two issues of the mass-market glossy SF magazine Death Ray.  By and large, I was impressed not only with the quality of the writing and the literary sensibility of the content but also the subjects that the magazine chose to cover.  Six issues later we find a magazine with very different values indeed; gone is the high-mindedness of the early issues, gone are the extensive book reviews and instead we have the same blend of weak DVD reviews and advertorial “features” that plague the other SF glossies leaving me genuinely struggling to find anything of interest within its pages.  However, in all fairness, the intellectual watering down of Death Ray is but a symptom of wider problems not just in genre but publishing as a whole.

Let me begin by getting one counter-punch in before anyone has time to issue a retort.  When I say that Death Ray has watered itself down intellectually, I do not mean relative to the content of this blog, SF Eye, the New York Review of Science Fiction or the Journal of Science Fiction Studies.  While it is possible to write about SF in an erudite and challenging fashion, I do not think that Death Ray ever embarked upon that particular economic fool’s errand.  Death Ray worked not because it was intensely intellectual but because its writers were clearly knowledgeable and brought that superior knowledge to bear in a way that was both accessible and entertaining.  Death Ray at its best, was always accessible even to the most thinly read of SF fans.  The problem is that Death Ray has watered itself down relative to the standards of high-mindedness that it displayed in earlier issues and the result is that it has lost the voice that made it stand out in the crowd of glossy SF magazines.

I’ll begin with what was my favourite section Deep Thought.  In issue two we had people making the link between the Blair government and the British horror scene and discussing the nature of SF as well as pointing out the relationship between Marvel’s Civl War continuity and the American political climate.  In issue 8 we have someone telling us that bionic limbs aren’t entirely fictional and an ambitious, ultimately flawed and incredibly worrying piece about how video-games are now an integral part of the SF canon.  The Deep Thought section still remains a place for editorials and commentary but in but six issues we have gone from articles designed to make readers think a little bit about their SF to articles stating the fucking obvious and even pandering to potential readers’ tastes (“no... you’re not wasting time playing Halo 3, you’re engaging with a vital component of the SF canon”).

The features on the second series of Torchwood and Primeval are the usual toothless fluff aimed primarily at getting the consumer slaves that make up the bulk of the SF audience excited about the fresh batch of slop about the be dumped in their collective trough.  Ooooh James Masters is appearing in Torchwood, that’ll almost certainly prevent the second series from being another round of utterly witless craven shite.  The other interviews with Pratchett and Ridley Scott are a little bit better but there’s nothing new or particularly interesting asked of either of them.  It really would save a lot of time and money if the glossy SF magazines stopped actually bothering to interview people themselves.  Why not just cut and paste from the press pack and have done with it?  I’m sure nobody would notice.

The reviews section Dark Stars continues to be competently put together and the willingness of the reviews editor to cast his net further astray results in reviews of unfunny comedies Good Luck Chuck and Family Guy season 6 (both of which rightly get panned).  However, this willingness to review films and TV series with only loose genre credentials results in the once plentiful book reviews section withering to only five proper full length reviews (of which one is a Doctor Who encyclopaedia).  There really is no excuse for cutting back on book reviews other than a clear editorial decision to do so, sending Death Ray tumbling down market into the kind of territory trod by the likes of SciFiNow and it’s a clear indication that the magazine’s early high-mindedness has been replaced with a desperate desire to chase the market even if this means wasting space that could have been used to review books on the likes of Family Guy and the umpteenth DVD re-editions of the original series of Doctor Who or Star Trek.

I think the shrinking of the Death Ray book review section and SciFiNow’s decision to only pay lip service to the idea of reviewing books (though, to be fair, this might have improved with later issues) stems from two particular developments...

Firstly, there’s the fact that book reviews are disappearing from everywhere.  Indeed, as the Kenyon Review and the Columbia Journalism Review point out, most newspapers no longer bother printing book reviews at all and when they do it’s mostly of big releases anyway.  It goes without saying that this is damaging to the long term health of the genre in particular and Western Literature in general as it makes it that little bit harder for new writers to find an audience and if new writers won’t sell then publishers will be less likely to buy their books or, if they do, they’ll offer them less money prompting writers to stick with their day jobs for longer.  That such cuts are happening in newspapers is unfortunate, that such shrinkage is going on in supposedly SF magazines is utterly unacceptable and to see books so mistreated in a genre magazine that started off being smart, literate and well-read it’s nothing short of a betrayal.  Though this leads us to our second problem...

Secondly, if you read this blog and a number of other blogs you’ll see that there are a number of different fault-lines within SFF fandom; there’s the split between fans of literary and popular fiction, the split between fantasy and SF fans, the split between novel readers and short fiction readers and many many others.  In fact, if there’s one thing that fandom is very good at, it’s splintering into smaller and smaller groups.  When I did my roundup of Death Ray, SciFiNow and SFX magazines during the early summer, I noted that one of the things that the glossy SF magazines tried to do was to put some distance between themselves and existing Fandom.  Back when SFX launched, SF fans were sad anorak-wearing speccy types, quite unlike the young dynamic market that SFX was trying to aim itself at.  The result of this is that, aside from the occasional nod, the magazines showed no interest in any of the infrastructure of fandom.  They even came up with their own conventions where you don’t listen to talks or discuss new books but rather pay for the nose for the privilege of maybe getting the autograph of someone who was once on Sapphire and Steel.  This by and large worked very well and, if you compare and contrast it with the fact that online geeks obsess over Star Wars but never actually read any SF you’ll find that the real fault-line in genre is between the people who read and the people who don’t read.  Unfortunately, there are far fewer genre readers than there are fans who love Star Trek, Buffy and Smallville but haven’t picked up a book since they finished school.  This is where the money is and this is why these glossy magazines increasingly only pay lip service to the idea that SF and Fantasy are literary genres.

For a while, Death Ray seemed to hold the promise of uniting this fractured community.  It was accessible enough to suck in the young and the non-readers but it was knowing enough to offer something to the people who want a little more from their genre than the cast of Roswell in swimming costumes.  However, as time has gone by, the smartness has drained from the pages of Death Ray leaving a magazine that is much like the other magazines in its class.  To say that this is a disappointment given how strongly I supported the magazine at its launch would be an understatement.  All I can do is suggest that people who do want actual SF book reviews buy Interzone instead as they have proper film and book reviews as well as occasionally decent stories.  If Issue 8 is anything to go by then there’s nothing left in Death Ray of interest to me.

Comments

[Patrick H]

>>They even came up with their own conventions where you don’t listen to talks or discuss new books but rather pay for the nose for the privilege of maybe getting the autograph of someone who was once on Sapphire and Steel.

Tying events to magazines is very much SOP in the publishing industry. All the big publishers have conference/events arms. In the financial press, awards are the big thing, and I think the music press has a similar strategy. I have sat in launch conferences where the topic is "what will the event tagged to this mag be?" Sales/editorial staff are regularly roped in to do stuff for conferences (eg, selling stands, presenting speeches,mixing with paying guests etc etc).

So, I'm not at all surprised that the mags arrange their own conventions, annoying as it may be.

Patrick H

[Guy Haley]

Guy from Death Ray here. I am sorry that you were disappointed with Death Ray issue 8, (it's funny, I wrote a piece about reviewing in issue 8, and talked about how we ourselves are not above review!) but I feel moved to answer one of your comments. You seem upset by the lack of literary coverage, and some of the points you make are valid in regard to this – books are under serviced in the press. However, your statement that we have decided to do away with our in-depth book coverage is incorrect.

Firstly, this is a huge genre, with many different things going on month to month, so some issues are going to have more features on books than others.

Secondly, the reviews section was so truncated because of the UK postal strike, something which we make quite clear in Dark Stars. We use a great many freelancers in this section, posting the material out to them. Most of this material did not arrive until three weeks after it was sent, long after our deadline. The strike continued, sporadically, throughout our production of this issue, making re-sourcing and resending review copies next to impossible.

DR09 will see a return to the in-depth book coverage you enjoy so much. I just want to assure you that there has not been, nor will there be, an editorial decision to 'dumb down' Death Ray.

All the best,

Guy

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Guy, thanks for dropping by :-)

Actually, the books were kind of the tip of the iceberg. I felt that a lot of the smartness of the early issues had ebbed away and was simply no longer present by the time we got to issue 8. The quality of the Deep Thought columns, for example, is markedly less than it used to be.

It is, as you say, a big genre and a lot of things arrive on your doorstop but if, at some point, you're choosing to put in an extra DVD review in place of a book review then you clearly are choosing to put less of an emphasis on books.

I can't see how the postal strike could have had an effect as it clearly didn't prevent you from having enough DVDs to review and you did mini-reviews of loads more books, so clearly you were getting the books but just choosing not the publish reviews of them. I'm on a number of ARC lists too and while there was some disruption caused by the postal strike, I was still getting courier deliveries and I'm sure you were getting them too as your readership is considerably larger than mine.

If you say that there will be more book reviews next issue then I'm glad to hear it but issue 8 was definitely nowhere near as smart or as interesting as issues 1 and 2.

[Guy Haley]

Hello,

I was trying to avoid boring you with the details, but I can't resist! We waited and waited and waited for the books to arrive with our freelancers, and by the time we realised they would not, it was too late. By that point, even if we had had them couriered out directly from the numerous publishers we deal with to our freelancers (which was discussed) we wouldn't have been able to get the reviews turned round fast enough.

We had a few more DVDs because some of our DVD guys either had copies or had already seen the film/show in question. It was a very random selection because of this. Also, we used some of the discs that had come in later – we can do a DVD review quickly, books take longer to enjoy, so we are far more dependent on freelance writers for book reviews, and thus, because the books are posted to us, then posted to them, the post.

It's also not a case of 'enough'. We try to be comprehensive. This is why the reviews section grows and shrinks month to month, it's dependent on what's out. Actually, that month was huge for DVDs – we had a lot more in than books, some months are just like that. Many of these DVDs did not arrive with their reviewers either, as you can see by the number in our DVD round-up. If you'd seen issues 3-7, you'll have noticed that on an average month our books section is bigger than our DVD section. And indeed, that our review section in that issue is unusually short altogether. (If you didn't see issue 3-7, you'll also have missed our Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, and William Gibson interviews).

The sole reason I was able to print round-ups of those products that got stuck in limbo was because I keep the press releases. There was not a big stack of books begging to be reviewed on my desk as you suggest. They really were lost in a sack somewhere.

I also would not axe a book in favour of a DVD, or vice versa. I have a set number of pages for each every month, determined by the volume of product released. I then try to fit reviews of everything in as best I can.

I hope that makes it a bit clearer. We'll carry on trying our best to present a magazine that is comprehensive, well-written, intelligent and diverse. I look forward to your continuing reviews of us.

Hello Guy,

Ah fair enough. I hadn't factored in the fact that while the publishers might well have couriered books to you, you then had to distribute to freelancers. It's an extra level of bureaucracy that the post office can indeed fuck with.

I look forward to a return to normality with the next issue then :-)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

That was me by the way.

[Doctor X]

I don't think Jon Mac was totally wrong to have a go at Death Ray: that edition did seem to have a "cobbled together" feel about it. Maybe because it was a,somewhat, superfluous Xmas edition. I do think DeathRay has a pretty good stab at trying to entertain, inform and educate the disperate or, as Jon calls it "fractured" demographic of sci-fi consumer. I've never read Interzone, and I will certainly have a look at it soon but it takes some tracking down for some. The same problem occours in the Music industry and is probably what is happening here. That is, there is not a specialist record store on every high street the same way there's not a Forbidden Planet, but there are plenty of HMV's and WH Smiths'. As long as Deathray keeps on it's toes, and Mr Mac's review was important here because it obviously hit a nerve at DeathRay HQ, I, personally, can forgive the occasional slip. Lets have it right, if a new Harry Potter movie comes out, for the sake of attracting the more casual reader, the 4-eyed gimp has to be on the cover. Most sensible DeathRay readers will instinctivly understand why this is.

Thanks

[Jonathan M]

Interestingly, I have looked at one issue of Death Ray since then and wasn't particularly impressed with it. The problem is that my tolerance of TV SF has completely dried up and as I don't watch any SF on TV any more, a media focussed SF mag doesn't really have anything to offer me.

Looking back at the review a little while on, it still pretty much captures how I feel about the magazine; It's not for me. Strip out those photo shoots and obsequious interviews with film and TV stars (which are completely interchangeable between all of the glossy SF mags) and you're left with reviews and frankly I don't trust any of the reviewers in any of the glossy mags. I know that some decent people have written for them and may still write for them but I don't find them rewarding.

Locus and Interzone give the best dead-tree SF reviews, with Vector up there too if you can stand the wait between issues.

Death Ray simply has nothing to offer me.