"Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's and Analog acquired

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.

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-...

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/

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...

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!

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

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't realize FaSF was teetering on the brink.

Yikes. I wonder if they will use the back catalog of science fiction stories to train AI and give us new forms of dystopia.

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.

Never got into these but loved AHMM for a while.

Well it was nice while it lasted

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.