SF Diplomat

Death and the Maiden : Tone in SF magazines

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.

REVIEW - GUD Issue 1 (Autumn 2007)

A while ago, I argued that the genre short fiction scene had become a little bit too cozy and that what was needed was a bit more risk taking and a bit more energy and a willingness to pick a fight with genre conventions.  In short, as Bob Hoskins once said in the Long Good Friday “a bit of the old Dunkirk Spirit, know what I mean?”.  Well the editors of GUD (Greatest Uncommon Denominator) must have known exactly what I meant as this magazine is a template and a master-plan for the reinvigoration of SF.

The question is, what are GUD’s authors and editors doing messing around in genre?

The RPG Industry : Wages of Sin

John Scalzi has uncovered the fact that Dragon Magazine is open for fiction submissions.  He also points out that while the pay for the writing isn't that good, it's overshadowed by the fact that unlike most other paying markets for short fiction (including free online publications), Dragon Magazine demands ownership of all of the rights to a story before they print it.  That means that you write a story, you get a cheque and those words are no longer yours... Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro could build an entire campaign setting on your words and ideas and you'd never see a single solitary cent of it.  They'd own it lock, stock and barrel.

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.

REVIEW - Vector Issue 253 (July/August 2007)

"I only buy it for the articles" was the famous refrain back when Playboy actually had articles.  To say that it equally applies to Vector, the Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association might well appear to be an empty truth given how devoid the magazine is of naked women but the truth is that I don't buy Vector for the articles, instead Vector's articles sell me my membership to the British Science Fiction Association and it should really sell you yours too.

 

REVIEW - Interzone Issue 212 (September-October 2007)

Back in July, having previously launched a stream of invective at the editors of Interzone, I chowed down on a big plate of humble pie and admitted that actually... their Issue 211 Michael Moorcock Special was really something special.  So... two months later, I picked up my freshly delivered copy of Interzone and looked forward to a decent read which, by and large, is exactly what I got... barring the "bloodstained cheese", the obsequious interviewing and a serious lack of cohesion.

 

Son of Scalpel - What do YOU think?

You will only be told about Project Meinong when the time is right for you to know about Project Meinong...

Following the unfortunate and pre-mature failure of Scalpel Magazine I was struck by how many people had been paying attention to what we were up to.  Even if they hadn't been present at the discussions that launched the project or contributed they seemed to be genuinely sad when we folded.  Buoyed up by this experience, as well as the joy I took from editing the pieces I got to edit for Scalpel, I have decided to start thinking properly about a way to continue the project that we had tentatively started with Scalpel.

And so I turn to you people out there in the blogosphere and ask what you think.  I'm going to run through what my current thinking is on what I'm jokingly referring to, for want of an actual name, as Project Meinong (largely because it sounds pretentious and preposterous and because Alexius Meinong was the philosophical cup-bearer for non-existent objects), and I want people to let me know what they think.  Would you read it? would you be interested in contributing to it?

REVIEW : Interzone Issue 211 (July-August 2007) - Michael Moorcock Special

25 years old this year, Interzone has long been a pillar of the British SF scene.  It has launched countless careers and generally helped ensure that British SF continues to punch above its weight in the global marketplace of ideas that is written science fiction.

It is also safe to say that Interzone and I have a rather... tense... relationship.

Back in April 2007, a discussion at the now sadly defunct Urban Drift forums about Interzone's review policy spilled over into what can only be called a storm in an internet teacup as Interzone editor Jetse de Vries took issue with our remarks about his magazine prompting him to attempt to justify a 350 word limit on reviews.  This then prompted Niall Harrison of Strange Horizons and Vector fame to take issue with some of the claims made by Jetse.  I then waded in and took issue with pretty much everything that makes up Interzone because, to this day, I could not make any logical sense out of the arguments attempting to justify Interzone's format.

My problem with the magazine at the time was that it seemed to be attempting to head in two different directions at once.  On the one hand, by virtue of being a magazine devoted to publishing short fiction produced by up and coming as well as experienced writers, it seemed to be setting itself up as a magazine for the hardcore SF fan.  After all, who else would care enough about SF to seek out a magazine that ran short stories by largely unknown writers if not the hardcore fan?  Meanwhile, on the other hand, John Clute's absence as well as the tendency to produce short reviews was justified in terms of populism.  Then, as now, I could not understand which demographic the market was going for as it appeared to be aiming for a group of people interested enough in SF to seek out unknown authors but fickle enough to be put off buying a short fiction magazine simply because it ran longer reviews.

More than three months after that particular argument I find myself sitting here with a copy of Interzone's Michael Moorcock Special and thinking that it's actually quite good.

Scalpel - my side of things

I have just posted to Scalpel, ending my association with the magazine.

This has been going on for a little while now and this is actually going to be my third post this week about the magazine's shut down.  This might very well give Scalpel Magazine's ending a touch of the theatrical "dying swan" but I thought that making each step public was the responsible and just thing to do.  As a writer, I have often waited and watched as magazines went through internal turbulence while I regretted not pitching my piece elsewhere.  Ultimately, no publication is bigger than the people writing for it and I wanted to make sure that Scalpel's writers were treated as justly as possible and full disclosure was part of that policy.

So I'm going to make public my experiences with Scalpel on a site I control in the hope that someone out there might learn something from my mistakes.

REVIEW : SciFiNow magazine (Issue 3)

Back in April, I reviewed Imagine Publishing's new mainstream SF magazine SciFiNow.  The verdict was not good.  I found the content predictable, the tone depressingly sycophantic and the writing to be decidedly hit and miss.  However, never one to be unfair, I decided that I'd cover the second issue in the hope of working out what was a permanent fixture in the magazine and what was filler, that way I'd get a better idea than I did at launch as to the quality of the magazine.  Sadly, I missed the second issue but I did come across Issue three.