I recently purchased issues 5 through 10 of the 1990's critical SF magazine SF Eye. I first heard about SF Eye when I working on Scalpel but it took me until recently to track down some copies of the magazine and take a look through them. Two different things astonished me about SF Eye.
Firstly, it contains hardly any reviews.
Secondly, it is astonishingly gloomy.
These two characteristics make it abundantly clear that SF Eye is not in any way similar to the kinds of SF magazine that currently haunt UK newsagents. Where SFX and company are brightly coloured and full of airbrushed shots of actresses in bikinis, SF Eye was black and white and full of slightly strange looking art and haunted faces. Where SFX has pages and pages of reviews devoted to every conceivable medium of genre, SF eye devotes barely 10% of its content to reviews, all of them are about books and when reviewers do wander further than SF novels, it's only to write about the new Deleuze and Guattari tract. SF Eye's interviews can't be summed up to repeatedly asking the interviewee how awesome they and their latest product are, and it also has articles that aren't related to SF but might be of interest to the SF audience (and no, I don't just mean science news).
However, while it is clear to me that SF Eye was a better magazine than anything currently in print, I couldn't help but be amused by how the whole magazine is engulfed with a sense of impending doom, and while some people might roll their eyes at every new "death of SF" article, I can't help but feel that a magazine that is worried about the genre's future is representative of a healthier scene than a dozen coloured magazines devoted to getting you excited about the rubbish that passes for SF most of the time.
One of the more interesting revelations surrounding the recent firing of Gamespot's editorial director Jeff Gerstmann was the revelation that the person overseeing the videogame website was not an industry insider or a videogame hack who had worked his way up but rather someone experienced in the world of lifestyle magazines, you know... those glossy things full of adverts devoted to selling you stuff and making you think that you fit into a nice marketing demographic...
One of the defining characteristics of capitalism is that it benefits hugely from stability. When things are unsure then people tend to think twice before spending their money. Consumerism is all about asserting one's identity through the medium of shopping and a lack of stability means less shopping and it means that it's harder to make purchasing decisions. For consumerism to work, you need a perpetual golden age in which things never change and yet everything is better than it's ever been before. In order to assert their identity, people need to feel excitement about upcoming products. They need to know that they're the kind of people who would happily shell out a small fortune for a re-mastered version of the original series of Star Trek that has the crew of DS9 digitally inserted into the episode with the tribbles.
Modern genre press, like much modern music and videogame press exist in order to provide this artificial golden age. This is why you will never see SFX or SciFiNow worry about the health of science fiction. Such navel gazing breeds self-doubt and nobody makes a profit from self-doubt. SFX will be talking about how great SF is right up until their publishers decide that there's no mainstream interest in SF anymore. Mainstream SF mags aren't interested in the health of SF or its artistic direction, they'd never take the genre's pulse, they'd only ever get her to slap on some make-up in the hope of impressing the boys.
Compare this to the likes of SF Eye. SF Eye existed in a state of constant neurosis. Every issue features essays written by not just critics but actual novelists wailing about the state of the genre. SF Eye pulls its hair out, gnashes its teeth and chain smokes over the health of SF and you know what, I think that this suggested a much healthier genre than any number of glossy mainstream publications.
Like it or not, navel gazing is a vital component of the artistic process. In order to move forward you have to know where you are, who you are and what lies in each direction. You can't make this decision if everything's great. You need there to be light and darkness, you need an impetus to move forwards. You need to worry. You need to care.
SF Eye died out quite quickly while the likes of Locus lived on. Locus, you'll note, has reviews, interviews with authors and page after page of details on which books are coming out, who has sold what and where you can buy this and that. Locus does not search its soul, it does not worry about the future, it does not wonder whether there's any point in still reading SF. It just has nice reviews and news of upcoming things you might want to spend your money on whether you're a consumer or a publisher.
To me, SF Eye's constant histrionics and navel gazing suggest rude health. Modern dead tree genre press gives off the stench of a celebrity-endorsed perfumed body spray. The question is, is that Instinct by David Beckham covering up a more unpleasant and fetid stench?
It goes back into something I've said before: Most people, including many people who are readers of SF, are not big on introspection. They want what they want, and they hate having their good times stomped on. They can always turn on "the news" for that (and, oh irony, it's getting to the point where even that's starting to become a scarcity).
I suspect part of the problem is that people don't see how it would be possible to generate a thoughtful compromise of attitude between something like SF Eye and something like SFX. They wouldn't have confidence in something that tentative.
Also, frankly, if I was getting a mag that complained every month about the generally rotten state of something without ever actually trying to DO something about it, I'd probably dump my subscription before long myself.
Posted by: Serdar | December 15, 2007 at 06:53 AM