Well, here we are, celebrating the 31st anniversary of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. This milestone may not be as exciting as the 30th. It would probably be harder to mark the occasion with an anthology similar to last year’s successful 30th Anniversary Anthology (still available at Amazon. com, by the way). No collection of editorials from the magazine’s past editors grace this issue. Robert Silverberg hasn’t marked the occasion with a special Reflections column, and, while we have a terrific line-up of stories, we haven’t asked each of the authors to reminisce about his or her history with Asimov’s.
Still, the significance of thirty-one years of publication impressed me this summer while reading through Worlds of If: A Retrospective Anthology edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, and published by Bluejay Books in 1986. If and its companion magazine, Galaxy, were two of the SF magazines I grew up on. If, which first came out in March 1952, ceased regular publication after December 1974 when it was incorporated into Galaxy. Galaxy, which began about a year and a half earlier in October 1950, made it through thirty years, with one issue out in 1980—its thirty-first year—before it, too, ceased regular publication.
Legendary editors who worked at one or both of these magazines include H.L. Gold, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, and James Baen. The breathtaking list of authors whose stories appeared in these magazines include Philip K. Dick, Cordwainer Smith, Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov, R.A. Lafferty, Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, Philip José Farmer, Robert Silverberg, James Tiptree, Jr., Theodore Sturgeon, and Clifford D. Simak. I don’t suppose it’s surprising that each of these authors also has a place on the list of writers that formed the backbone of my teenaged reading and helped to create my earliest perceptions of what good SF writing was all about.
When I joined the staff of Asimov’s in 1982, the magazine was at the close of its sixth year. While If had made it through 175 issues and Galaxy to 254, Asimov’s was on its 56th. If and Galaxy’s numbers and years of publication seemed like noble goals to aspire to, but they were hardly within reach. We were closing in, though, on some historic pulp magazines that surely must have influenced the formative years of many of the If and Galaxy authors. In numbers of issues, we had already passed Super Science Stories 1940-1951 (31 issues), and were in striking distance of Planet Stories 1939-1955 (71 issues) and Startling Stories 1944-1955 (99 issues), whose respectable runs had all ended before I was born. However, we had a long way to go before catching up with Thrilling Wonder Stories, another venerable magazine that began life as Wonder Stories in 1929 and which, like so many others, ended its run in 1955—nearly 27 years and 189 issues later.
But 25 intervening years have flown by, and, altogether, we’ve lovingly put out 357 separate physical issues (the whole number on our contents page is higher because all double issues count as two editorial issues). Somewhere along the way we passed Imagination (63 issues), New Worlds (201 magazine issues), Omni (201 print issues), and Fantastic (208 issues). Due to years on hiatus, we managed to catch up with Weird Tales (first published in 1923 and still going strong today at 340 issues). Even though it has ceased publication, it will be sometime before we come close to Amazing Stories’ 609 issues that appeared between April 1926 and March 2005.
Of course, there are two magazines currently available that make nearly every other publication look like a slacker. F&SF, which will be celebrating its 60th anniversary in a couple of years, is currently on its 666th issue, while Analog/Astounding dwarfs us all at 988 issues in 78 years. Now that we’ve been around over a third of Analog’s lifetime and more than half F&SF ’s, we’re not the new kid anymore, but we’ll always be the kid sister to these two periodicals.
It’s not uncommon in this field to find people pining for a past where there was little to no TV, SF rarely appeared in book form, role-playing and electronic games were a thing of the future, the Internet was beyond our imagination, and large numbers of people actually read SF magazines. We know there was a time when the circulation figures for all periodicals were far higher than they are today and the newsstands exploded with a profusion of genre magazines. It doesn’t take much digging, though, to find that some of this perception of the SF magazines’ glorious past is partly seen though the fog of memory.
While we are mostly aware of the long-term survivors, the graveyard of science fiction magazines is filled with short-term reigns. Some, like the still deeply mourned Unknown (39 issues published between March 1939 and October 1943), found their lives ended unnaturally by wartime paper shortages. Others fell victim to newsstand distribution reorganizations and fiascos.
According to Mike Ashley’s excellent historical documentation in his three-volume Story of the Science Fiction Magazines, even some of the longer-running magazines were filled with reprints or just published stories about one continuing character such as Ki-Gor, White Lord of the Jungle; Captain Future; Doc Savage; or The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. It may be that these magazines simply couldn’t sustain the reader’s interest after a certain point.
Whatever the reason for their demise, the vast majority of SF magazines, with wonderful sounding names like Astonishing Stories (1940-1943), Destiny (1950-1954), Fantastic Universe (1953-1960), and Stirring Science Stories (1941-1942), were unable to make it out of their first decade. While a large number of genre magazines may not hold sway on today’s newsstands, those that can be found there, such as Analog, F&SF, Interzone (founded in 1982), and Realms of Fantasy (founded 1994), each have a long and rich publishing history. In addition, many exciting newer publishing outlets can be purchased through mail order or the Internet or are simply available as e-zines online.
When I look back at the illustrious history of Galaxy and so many other fine magazines, I find I’m very proud of each of Asimov’s thirty-one years. We’ve been part of this field for a significant chunk of time, and look forward to contributing to its future as well.
