In my first rapturous years as a reader of science fiction magazines, more than half a century ago, I greeted the advent of any new title with immense excitement. What a thrill it was to see an unfamiliar cover looking back at me from the array of magazines at the corner newsstand, and discover that another newcomer had arrived! 1949 brought The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1950 delivered Galaxy and Imagination and Worlds Beyond, among others, 1952 produced If, Space Science Fiction, and half a dozen more, and the never-to-be-matched bumper crop of 1953 included Fantastic Universe, Future Science Fiction, Universe, Science Stories, Vortex, Beyond, Science Fiction Plus, and ever so many more. Most of them lasted just a few issues and all of them are ancient history, now, except for the perdurable Fantasy & Science Fiction. But for me the arrival of each in the candy store is still a well-remembered red-letter day, betokening who knew what fabulous fictional delights.

On the other hand, when the first issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine made its appearance in the early weeks of 1977, I confess that I paid hardly any attention at all.

For one thing, I was no longer the starstruck teenager, gaga over all things science fictional, of the early 1950s. I was in my forties now, a veteran professional writer with decades of published work behind me, and I not only had virtually stopped reading science fiction, I had given up writing it. My life had grown very complicated in the mid-1970s, I felt terribly tired, and I told anyone who was willing to listen that I had retired from writing forever. So I dutifully bought the first issue of Asimov’s, because it was still my age-old and unbreakable habit, going back to those rapturous teen days, to buy the first issue of any new SF magazine. But I glanced through it with what could best be termed indifference, and put it on the shelf, and that, I thought, was that. No longer did the coming of a new SF magazine open infinite vistas for me. Since I had given up writing the stuff, and wasn’t much interested in reading it, I didn’t see how Isaac’s new magazine could be of any relevance to my life at all. Little did I know.

I have that first issue before me now, and from its pristine condition I suspect that I never did get around to reading it. In format Issue Number One isn’t extraordinarily different from the magazine that’s in your hands right now. The page size is about half an inch shorter, and it has 192 pages instead of today’s 144, but the typeface was a little larger back then, so the overall word-count of the two magazines is probably about the same. The text runs right across the page from right to left, book-style, rather than being divided into columns according to the usual custom of magazines. Instead of today’s simply styled straight-up-and-down cover heading that tells us that the magazine’s name is Asimov’s Science Fiction, the name of the magazine on that 1977 issue is splashed across half the cover in giant curving yellow letters against a startling red background, and took up even more space because the magazine, in those days, was called Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Just to reinforce the point, the part of the cover that didn’t blazon forth the name of the magazine contained a photograph of Isaac, a lovely picture of him in a dark jacket and light-blue necktie, looking formidably intelligent and quite handsome.

The price of that first issue was one dollar. (The price has quadrupled since then, but so has the price of almost everything else.) It was dated “Spring 1977,” because the cautious publisher, Joel Davis, was launching the newcomer as a quarterly. (It was such an immediate success—within a year and a half it was the best-selling magazine in the field—that it shifted to bimonthly publication in 1978, to monthly publication in 1979, and for a giddy time beginning in 1981 published thirteen issues a year before gradually subsiding back to today’s ten-times-a-year schedule.)

In my one indifferent glance at the Spring 1977 Asimov’s I concluded that it was probably a pretty good magazine, and that if I were interested in writing science fiction at all, I would probably want to write for it. Isaac’s presence on the masthead as editorial director guaranteed a certain level of quality, after all. And the actual editor, the man who would be picking the stories, was the knowledgeable and sophisticated George Scithers, whom I knew to be well grounded in science fiction. (His associate editor at the outset was the young writer Gardner Dozois, who had already established himself as a storyteller of distinctive skills.) The first issue contained stories by such accomplished veterans of SF as Arthur C. Clarke, Gordon R. Dickson, and Fred Saberhagen, and a novelette by the brilliant new writer John Varley. (There were actually two Varley stories in the issue, one under a penname, but I didn’t find that out until much later. The other one was “Air Raid,” published as by “Herb Boehm,” which has been much anthologized since and made into a film.)

But I wasn’t writing science fiction in 1977, and, as I said, had no plans ever to do so again, so the new magazine receded to the back-burner part of my mind. I still maintained a social interest in the field, though. And over the next year or two I began to hear considerable buzz about the new magazine from my writer friends. It was, they said, the most exciting newcomer to emerge in the field in many years. They were all writing for it. George Scithers won the Hugo award in 1978 as Best Professional Editor, and won it again in 1980. Stories published in the magazine were being nominated regularly for both the Hugo and the Nebula, and some of them were winning them.

I ended my “retirement” from writing late in 1978 with a new novel, Lord Valentine’s Castle, and began to think about writing a few new short stories, too. When I saw Scithers at the World Science Fiction Convention not long afterward he asked me whether I might care to write one for him, and I said I’d think about it if I ever did start doing them again.

Little did I know!

I did start writing stories again in January of 1980, and a few months later, after another gentle hint from George, I wrote my first for Asimov’s, a very short piece called “The Regulars,” with which I made my debut in these pages in the issue of May 11, 1981. (That was how they were dated then.) Soon afterward I followed up Lord Valentine’s Castle with a group of stories set on the same planet, Majipoor, and three of them appeared in consecutive Asimov’s issues in December of 1981 and January and February of 1982, with others to follow. And so it went for me thereafter at Asimov’s as the magazine came to occupy a central position in my short-story-writing life. When Shawna McCarthy became editor later in the 1980s I did the novella “Sailing to Byzantium” for her, the first of my award-winners for Asimov’s, and for her successor Gardner Dozois I did a whole raft of stories and novellas, maybe two dozen of them, including two more award-winners (“Gilgamesh in the Outback” (1987), and “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another” (1990). And so on and so on ever since, even unto this very issue. And a year and a half after Isaac’s death in 1992 I took on the task of writing this quasi-editorial column, “Reflections,” which has appeared in all but one issue of Asimov’s in the past thirteen years. (The one time I missed I was fighting a book deadline, and my wife Karen wrote a column in my place.)

Which amply demonstrates how important Asimov’s Science Fiction has been to me across some twenty-seven of its thirty years of existence, and how foolish I feel about having paid so little attention to it in its first three years. How important the magazine has been to its readers over the thirty years of its life has been made amply clear by the astonishing string of Hugo and Nebula awards its stories have gained—I hope Sheila Williams runs the full list somewhere in this issue—and the many honors that have come to its editors as well.

Now, in the capable and experienced hands of Sheila, its current editor, Asimov’s enters its fourth decade of publication. Only a few SF magazines have reached that milestone. The list is headed, of course, by our companion magazine Analog, the once and future champion, which goes back to 1930. (But Analog, then called Astounding Stories, went out of business for six months in 1933.) The field’s pioneer, Amazing Stories, ran from 1926 to 2005, but it too suffered interruptions of publication along the way, several of them, and seems to be undergoing permanent interruption now. Weird Tales, which published a great deal of SF, had a thirty-year-run from 1923 to 1954, and has been revived several times since, but there have been some very big gaps in its publication history. Only Fantasy & Science Fiction, of all the SF magazines we have had, has managed to continue without ever breaking continuity from its first issue to its current one, a span that now is approaching sixty years. But Asimov’s hasn’t been doing too badly in that area. It has sailed serenely along for three full decades, now, never missing a beat under three different corporate owners and five editors, and will, I trust, hang in there many decades more. I like to think that I’ll be around in this column for at least some of that time. I hope you’ll be here too.