Editorial
Asimov’s Science Fiction: A Reader’s Perspective
by Piet Nel
For Asimov’s Science Fiction, it is the age of milestones. With the January/February issue of 2024, Sheila Williams surpassed Gardner Dozois’s tenure of nineteen years at the helm, to become this magazine’s longest serving editor. The September/October issue of 2025 was the five hundredth physical issue, even though the official numbers are out of step due to the “double issue” publication schedule. And, of course, the magazine will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary with the March/April issue of 2027.
I wasn’t a reader from the very beginning—and yet, I remember seeing the very first issue on a newsstand, with its red cover and portrait of Ol’ Muttonchops. There was no internet in those days, and for all I knew there were scores of American science fiction digests. I didn’t know that this one was going to be special, so I didn’t buy it. The only science fiction magazine I’d bought regularly up to that point was Science Fiction Monthly, a British publication, and from 1978 I was a loyal follower of Omni.
I occasionally sampled a digest, and I believe I bought an issue of Asimov’s for the first time in 1982. After that I bought an occasional number, but it was the February 1985 issue that convinced me that I had to become a regular reader of the magazine. That issue featured Robert Silverberg’s novella “Sailing to Byzantium,” and I realized right away that it was a major story. It helped a good deal that I’d studied W. B. Yeats’s Byzantium poems at university, even though I was a young working man at the time and had to read the story in several late-night sessions.
From January 1986, I decided to buckle down. That January issue happened to be the first one in which Gardner Dozois was officially listed as the editor, although I paid no attention to such things at the time. I bought every issue after that, apart from the occasional one that simply never turned up on our newsstands in South Africa. There were also two runs of issues I never bought, due to upheavals in life, but other than that I’ve been a dedicated buyer of the magazine since 1986. I was able to buy print copies until 2009, when distribution stopped. After that, I subscribed to the magazine directly—the print version until 2017, and the digital one after that.
Memories of great stories linger. There was Geoffrey A. Landis’s spellbinding “Ripples in the Dirac Sea,” which I read during an extended lunch hour, sunk deep into one of those boxy government chairs. Kij Johnson’s sublime “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” was another one I read at work, during one of those interminable delays before court began. A few other favorites: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Ether, OR,” with its luminous prose, Connie Willis’s “Chance” (a mysterious and unclassifiable story), Robert Reed’s “Roxie,” with its heart-wrenching ending, and so many others that I’ll just stop there.
But despite all the great memories, I still had difficulty remembering exactly which stories I’d read and which I hadn’t. So, around 2005 I decided to create a spreadsheet of the fiction contents of all my magazines, and a few years later I began to expand it to all issues, including the many issues I’d never seen. Now, this isn’t exactly pioneering work. I rely heavily on online sources such as the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, created by Al von Ruff, and on the tireless and continuing work of Phil Stephensen-Payne at Galactic Central. Still, it’s fun to assemble an index to Asimov’s in spreadsheet form. For starters, it’s an outlet for my penchant for Putting Things in Order (as Pooh Bear might have said). But it’s also a handy way to extract statistics from data.
For example, do you know which author has contributed the most stories to Asimov’s? Why, it’s the unstoppable Robert Reed, with eighty-eight stories published (in this magazine alone) from 1990 to the end of 2025. Some of the other stalwarts of Asimov’s are Kristine Kathryn Rusch (fifty-seven stories since 1989), Nancy Kress (fifty-five stories since 1978), and Allen Steele (fifty-four stories since 1988). Knocking on the door of the exclusive fifty-story club are James Patrick Kelly and Michael Swanwick, with forty-nine stories each. No pressure, guys!
The Poet Laureate of Asimov’s is Robert Frazier, who has contributed 136 poems since 1979, closely rivaled by Bruce Boston, with 130 poems since 1983. I have enjoyed tracking the major science fiction awards as well, and Naomi Kritzer’s win at the 2025 Hugo Awards brings the total number of Hugo winners that first appeared in Asimov’s to fifty-six—more than the total for any other magazine, and a record that will surely not be equaled in my lifetime. Connie Willis was the winner of eight of those, another record, but it’s Kris Rusch, with eleven wins, who has won the most Readers’ Awards for fiction. Earlier this year, I began to extend my database to nonfiction, but that will keep me busy for a long time to come.
Bored yet? Trust me, there’s a lot more. Still, the reading is more important. I do my best to read and finish every story published in Asimov’s, but it’s a lonely pursuit if you live in South Africa. I recently asked the members of two Facebook groups, including Science Fiction South Africa, whether there were any readers of the major genre magazines. The result? Crickets. It’s a blessing to be able to share my love of short SF with international readers, thanks to the internet.
Short science fiction may be a niche interest, but Asimov’s has been a beacon of stability and continuing excellence in the turbulent publishing landscape. Long may it prosper.