[HN Gopher] "Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's...
___________________________________________________________________
"Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's and Analog
acquired
Author : ilamont
Score : 144 points
Date : 2025-03-05 22:47 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jasonsanford.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jasonsanford.substack.com)
| pfdietz wrote:
| I didn't realize FaSF was teetering on the brink.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Basically all of fiction except romance/porn is withering fast.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| My understanding is that romance/porn is mostly written by
| LLMs at this point. Its all just churned out crap to make a
| quick buck on Amazon. My elderly mother reads this genre
| endlessly and frequently wonders if there are editors at all!
| smcin wrote:
| _" mostly written by LLMs... on Amazon"_ Do you mean in
| e-books, print books, or subscription based sites, or
| some/all of those? I think you only mean e-books, on
| Amazon. Then if people object to that, just avoid e-books
| on Amazon. Stay with human-curated.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Then if people object to that, just avoid e-books on
| Amazon. Stay with human-curated.
|
| What does being an ebook have to do with it? You want to
| avoid self-published books. The typical self-published
| book is much worse than nothing. But most books are
| available as ebooks.
| smcin wrote:
| The only way most people are going to encounter self-
| published (e-)books being marketed to them is Kindle
| (Unlimited) or online stores. Brick-and-mortar stores
| wouldn't do this, it wouldn't even economically make
| sense to carry the stuff and it would damage their
| reputation.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| So? You have your implication backwards. Here's an ebook
| on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC13Y0
|
| Why are you recommending that we avoid reading it?
| smcin wrote:
| Do us a favor and don't misrepresent what I say. "Self-
| published author" connotes no-name author (or
| anonymous/pseudonymous) with no publishing history or
| reputation; whereas Neil Gaiman is already reputable and
| has sold 40+ million books.
|
| Statistically, the average e-book that Amazon tries to
| advertise to you is far more likely to be the former than
| the letter. And that was before the current wave of "pay
| to learn our system to get rich publishing e-books". I
| even have friends who tried it for a while. They hardly
| made any money.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Do us a favor and don't misrepresent what I say.
|
| Would you mind doing me the same favor, of not
| misrepresenting what you say?
|
| > "Self-published" connotes no-name author (or
| anonymous/pseudonymous) with no publishing history or
| reputation; whereas Neil Gaiman is already reputable and
| has sold 40 million books.
|
| ...is this relevant to something you've said? I'm the
| only one so far who's said something about self-published
| books. Your recommendation was to avoid ebooks. That
| recommendation was stupid.
|
| > Statistically, the average e-book that Amazon tries to
| advertise to you is far more likely to be the former than
| the letter.
|
| Well, I just opened the Amazon front page. These are the
| ebooks they're advertising to me:
|
| 1. _The Summer Dragon_ , Todd Lockwood. Publisher: DAW
|
| 2. _Beren and Luthien_ , J.R.R. Tolkien (and Christopher
| Tolkien). Publisher: William Morrow (= HarperCollins)
|
| 3. _Daughter of the Empire_ , Raymond Feist (and Janny
| Wurts). Publisher: Spectra (= Penguin)
|
| 4. _The Grace of Kings_ , Ken Liu. Publisher: Saga Press
| (= Simon & Schuster)
|
| 5. _An Inheritance of Ash & Blood_, Jamie Edmundson.
| Publisher: Rarn, which does appear to be Jamie
| Edmundson's personal publishing company. This could
| fairly be considered self-published. It's also available
| on Kindle Unlimited, which is a red flag. The author
| appears to be fairly prolific, so he's not exactly
| lacking a publishing history.
|
| 6. _Heir of Ra_ , M. Sasinowski. Publisher: Kingsmill
| Press. This is another publisher that appears to be a
| vehicle for a single author. Probably self-published.
| This book is at pains to point out the many awards it's
| won, probably because it's self-published.
|
| 7. _The Anvil_ , Christopher Coates. Publisher: Next
| Chapter, which purports to "combine the professionalism
| and quality of traditional publishing with the creative
| freedom of independent publishing". They review your work
| before publishing it; not self-published.
|
| 8. _The Book That Wouldn 't Burn_, Mark Lawrence.
| Publisher: Ace
|
| That concludes the front page. There are five books from
| major publishers, one from a minor publisher, and two
| most likely self-published. The biggest names appearing
| are J.R.R. Tolkien and Raymond Feist. Taking author
| quality into account, you appear to be roughly as likely
| to get Neil Gaiman as you are to get anything self-
| published. Ignoring it, you're far more likely to get
| something reputable than to get trash.
|
| Unless, of course, you _want to read trash_ , in which
| case Amazon's recommendations will probably lean that
| way.
| smcin wrote:
| No, we were talking specifically about things "mostly
| written by LLMs... on Amazon" in the ancestor comment by
| Henchman21 ( _" My understanding is that romance/porn is
| mostly written by LLMs at this point."_)
|
| Given that we're talking about the set of those, allow
| that it's pretty obvious to recognize a book by a known
| author vs an LLM based simply on the title, cover, author
| bio or lack of, publisher and whether they have
| links/catalog to any prior books, or a total absence of.
|
| Those are going to skew disproportionately towards
| e-books and away from paper books. And you can "look
| inside" to get an idea of their quality. Which in my
| experience was often bad. So that recommendation wasn't
| at all stupid.
|
| As to what Amazon recommends you, noone said frontpage,
| Henchman21 was talking about romance/porn, and as for me
| I use keyword searches. I see lots of obscure titles from
| unknown authors ranked above titles I know are reliable.
|
| * EXAMPLE: Search Kindle Store for "guide visit
| Philippines"
|
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=guide+visit+Philippines&i=digi
| tal...
|
| The #1 hit is not any legit guide, but an obscure 32pp
| Kindle book by an unknown Portuguese(?) author averaging
| 3/5 stars, published way back in 2015 (which in itself
| would be a fail for a travel guide with timely
| information). I clicked Look inside and confirm it's
| garbage, really basic, possibly not written by a human.
|
| #2 is a $9.99 title by an unknown Kindle author who
| managed to be amazingly prolific in the month of Dec 2024
| alone, publishing "The Essential Philippines Travel Guide
| 2025: Things to know before visiting, Best Attractions,
| Best Hidden Gems, Antiquated Cultures, Culinary Delights,
| Travel budget, itineraries & Staying Safe" but then you
| find in Dec 2024 she also wrote "The Essential XX Travel
| Guide 2025: ..." for XX = {Philippines, Paris, Malta,
| Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Norway, New Zealand,
| Berlin, Valencia, Seoul, Serbia, Vietnam, Florida, Costa-
| Rica, Germany... Sedona AZ, and many more...} Did she
| visit all these countries in 2024? ever? ( _" What Makes
| This Book Unique? Written by a Team of Philippines
| Experts: Crafted by those who know the Philippines inside
| and out, ensuring accurate and authentic
| recommendations."... "What Makes This Book Unique?
| Written by a Team of Morocco Experts: Trust in the
| expertise of seasoned travelers and locals who know the
| country inside out... Regularly Updated: Enjoy the latest
| insights for 2025 and beyond..._ Impressive.)
|
| The #4 hit is another KindleUnlimited 26pp "Visiting the
| Philippines as a Christian: Guide to Customs and
| Worship". Not even a relevant search result.
|
| The #5 hit is "CultureShock! Philippines", the first
| relevant quality result (although it's a (superb)
| cultural guide rather than a practical visitor how-to-
| get-around guide). But it's the only decent item in all
| these results.
|
| #7 is "Palau Travel Guide 2025: ..." (wrong country) and
| #10 is "BALI FOR TRAVELERS. The total guide" (wrong
| country).
|
| Statistically, the average Kindle e-book that Amazon
| tries to advertise to you for "guide visit Philippines"
| is far more likely to be the former than the letter.
| Exactly what I said.
|
| Lonely Planet Philippines doesn't even show up anywhere
| in the results(!) It should be in the top-3. (Bizarrely,
| if you know it's the result you want and search for that
| exact title "Lonely Planet Philippines", it shows up in
| all its editions.)
|
| (Also: I almost never look for e-books on Amazon, so
| their A9 search results for me are going to have worse
| personalization than for you. Try repeating your own
| search logged out or incognito and see if doesn't get
| worse. (Search, not frontpage))
|
| And as to "the current wave of "pay to learn our system
| to get rich publishing e-books [on Amazon]"" ad content I
| mentioned, I get an obscene amount of those ads on
| YouTube, for e-publishers that target Amazon. Which helps
| explain the above results.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| The deal with Amazon is you pay a fixed monthly
| subscription fee to read an umlimited amount of crap on
| your Kindle (RMS calls that device a Swindle). So if you
| have some favorite authors or get recommendations from a
| subreddit or something, you can keep your reading
| appetite satiated without buying individual titles.
| Particularly, that lets you DNF (do not finish) a work
| without incurring expense, if you read a few pages and
| decide not to continue.
|
| The plan involved is called Kindle Unlimited and its
| terms for authors are quite onerous imho, but monopolies
| etc.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| If anyone needs an alternative: the current Kobo lineup
| is great. You can buy ebooks directly through the Kobo
| store, and they work well. And if you want to tinker with
| the OS, you can.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > (RMS calls that device a Swindle)
|
| That's kind of a non-sequitur though; he's not calling it
| that because the subscription sucks.
| lmm wrote:
| > My understanding is that romance/porn is mostly written
| by LLMs at this point. Its all just churned out crap to
| make a quick buck on Amazon.
|
| It's always been churned out crap, I don't see LLMs making
| much difference.
| mtVessel wrote:
| I didn't realize they were still in print!
| Finnucane wrote:
| Gordon's had some issues--declining distribution (as with every
| magazine), and recently the printer he'd been using for a long
| time went out of business, and he had to scramble to find
| another.
| droideqa wrote:
| Anybody reading this might appreciate 'Astounding'[0]:
|
| "Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary
| partnership between four controversial writers--John W. Campbell,
| Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard--who set off
| a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world. "
|
| [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Astounding-Campbell-Heinlein-
| Hubbard-...
| righthand wrote:
| Book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-campbell-
| isaa...
|
| Audio book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-
| campbell-isaa...
| Henchman21 wrote:
| I appreciate the non-Amazon links, thank you!
| dcminter wrote:
| Be warned, I found it a bit depressing though. Never meet your
| heroes they say...
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'm hazarding that a lot of the early scifi luminaries
| weren't the most well-adjusted humans?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Some were even worse. I threw out (not sold) all my Marion
| Zimmer Bradley books when I found out.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/aklqck/breendoggle_
| a...
| mcswell wrote:
| Campbell was a racist, and I believe bought into the theory
| that smokers smoked because their bodies were trying to
| prevent or fight off lung cancer. He also appeared to be a
| believer in psi. He attracted (and doubtless encouraged)
| authors who shared those beliefs. If you go back and read
| the stories from the 50s and 60s, the heroes were
| invariably heavy smokers, and many of the stories involved
| telepathy, telekinesis, etc. The role of women in the
| stories was usually secondary (and the boy got the girl in
| the end), although that was probably true of most scifi
| back then. I don't recall any stories in Analog where the
| hero was other than a white man.
| r0uv3n wrote:
| Arguably Bayta is the lead in The Mule maybe? But of
| course the basic plot was very much influenced by
| Campbell still
| pdimitar wrote:
| One of the most refreshing things about this part of the
| Foundation books was that I couldn't quite figure out who
| was in fact the main character.
|
| I too eventually concluded it was Bayta since she was the
| one who figured out who The Mule was but the other
| characters contributed quite a lot.
|
| Plus it's my belief that it was the intent of Asimov that
| nobody is actually a main character -- not for long
| anyway; I mean, people just die at the very least --
| because Seldon's plan is just that big.
|
| But yeah, Bayta was a very likeable character. One of the
| very few female characters that I liked from Asimov.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >although that was probably true of most scifi back then
|
| In 1950? That was true of _all_ media, including novels
| written by women. Is Dagny Taggart the protagonist of
| Atlas Shrugged?
| fractallyte wrote:
| Mack Reynolds:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Man%27s_Burden
| fractallyte wrote:
| Regarding ,,psi": inexplicable stuff happens, and
| Campbell was one of the few who sought answers, rather
| than simply dismissing it.
|
| I suspect almost everyone has their own experience of
| ,,It happened to me!":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295560
| dmurray wrote:
| Asimov's Susan Calvin stories first appeared in Analog
| (when it was called Astounding, but already under
| Campbell).
| swombat wrote:
| Granted, he did. At the same time, Asimov was well known
| to be a groper, and even wrote a satire book called "The
| sensuous dirty old man" which would probably have landed
| better as satire had he not been fairly well known in
| scifi circles to be in fact a dirty old man.
|
| There were some decent scifi authors at the time - not
| least, Ursula K LeGuin.
| dmurray wrote:
| Ok, but "had some authors who wouldn't pass a 2025 purity
| test" is moving the goalposts quite a lot from "never
| published anything that wasn't by a White man, about a
| White man".
|
| Le Guin, while a great author, was 12 when the first
| Susan Calvin story was published, and wouldn't be
| published herself until 18 years later. So she wasn't
| exactly being overlooked at the time.
|
| And if you really insist on some identity politics in
| your science fiction, you'd do well to remember that in
| 1941 Asimov wasn't a White man. He was Jewish, which
| while not as bad as being Black had some very real
| consequences in 1940s America, not least being subject to
| a university admissions quota.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >Campbell was a racist
|
| Back in the 50s? Most people of all kinds were, either
| implicitly or explicitly, even those who could have known
| and embraced better with a bit of context improvement.
|
| Judging the people of the past by all the biases and
| ingrained assumptions of their time is myopic at best and
| a dumb path to disregarding a lot of wonderful knowledge
| too.
|
| No human is free of at least some absurd ideas, it
| doesn't necessarily make the rest of what they create or
| say worth denigrating.
|
| I'd hate to imagine all of us in the early 21st century
| only being mocked because of certain absurd things we
| surely take for granted as truths today.
| mcswell wrote:
| No disagreement, and I was probably racist back then. I'm
| just agreeing with an earlier comment that some of the
| 1950s authors were not "well adjusted", because I now
| think of racism as a sin.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I definitely agree - it's better to focus on the good in
| people, rather than the flaws. People 75 years from now
| will think just as poorly of our values as people today
| do of the values in 1950. And the people of 1950 would no
| doubt have thought just as poorly of our values today!
|
| The change of values throughout the years is not one of
| monotonically increasing moral rightness. Every age gets
| some things right, and some things wrong. So we should
| focus on the positive and not the negative, because
| that's what we would want done for us.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I found the the Hubbard sections most unpleasant, but I also
| knew the least about him.
| dcminter wrote:
| I knew he was behind scientology, so I wasn't too surprised
| there. Heinlein wasn't completely unexpected (although his
| gullibility with Hubbard was). I was more thinking of
| Asimov turning out to be a serial groper.
|
| I read a bio of John Wyndham shortly afterwards and I was
| so relieved that he seems to have been one of the good
| ones.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Let me be crystal clear that I am NOT defending Asimov
| here; he used his fame and was aware that many of the
| women will not be believed if they spoke out -- and
| shamelessly took advantage of that.
|
| Combine that with my strictly personal opinion that he
| could have taken much better care of his looks at least;
| a good barber and a dentist alone would have gone a long
| way so he looked a bit less unpleasant, not to mention he
| could have jogged once a month and still could have been
| in a better shape...
|
| ...but after reading stories about many other authors,
| well, Asimov looks like a saint in comparison.
|
| Again, not defending the guy. And Heinlein's gullibility
| also starkly contrasts with his intelligent aura and
| writing style. Goes to show we all have blind spots, I
| suppose. A bro club and all that in their case, probably.
|
| [sighs deeply]
| rendaw wrote:
| Asimov was controversial?
| mperham wrote:
| He was a known harasser at cons.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Nobody was saying this prior to the Foundation TV series
| coming out. It seems like marketing wanted to drum up some
| controversy for their series because the allegations would
| have required evidence from 40 years prior. Maybe it
| happened, maybe it didn't, but definitively saying so
| either way makes it seem like you have an agenda.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Lol, Asimov's reputation for being, shall we say,
| physically inappropriate with women at SF conventions
| goes back, well, for literally as long as there have been
| conventions.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Nobody was saying this prior to the Foundation TV
| series coming out.
|
| I knew about this back in the 90s. It's always been out
| there whenever Asimov is mentioned.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| It's written into the story line of some stories like the
| mystery solving ones.
|
| But in the story lines, the affections seem very mutual.
| So I'm not sure it's fair to call him a "harasser".
| Dirty? Perhaps. Old man? Yes, that's chronological and it
| can't be denied.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| His writings weren't controversial, though, except to anti-
| science nuts.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| In the 1990s my uncle gave me a ton of Analog and Fantasy and
| Science Fiction from the 1970s of which I only still have maybe a
| half-dozen. Even in the 90s the perspective of the stories was
| super interesting and now even more so. Surprisingly they have
| almost no advertisement, just stories. I didn't know they were
| still around!
| rom16384 wrote:
| I used to buy Analog on paper once in a while. A few years back I
| wanted to subscribe the digital version, but there wasn't a
| convenient way to do so, just closed platforms and drm'd readers,
| so I didn't subscribe. Don't make it hard for people to give you
| money. They could just email pdfs...
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| I made a post below on this, but I had previously subscribed to
| Analog via Amazon/Kindle. About two years ago Amazon killed
| _all_ magazine subscriptions and forced the magazines to either
| make their issues available for free to "KindleUnlimited"
| subscribers ($10/mo) or get the hell off their platform.
|
| Analog and Asimov's took the hit, and are, to this day,
| available to read for free if you have Kindle Unlimited.
| There's no way this didn't lose them tons of money and wreck
| their cashflow.
|
| And, even though I personally benefitted, I'm still mad that
| Amazon did this & I'm surprised there wasn't more pushback from
| the magazines. They could have done _a lot_ more to incentivize
| off-platform digital subscriptions.
| minihat wrote:
| You can subscribe to Asimovs and/or Analog on their website
| today and they give you a download link for PDF, epub every
| other month.
| jrootabega wrote:
| Analog has been an all-around pain in the ass. I subscribed to
| the paper version and didn't receive an issue within the
| timeframe they advertise. It's bimonthly, so it was quite a
| while. When I wrote them, they said "Oh, we always skip the
| current issue in case you bought it in a store." I asked them
| to include that on the website, but guess whether they gave a
| crap.
|
| When I let my subscription expire gracefully (because the
| overall quality of the writing and editing was bad), I got
| something like 6 - 10 letters warning me about it. They were
| the kind that scare elderly people with dementia into paying.
| They also included some dubious claims about renewing "now" and
| saving, but I couldn't work out how I would save anything if I
| did.
|
| So things have been bad for a long time.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| I got really into short sf fiction, reading years best
| collections and then seeing they were all from analog ect started
| reading them.
|
| The collections were better, just more filtered, but the history
| of these pulp magazines is amazing.
| BMc2020 wrote:
| The golden age of science fiction is twelve...
|
| This is a good spot to post the omni magazine collection as
| well...
|
| http://www.williamflew.com/
| FpUser wrote:
| I am 60+, read a lot and at least 50% is science fiction
| FiatLuxDave wrote:
| I believe that is referred to as the Silver Age of science
| fiction ;)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 63, and read fantasy, the most.
|
| I prefer fantasy, over scifi, because, in my opinion, with
| fantasy, the story is about characters in a fantastic world,
| while, in science fiction, the story is about a fantastic
| world, with characters in it.
|
| I do have trouble liking newer stuff, though, and end up
| rereading a lot of "classic" lit. I feel as if authors aren't
| well-edited, anymore, and that can have devastating
| consequences on the quality of their work. I hope that AI
| editors may help, there.
|
| One of the things about these mags, is that they were a forge
| for great style. People learned to develop succinct,
| effective stories, and the editors for the publications could
| be _brutal_.
|
| They forced authors to be good.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| One thing I've noticed is that sometimes modern authors are
| too married to their big ideas, and neglect the rest of the
| story. The example I like to point to this is Ann Leckie's
| _Ancillary Justice_. She has fantastic ideas, really
| interesting stuff. But the plot is _awful_. There 's just
| no interesting story there, and the ideas aren't enough to
| carry the book so it winds up being a bore to read. And I
| don't find that to be the only case of such a thing.
| pfdietz wrote:
| As I get older, I find it hard to maintain suspension of
| disbelief when reading SF. Too many of the tropes have grown
| old and stale. I also find it hard to maintain interest,
| since too many stories are describing a time beyond when I
| can reasonably believe I'll be alive.
|
| It's also clear that predictions of the future in SF stories
| are no more connected to reality than are outright fantasy
| stories. So why not just read fantasy if you want escapism?
| The takeover of SF by fantasy should have been predictable.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| As someone who bought originals of Gibson's omni stories... old
| issues are surprisingly cheap on eBay, if anyone is curious.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Those magazines from the 70s and 80s look so good!
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Well it was nice while it lasted
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| > _In a public post on the official Facebook page of Asimov 's
| Science Fiction, the magazine's editor Sheila Williams said
| "We're excited about Asimov's future with our new owners. We
| have lots of great stories lined up. There's no change to our
| editorial staff. Our new owners are readers who love genre
| magazines and we're looking forward to working with them."_
|
| Seems like things are going to be fine.
|
| In all honesty, Amazon cutting digital magazine subscriptions
| and shifting everything over to "KindleUnlimited" was hugely
| damaging to these magazines and probably outright killed their
| business model. The new owners are apparently fans who are
| keeping the thing going practically as a charity.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| This is very likely. Bezos' early investment in political
| lobbying really paid off for them; bought them a judge who
| effectively killed competition from Apple, and they've been
| free of antitrust scrutiny since 2005.
|
| Won't help them much under Musk's governance, though.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| I never read any SF magazines, but "Analog Science Fiction and
| Fact" seems to be a super cool name for a SF magazine.
|
| What are the most popular Analog/Embedded hobbyist magazines out
| there? I know Pi has one or more, but I always feel Pi to be a
| bit too high level for my taste.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Ooh, I hadn't thought of these mags (sort of the size of a
| paperback) for years. I used to read Galaxy and Analog in the
| mid-70s. I wonder where people sell or will sell SF novels these
| days? They were published multi-part in the mags.
|
| I stopped reading them because I moved to London in the late 70s,
| and was frankly broke because of housing and other costs.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Someone tried to relaunch Galaxy last year. They produced an
| August 2024 issue, none since. No idea what's going on with it.
| The same people tried to do a relaunch of Worlds of If a year
| prior, just one issue too. I honestly don't know whether to
| wish luck to the people doing this, or if they'd just ruin
| them...
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Never got into these but loved AHMM for a while.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I'm not sure how many people realize the number of great sci-fi
| stories that started as anthologies in these magazines. It's a
| foundation of the entire genre that often goes entirely
| unappreciated.
| whartung wrote:
| Someone probably knows this in more detail, and I can easily get
| the magazine wrong. But I'll share the anecdote, maybe it'll ring
| someone else's bell.
|
| Back in the day, talking 40s to 50s, Analog published a letter to
| the editor that was "from the future". Several years in the
| future. The writer was commenting on the stories, the topics, the
| writers, etc. in that issue.
|
| Several years later (and I want to say it was, like, 9 years),
| Analog published that issue based on that letter. They contracted
| the authors and stories, the whole thing.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| One year later.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fac...
|
| >In the November 1948 issue, Campbell published a letter to the
| editor by a reader named Richard A. Hoen that contained a
| detailed ranking of the contents of an issue "one year in the
| future". Campbell went along with the joke and contracted
| stories from most of the authors mentioned in the letter that
| would follow the Hoen's imaginary story titles. One of the
| best-known stories from that issue is "Gulf", by Heinlein.
| Other stories and articles were written by some of the most
| famous authors of the time: Asimov, Sturgeon, del Rey, van
| Vogt, de Camp, and the astronomer R. S. Richardson.
| mcswell wrote:
| Analog used to publish the rankings a few months after each
| issue came out. When the actual rankings for this issue came
| out, was there any correspondence to Hoen's prophesied
| rankings?
| themadturk wrote:
| I read Analog avidly in the mid-to-late 60s (yeah, 12 being the
| golden age of science fiction). I only remember one story for
| sure I read there, Dean McLaughlin's _A Hawk Among The Sparrows_
| , but I'm pretty sure I caught some others serialized there
| during that era. Good to see these mags are still around.
| greesil wrote:
| I was gifted an Asimov subscription back in the late 90s, and
| when I went to college stopped reading. I recently had subscribed
| again and found it not as good as I remembered. As a kid it was
| definitely hit or miss, but as an adult it's all misses. I can
| figure out if the magazine has changed, or if I have changed, or
| both. But, it feels like it has gone downhill. Honestly, the
| whole genre. Maybe it's hard to write sci fi now what we're
| actually living it. Or, anyone with talent has gone elsewhere.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| No idea if Asimov's got worse, but what we're living right now
| is so much stupider than any science fiction. AI, but it's not
| actually intelligent and it often produces garbage. A fascist
| takeover of the US from the inside by the dumbest billionaires
| imaginable, because an entire segment of society got bored with
| their lives during pandemic lockdown and decided they'd rather
| live in an action movie than consensus reality.
|
| Nearly infinite computing power on a glass rectangle in your
| pocket, and it's only made humanity stupider, again thanks to
| billionaires who are too stupid to understand where their money
| and power derives from. And how it can be taken away.
| pfdietz wrote:
| We're living in a time when chickens are coming home to
| roost. A nation can't sustain greatness by borrowing forever.
| SF could have helped people come to grips with this
| inevitability, but I guess it didn't.
| greesil wrote:
| The solution was obvious circa 1940 - 1970s. It wasn't
| science fiction, it was what was in place then.
| coldpie wrote:
| I think it's probably you. I've been a subscriber to Asimovs
| for 5+ years and every issue has at least one or two stories
| that make me say "wow." But I figure at some point I will have
| read enough stories that I'll run out of "wow"s. Maybe you're
| there already.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Yikes. I wonder if they will use the back catalog of science
| fiction stories to train AI and give us new forms of dystopia.
| genewitch wrote:
| What, you don't like the current dystopia?
| mcswell wrote:
| There is a freely browsable and readable collection of stories
| from the 40s, 50s and 60s, and a few later, mostly from Analog,
| here: https://www.freesfonline.net/Magazines2.html
| fractallyte wrote:
| Here's a more or less complete archive:
| https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/AST/ (Astounding) and
| https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/AN.htm (Analog).
|
| Luminist is one of the treasures of the Internet, right up
| there with Wikipedia and Archive - well worth donating to.
| dsign wrote:
| I think we have killed science fiction with all sort of dumb
| things, but specially social media. And I don't mean that people
| spend more time on social media than reading (but they definitely
| do), but that in social media everybody is a bad critic, and that
| influences authors.
|
| Just to give an example, I put off for many years reading Larry
| Niven's ringworld series, because I read in Twitter that the book
| was sexist. Well, it was sexist, but so were things at the time,
| and Ringworld is an amazing book otherwise, with some actual
| science sprinkled here and there, a lot of humor, and it's
| relatively low on drama.
|
| Another science fiction killer was Hollywood. They want so much
| drama and special effects,and it should be appealing to people
| who don't know any science at all.
|
| Who knows, maybe AI slop will save us by making us value logical
| consistency in art, something that current transformers and LLMs
| are very bad at. But I have more faith on our top-of-the-line AIs
| becoming logically consistent way before popular culture shifts
| in that direction, since current economic forces press for
| smarter AIs and stupider people.
| yew wrote:
| I think we should probably ban reading old books. They seem to
| infect people with bad ideas.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Another SF&F magazine I enjoy is Clarkesworld. I met the editor
| at Worldcon last year and it was nice hearing about how they
| manage to publish online for free and still pay authors.
|
| https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/
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