My Future Life, and Yours

From FutureLife March 14, 2012

Several days ago, I finished reading the final article in the final issue of a long-dead magazine, Future Life. It was the culmination of an off-and-on effort over several years to read the entire 31-issue run of the magazine.

It’s an achievement of dubious status, I realize.

Some things have changed since I began the effort to read every issue of the magazine. My original intention had been to come up with a business plan for a similar magazine. But over the next several years, I realized that there already were a number of publications that served the market for science-interested people who also love science fiction. None of them were the same as Future Life, naturally, but they covered more than enough of the same topics that there would not have been room for a new magazine in the same market space.

And yet, I continued reading, partly out of a self-induced urge to complete what I’d started, and partly because I was learning a lot about publishing by reading these 30-year-old magazines. I’ve been in the editorial business long enough to be able to tell when a short news article is nothing more than a warmed-over press release; I have a pretty good sense of when an article is published basically as a favor to someone; I know enough about paper weights, page counts, and coatings to be able to gauge the financial health of a publication.

I was also learning other things, though; perhaps it is better to say I was being reminded of other things. Future Life published its last issue in late 1981 (the cover date is December 1981, so it was actually released in late October of that year). Its entire life spanned only four years of eight annual issues. But the articles it contained reminded me of the public mood at the time and how it changed dramatically over the next decade. In the late 1970s, despite all of the country’s economic problems, the expectation was that we would keep exploring space, building permanent orbiting space colonies by the end of the century. The feature interview in Future Life #31 was with James Beggs, the Reagan administration’s newly installed administrator of NASA. The interview is largely devoted to him explaining all of the economic restraints that were being placed on the space agency. Basically: We’d like to do A, B, and C; but budget director David Stockman is only going to allow us to do A, and we’ll have to scale that down, too.

From FutureLife March 14, 2012

Naturally, NASA didn’t get to do much of squat, other than limp along with the already-outdated space shuttle, and colonization plans – commercial or private – simply receded from memory as the deep economic recession of the early 1980s took hold. It was a time when Americans went through something the British have gone through numerous times in the postwar years: austerity. We didn’t like it then any more than we like it now.

The country would come roaring out of that recession, its economy partially Reaganized (the full Reaganization would really take place under successors Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama) and its priorities much more refocused on the ground in front of us. But the futures dreamed of and written about by Future Life’s staff were largely forgotten. In that four-year period, those futures included everything from galactic civilization to farming the seabeds to floating cities to life extension to ion drives to orbiting space junk to space warfare to overpopulation to laser art and on and on.

To its credit and unlike competitor Omni magazine, Future Life always remained refreshingly skeptical about UFOs. If Future Life had an obsession, though, it was scientist Gerard K. O’Neill’s “high frontier” concept of orbiting space colonies, and many articles, columns, space art, and news briefs were taken up with working out the practical steps of such a plan. What would be the economics (and the economy) of colonies? How would you transport people and cargo to them? How would you exercise in zero-g?

From FutureLife March 14, 2012

Future Life was a mixture of science and science fiction (films, books, paintings, etc.), and I think the magazine was an attempt to take the energy that the science fiction fan often burns off on daydreaming and self-absorption, and expend it instead on solving real problems and setting the fan’s sights on how to put their ideals to real-world uses. That, too, is an approach that I think has been lost. It might have been the particular interests of Future Life’s publishers and editors at that point in time, or it might have been a marriage between their efforts and the huge influx of new fans inspired by Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Star Trek movie, but after Future Life died, science fiction media coverage elsewhere tended to grow ever-more narrowly focused on feeding fanboy obsessions, without introducing any higher expectations for that fan.

I had only begun reading Future Life magazine a couple issues before it stopped newsstand circulation and became a largely subscription-only publication. By the time my eighth-grade self was able to scrape together enough money to pay for a subscription, the magazine ceased publication altogether. It would be almost three decades before I cobbled together a complete collection of the magazine and begin reading what I’d missed. That’s how I came to see what we’ve all missed out on these past few decades.

From FutureLife March 14, 2012

• For my issue-by-issue description of Future Life, see my main website.

Sincerely Flattered

I was wondering how long it would take for this to happen. My chronicling of each issue of Starlog magazine in my Starlog Project has become the standard resource for people describing issues of that late great science-fiction film/tv/books magazine or looking for which issue included what article. That was my intention.

The latest proof of this status is the listing I stumbled across this morning on eBay's Austrian site, in which someone named "spaceranger2000" listed a copy of Starlog #10 from 1977, and to describe the issue's contents, Herr/Frau/Fraulein (your guess is as good as mine) Spaceranger2000 uses my Starlog Project writeup.

Frankly, I'm rather pleased. I would have preferred attribution, natürlich, but my road to worldwide fame and fortune isn't necessarily a fast highway.

Well, it's not quite imitation; it's really just re-use. But nonetheless I'm flattered.

Read more: The Starlog Project's permanent site, the Starlog Project on my blog, and my similar project with Starlog's short-lived sister magazine Future Life.

On Stage with Michio Kaku

Above, courtesy of The Commonwealth Club's great photographer, Ed Ritger, is famed physicist and co-founder of string field theory Dr. Michio Kaku (right). I'm the other gentleman in the photo, which shows us on stage at the Cubberley Theatre in Palo Alto, California, where the Club event took place before a sold-out audience of about 300 people.

I'd love to tell you that we were on stage together so that Kaku could ask my advice about various perplexing scientific problems, but in truth we were there fielding audience questions about his new book, Physics of the Future.

More on this as I write it up. But, to put it briefly, if you ever have the chance to talk with a genius physicist, do so. And if that genius is Dr. Kaku, you'll enjoy every minute of it.

Republibot Remembers Fantastic Films, Sci Fi Universe, Starlog, & More

Sorry this is so late, but I only today discovered this post on Republibot, a conservative science-fiction web site. The post remembers what I call the last golden age of science-fiction magazines, the late 1970s, early 1980s – if you define such magazines not as the fiction mags but the splashier, flashier movie/TV/book media magazines that made Kerry O'Quinn and Norman Jacobs rich over at Starlog Group.

Republibot's comments on the various magazines are entertaining. I don't agree with him on a number of things; if Republibot thinks Starlog's journalism was bad, I don't know how Fantastic Films could rate higher on that writer's favorites list. To put it in right-wing terms Republibot might understand: A wag once labelled New Criterion editor Hilton Kramer the "poor man's Norman Podhoretz," which is a terribly nasty thing to say. But funny. Well, I always thought of Fantastic Films as the poor man's Starlog; it wasn't as good, it had fewer readers, its design was a mess, and its writing was at times laughable. It is a sad comment about the world of genre publishing that Fantastic Films was arguably the best of Starlog's competition (until the early 1990s, when new American and British publishers launched genre titles).

But to each his own. Despite my obvious bias, I also enjoyed a number of issues of Fantastic Films during its brief lifespan, and I obviously enjoyed Starlog's sister magazine, Future Life, which Republibot remembers fondly. However, I definitely don't share Republibot's love for early Sci-Fi Universe magazines. Published at first by the Larry Flynt family of publications (around the same time it launched Film Threat magazine), Sci-Fi Universe is the only magazine I know of to have published an interview with Harlan Ellison that was boring. I mean, you have to try to make him sound boring, something SFU managed to pull off.

But quibbling about films and politics and magazines is what makes genre life so much fun. That also makes me happy to have discovered Republibot.

China's New Super-Bus. Or, Why Isn't America Building the Future Anymore?

In her landmark science-fiction novel China Mountain Zhang, writer Maureen F. McHugh takes her young hero to China, where he rides a fantastic public bus that assembles and disassembles its separated cars depending on their individual destinations. When they're all together as one, they make up a large, multi-car, double-decker bus, but each car will go soaring off on its own route, or will join up with the rest of the bus as their routes merge.

From my sloppy description, that might be hard to imagine. I heartily recommend McHugh's very good book to you if you want to get her idea in better form. But the key point is that in the book, China has become the leading power in the world, the United States reduced to a near vassal-like status. All of the innovation and energy in the world comes from China.

I think it would be overstating things to say that that's becoming the situation today. But when I heard about proposals for a Chinese super-bus that would coast over other vehicles on the road, I thought, Isn't that the kind of so-crazy-it-might-work futuristic idea that America is supposed to create? Or Germany created before it went kablooey last century?

When I lived in Chicago a decade ago, the city buses were being fitted with technology that would let them prolong a green light if they were approaching an intersection. This was expected to speed up bus service, where buses were averaging something like a mere 13 mph in city traffic.

Now watch the video below for an illustration of the Chinese concept for speeding up urban transportation. The video is in Chinese, but even those of us who don't know Mandarin or Cantonese can still get the gist of the idea from the video. (If the embedded video doesn't work, you can watch it here.)



China Mountain Zhang aside, China's ascendancy to the pinnacle of world power is not likely in the near future, but it is rapidly ascending to the height of economic power. This year it became the number-one user of energy on the planet, outdoing even us profligate energy-wasters in America. Last year it overtook Germany as the world's third-largest economy, and this year it is claiming to have supplanted Japan as the world's second-largest economy, though many people are disputing that claim. (Not a big deal if it's wrong, because it'll be true soon enough.)

I'm not afraid of a wealthy and powerful China. I would prefer it be a democratic and free China, rather than the authoritarian and sometimes brutal China that it is. But it is no longer a Maoist China, thank god, and its rise – along with India's – will help counterbalance the threat of violent extremism in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Also, China is unlikely to supplant America as the world's most influential and powerful nation any time soon. Or possibly any time. China faces incredible internal pressures from economic dislocations, income disparities that surpass an American Republican's wildest dreams, and widespread corrupt officials, and it's surrounded by often pliant but also nervous neighboring nations. No country rises so far without tremendous disruptions. The United States tore itself in two with its civil war.  England went through horrific civil wars and persecutions. France invented modern state terror and marauded across Europe. Germany lost control of its crazies and thereby lost control of its civilization. Japan turned itself over to brutal imperialist leaders who left mass murder in their wake. And the list goes on. I hate to say it, because I'd much rather see eternal peace and freedom and prosperity, but China is just as likely to hit the wall of its internal contradictions at some point. We can only hope it comes out of it freer and more peaceful than it came out of the horrors of the Maoist period.

But until that happens, we've got the possibility of giant buses soaring along Chinese streets. America should be building those, or dreaming those dreams. Instead, we're busy entertaining our populist crazies, we're spending ourselves into long-term oblivion (and no, I don't mean the stimulus spending, that's a different, temporary, and necessary profligacy), and we're fighting wars we should be handling differently.

I want the buses.

Slideshow of Select Future Life Magazine Spreads

Okay, so I'm kind of testing Picasa's embeddable slideshow player here. These images are all spreads from my favorite deceased magazine, Future Life. For more on Future Life (published for four years by Starlog three decades ago), see my chronicle of the magazine, which also includes cover images from every issue.

The Starlog Project: Starlog #94, May 1985: A Bigger Package

Starlog's editors make a number of changes to the magazine starting with this issue, and they're all positive. First, there are more pages in the package -- a total of 76 instead of 70; they got rid of the two-page inside front cover foldout, and added eight non-color pages (printed on colored non-glossy stock, such as a blue or yellow). Two new sections also premiere: Future Life revives the name of the late, great magazine, and it features science and space-related articles and news bits; Fan Network is a neat little section that answers reader questions (such as, "Whatever happened to the Silver Surfer move?"), features convention news and calendar, fan club listings, and other fan-centric news items, assembled by junior staffers Carr D'Angelo and Eddie Berganza. And, thankfully, the publishers seem to be printing on a slightly better black-and-white paper stock for the non-color pages. In fact, they might have even switched printers again, because the color pages have better color registration. All-in-all, combined with a well-chosen selection of feature articles, this iteration of Starlog is quite good, a welcome revival of sorts.

On the corporate front, the company releases the latest (volume four) of its Starlog Scrapbook special, this time featuring Jane Fonda's Barbarella on the cover.

Starlog #94
76 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $2.95

One change that actually is a mixed-emotions situation was to make David Gerrold's long-running column appear every-other-month instead of monthly. I still don't know if that was the decision of Gerrold (who would, in a couple year's time, join the team that finally brings Star Trek back to weekly television, and likely had plenty of projects on his plate to keep himself busy) or if the publishers and editors actually thought they should reduce the presence of one of their defining voices in the magazine. Dunno. Nonetheless, they made the change, and at the same time they introduced a rather nifty guest column that would bring into the pages a number of writers -- some well known, others less so -- on a pretty wide variety of topics. They could have had both a Gerrold column and a guest column -- after all, at one point the magazine featured columns by Gerrold, Susan Sacket, Jonathan Eberhart, and David Houston, and it still found room for plenty of feature articles and the other departments. But they chose this path.

The rundown: In his From the Bridge column, publisher Kerry O'Quinn discusses the joys and the all-consuming passion of devoting yourself to projects that fascinate you; in the Communications section, readers share lots of ideas (sparked by what, I don't know) about George Lucas and his Star Wars creation, offer feedback (on Runaway, Starman, The Ewok Adventure, and The Terminator), defend England against David Gerrold, and more; in the Log Entries short-news section, Edward Gross (who, unless my mind is getting rusty, makes his first of many appearances in the magazine) chats with Gremlins writer Chris Columbus, David McDonnell previews an E.T. sequel in book form, Adam Pirani reports on the reopening of the James Bond film set destroyed by fire (see issue #87), David Hutchison previews new video casette releases, and more.

Mike Clark interviews V star June Chadwick; Fan Network debuts, packed with news and information; Adam Pirani interviews Robert Watts, producer of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; Jim George and J. Cat McDowell interview Star Trek's Mr. Scott, James Doohan; the new Future Life section premieres with an article by Max Rottersman on the use of the space shuttle to retrieve satellites, plus short news reports on claims of the discovery of an extra-solar planet, NASA's 1985 launch schedule (including the classified mission on September 18 with a Department of Defense payload), and more; former editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland Forrest J. Ackerman is the first Other Voices guest columnist, and he announces a contest; William Rabkin interviews Ladyhawke producer Lauren Shuler (with a sidebar by Lee Goldberg chatting with Michelle Pfeiffer); Steve Swires interviews writer John Sayles (The Brother from Another Planet, Clan of the Cave Bear); Lee Goldberg previews the James Michener TV adaptation Space; in part six of his never-ending series, David Hutchison looks at staging the walker fighting in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi; Brian Lowry interviews William Katt, star of Baby and the late The Greatest American Hero; Lowry also interviews actor Yaphet Kotto, star of Alien and Live and Let Die, among others; Cary Bates interviews veteran film composer John Barry; Dennis Fischer examines the TV series Otherworld (which, I have to admit, I'd never heard of before I reviewed the issue for this Project, despite the fact that there frankly weren't very many genre programs around back in the mid-1980s); and Howard Zimmerman's Lastword explains how the magazine decides what to feature.

All in all, a great issue and a good magazine.

"[The Cannes Film Festival] was like going to Las Vegas, ... It's so trashy that it's funny. The festival is so transparent. There is no attempt made to disguise the fact that it's really about money. The foreign distributors just buy in bulk: 'Give me 500 hours of action, 500 hours of softcore and 200 hours of hardcore. I'll put my own titles on them.'"

–John Sayles, writer/director, interviewed by Steve Swires: "John Sayles: From Hoboken to Hollywood"

To view previous Starlog issue descriptions, click on "Starlog Internet Archive Project" in the keywords below or visit the Starlog Project's permanent home.

Check out Omni Magazine Tribute Site

A Chicago tech consultant named Mirko Cukich is building a very cool-looking web site devoted to the late great magazine Omni. Omni was a science and science-fiction magazine produced by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione from 1978 to 1995; at its height, its circulation was larger than 1 million, but it dropped down to around 600,000 at the time of its closure.

Omni was launched just months after Starlog launched Future (renamed Future Life a year later), and Guccione's company was just too much larger for Future/Future Life to compete, so it died four years later. (Though it should be noted that the second issue of Omni excerpted Starlog/Future's great Space Art book of space paintings.)

I loved both magazines, though I was probably more attached to Future Life. That led me a couple years ago to make my own online tribute to Future/Future Life, and I still occasionally hear from the magazine's writers, other readers, or researchers with questions about the magazine because of that tribute page. The feedback from that page is what has led me to my ongoing project to chronicle all of the issues of Starlog -- a project that will likely take me more than a year to complete, but I'm starting it here on my blog and will soon begin storing it on my main web site.

But frankly, Cukich's site is kind of putting my efforts to shame. Give his site a look and bookmark it so you can keep visiting as he populates it with more issues.

Starlog Internet Archive Project: Starlog #12, March 1978: Seems Like Old Times

This is a great issue, a magazine that I'd have been glad to have show up in my mailbox, to sit next to my bed to be devoured every night before I went to sleep. But it was published two full years before I would buy my first copy of Starlog, so I only got to know it years later as a back issue. Staffbox changes: David Hutchison, having established himself as the resident special effects guru on staff, is now listed as the science & SFX editor. Rita Eisenstein appears as a production assistant; Eisenstein would work her way up the company to executive VP, second-in-command to the Starlog Group empire, by the early part of the 21st century. Talk about starting at the bottom rung and working your way up.

Starlog #12
80 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $1.75

This is another issue with examples of Starlog growing, flexing its muscles, reveling in its success. It includes the launch announcement of the first spinoff magazine from Starlog, called Future (renamed Future Life a year later). The magazine also shoots its first television commercial, featuring a famous science fiction icon as its spokesman -- er, spokes'bot.

Kerry O'Quinn uses his From the Bridge column to do two things: first, he urges SF fans to have high standards and demand quality science-fiction entertainment, and second, he announces the birth of Future magazine. The Communications letters range from amateur filmmaking geek talk to commenting on Isaac Asimov's faster-than-light travel, and more; short news items in Log Entries include a report on the "Martian winter," SF video games, Mark Hamill's role in Stingray, Spacelab, and more.

An unbylined one-pager TV Update announces the cancellations of Logan's Run and Man from Atlantis. James Obert commemorates the 20th anniversary of "Sputnik and the Opening of Space"; Charles Bogle chronicles the Charles Band movie Lasterblast, which would quickly be forgotten until it was immortalized in episode 706 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (for completists, we might note that the Laserblast article is cut off at the bottom of page 23 -- the jump line was left off, so readers were left to page through the magazine until they get to the article's completion on page 70); Susan Sackett interviews her boss, Gene Roddenberry, on the making of the new Star Trek movie; Sackett also contributes her regular Star Trek Report column, answering questions from fans. David Hutchison provides a "Special Report on the (New) Enterprise" design; Richard Meyers writes about another soon-to-be-forgotten 1970s SF flick, Starship Invasions; the Conventions page covers Mystery Con II, Science-Fiction, Horror & Fantasy Con, and Creation Con; David Gerrold's State of the Art column publishes a pack of his Solomon Short quotes (he would do this one or two more times during his years as a columnist); James Oberg investigaes "UFOs: Reel vs. Real"; Ed Naha writes the humongous cover feature on Close Encounters of the Third Kind; David Hutchison interviews Star Wars animator Larry Cuba; it's more makeup effects masters profiled in the SFX section: Samuel J. Maronie does Dan Striepeke and Richard Meyers does the legendary Dick Smith; David Houston profiles space artist extraordinaire Chesley Bonestell; there's a one-page report on the Starlog TV commercial starring Robby the Robot, including a photo of Robby being "directed" by a script-in-hand Kerry O'Quinn; Richard Meyers writes about superheroes on TV; David Houston explores "Two Branches of Science Fiction's Conceptual Family Tree: Part I: Wishful Thinking" in the Visions column; and to close out the book we have the first column by editor Howard Zimmerman, whose Lastword issues a harsh verdict on Close Encounters.

"If Mr. Spielberg did not want to make a science-fiction movie then he should have chosen another theme. However, having chosen the theme that he did, it was his responsibility to do something with it. Spielberg had the chance to expose the public to the meat and heart of SF -- extrapolation from today to tomorrow and the personal consequences thereof -- and he blew it."
--Howard Zimmerman, editor, Lastword

To view previous Starlog Archive issues, click on "Starlog Internet Archive Project" in the keywords below.

Flashback to Flash Gordon -- Aaaaarrrgh of the Universe

I went time-travelling this morning, reading an old copy of Future Life (#23 from December 1980 -- part of my project to read every page of that short-lived magazine). This morning I read an article about the then-upcoming Flash Gordon movie produced by none other than Dino De Laurentiis.

Writer (and former Future Life and Fangoria editor) Ed Naha noted, "... many of the fans of the [comic] strip and the science fiction genre are somewhat apprehensive about its quality; concerned by the fact that Dino De Laurentiis is producing it." Naha then quotes the production's art director, John Graysmark, who defends the film and says how much De Laurentiis "wanted it perfect."

If you've seen the film (the trailer is above), then you know it's perfect -- a perfect piece of schlock. In the Future Life article, Graysmark first takes the readers through the beginning of the story, including the ridiculous football-like action by Flash and the cheerleading by Dale Arden, and "erupts into soft laughter, 'Delightful.'"

I'm not picking on Graysmark. I think a certain amount of respect or at least understanding is due to people who spend months or years of their professional lives writing, directing, designing, acting, etc., on films, even turkeys. And the silliness of a film's story certainly isn't the art director's fault.

But this blog article also is something of a defense of film magazines (such as Starlog and Fangoria) which are sometimes accused of being cheerleaders (like Dale Arden) for films their editors haven't even seen yet, because their articles pass along the fluff statements of the interview subjects. Unless the editors have had a preview of a movie, there's no way they can tell if the interview subjects are delusional or lying, and anyone who's covered films for years knows that a film might look like a turkey or a masterpiece while it's being assembled, but it'll be bungled by a slash editing job or a studio's imposition of last-minute changes. Plus, anyone reading Graysmark's extensive preview of the movie's opening scenes got an accurate sense of what that film would be like. Let 'em make up their own minds about the film, right?

Flash simply was bad. It has its fans, and that's fine for them. I don't criticize them; I'm sure I like some films, TV programs, or books that they'd think were awful. But when I watched the trailer above, and I remembered sitting through the entire film with ever-increasing incredulity, I had to wonder why De Laurentiis, with his many millions of dollars to put into this film, couldn't make a film that was much better than the low-budget, soft-porn Flesh Gordon from the early 1970s. The Flesh trailer is below (don't worry, it's safe for work; though the film was rated X when it was released, it really would have difficulty getting an R these days, and the trailer is PG at most).

Both Flash and Flesh are bad movies, but the folks who put together the latter weren't laboring under the illusion that they were making the Next Big Thing.

Yes, I Want an Apple Tablet, but I Don't Think Print Publishers Are the Ones at Risk

Today, Apple is expected to unveil the worst-kept secret of the year: a tablet computer. Rumors have swirled for some time, but my sources tell me what everyone pretty much already knows: There Will Be a Tablet Computer from Apple.

The Baltimore Sun reports that Apple's been doing its usual hardball negotiating with potential content partners, setting prices for digital versions of books (with a generous percentage take for Apple). Others have talked about the possibilities that the tablet could offer for newspaper and magazine publishers. I'm not sure about the periodical publishers -- they (we) have been doing digital versions of our print publications for years, and millions of people already read entire digital magazines, HTML articles, or completely disaggregated bits from periodicals every day. Anyone who wants digital magazines and hates holding print magazines in their hands (it's so much work) has already discovered Zinio or Issuu. What a tablet will do that a laptop computer isn't already doing (or capable of doing) is not readily evident to me, and certainly doesn't qualify yet as a must-buy decision factor for a tablet computer. Print publishing will survive tablets, and publishers will probably find a way to make an additional revenue stream from the new devices. Fine and dandy.

But an Apple tablet will likely have its biggest effects in whatever combination of services and software are possible on a tablet (again, not sure how those differ from a touch-screen-equipped laptop, but whatever). As I've noted recently, to me the magic has always been in the combination of devices into one device, not the birthing of separate devices for each new use (good-bye, Kindle). Make a sleek, lightweight tablet with a touchscreen, voice-enable all of the input features, give it phone capabilities, internet access of course, a big hard drive for viewing movies and listening to audio and playing games, video/still camera, and all of the personal and office productivity software we use almost every day of our lives.

I suspect the Apple tablet will have much of that. And what it doesn't have now, it will in the future. (After all, the computer became the television, your cable provider became your phone and internet provider, your cell phone became your e-mail service and video camera, so why shouldn't your tablet also become a phone?)

Much of the technology reporting has for years been hyper-hype filled, and that is especially true about reporting on Apple products. Hey, I love Apple products. I have two iPods, large-screen Macs at work and at home, and I'm sure I'll buy an iTablet (or whatever it's called) as soon as my finances permit. But not every iteration of iLife is revolutionary. Not each upgrade of the iPhone is a breakthrough.

And if you look over the years at what computers have been able to do (note the 1981 magazine cover above) and each evolutionary leap that has been made due to increasing processor power and ever-more interconnectedness of hardware and data, you see that the whole thing is evolutionary. Steve Jobs is a genius for seeing the opportunities that are thus presented and for pushing his company to go there. (And Apple is not infallible; it just seems that way. Anyone remember the Newton?) But Jobs is not creating these things out of thin air. He is able to look at where the technology goes, what new features and programs and businesses can be enabled by where the technology is evolving, and he's then going there with style and quality.

Others could do the same thing, but I think the modern public corporation is not designed to think in such a way.

Fake or Not, Balloon Boy Had the Right Idea, just not Zeppelin Enough

Okay, so it's looking pretty obvious that the Balloon Boy saga was a fake. But issues of shameless self-promotion and bad parenting aside, I think a lot of the focus on the Balloon Boy non-adventure was because many people had in the backs of their minds the thought, "That'd be pretty cool to float above the earth like that."

Boys in balloons have happened before. The Bay Area has its own case, from 1964, reports SFGate.com. And USA Today tells us about a boy who used to be attached to a balloon by his father and sent aloft.

Still, I'm not a fan of putting boys in balloons and sending them into the air, though under the right circumstances, the kid's probably having the time of his life. (It sure beats hiding in an attic for five hours.) But I do like the idea of traveling by balloon -- big balloons, zeppelins. And I'm still waiting for that to happen.

One of my favorite covers of the old Future Life magazine as the December 1979 issue (#15), which featured a painting of a dirigible docking on a tall building and the headline "Return of the Airship." Inside, writers James Holahan and Adam Starchild wrote about efforts to popularize a new generation of dirigibles. "Traveling by airship is flying in the truest sense," the authors write. "This is bird-like flight, with a sense of freedom and relaxation, as opposed to the sensation of being hurtled through the air in a machine."

Dirigibles have had a bit of a bad press since the Hindenburg explosion. But newer versions of the flying giants are safer and sleeker. Still, even the old ones can fascinate: I heartily recommend Douglas Botting's book, Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel, for a very readable history of airships and their fate.

Luckily, others continue to dream Dr. Eckener's dream, and they're smarter than Balloon Boy's parents. For example, the Zeppelin NT (New Technology) launched in 2001. As BusinessWeek's Adam Aston noted in 2007, "The appeal of zeppelins is enduring, and difficult to describe. Is it their slow moving grace, like whales in the sky? The retro-hip 1930s futurama look and feel of the modern, when modern really meant something?" Maybe all of those reasons. After all, wanting to see dirigibles floating through the sky ferrying people and freight doesn't mean one doesn't want to see airplanes and trains. But it would be nice to reclaim a graceful -- and cool -- technology that was unfairly discarded when speed and power became the main criteria for transportation.

Wayback Machine: Bad Astonomy on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

Sometimes I get to put a bunch of favorite topics into one blog post. Earlier today, I managed to include in one posting the topics of magazines, gays, Playboy, and anti-discrimination. How many can I put in this one? Well:

Blogger Phil Plait writes in his Bad Astronomy blog on Discover magazine's web site about his experience on the NPR news quiz radio program Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me. This is from the Wayback Machine, because Plait wrote it in 2007. But I still found it interesting (and, as they say, it was news to me, because I hadn't read it before), so if you want to read a cute short article about how Plait was called by the program's host to supply a funny story about NASA, check out his blog posting. He wasn't able to do so, so he called his pal James Oberg (a former contributor to Future Life magazine, BTW) to get the scoop.

So you don't care? Well, then you're not a NASA geek like I am. But anyway, here are the favorite topics of mine that I squeezed into one blog post: Future Life magazine, James Oberg, Bad Astronomy blog, Discover, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, public radio, NASA, radio quiz shows. Sigh.

The Future Life Answer Man

A while ago, I created a page on my main web site to highlight a long-discontinued magazine I like, Future Life.

It gets a very low but steady stream of visitors, but lately I've been hearing from more and more visitors -- former writers for the magazine, readers with questions (in which issue did such-and-such appear? or, Where can I find this-or-that that appeared in Future Life?).

I think this makes me the Official Future Life Answer Man. So, come on, lemme hear all of your questions.

Oh, I know, most of you are wondering, What the heck was Future Life?

More Ridley, More Alien

Starlog.com passes along word that Ridley Scott, the director of the staggeringly good science fiction/horror movie Alien, is going to direct a prequel to that movie.

With all due respect to James Cameron, who really established the series' popularity with his Aliens sequel, the Scott original remains one of the few movies to successfully get across real alien-ness. So I've got high expectations for his prequel.

Starlog Withdrawal

Ever since Starlog magazine decided to retire to the powder room to retool its print version, I -- like thousands of other science fiction aficionados -- have been without a monthly print fix from the long-time publisher. (We could take the drug metaphor further, but I'm really not a drug person, so I don't know how.) There is a regularly updated web site, of course, but no print magazine to stick in my bookbag every morning to read on the subway or take to the living room for a relaxing read on the sofa.

True, this isn't a problem as vexing about what to do about the Iranian election problem. But for a blog that is 90-percent focused on magazines and the publishing industry, it's worthy of comment.

For years I have received my shot (okay, one more) of Starlog in the mail, thanks to my subscription. But I still have gone to the bookstore or magazine shops or newsstands (well, we don't really have newsstands here in San Francisco; unlike Manhattan, where I could get just about any magazine from newsstands on zillions of street corners, here there are actual kiosks selling newspapers that sell exactly one paper: The San Francisco Chronicle; it's like a Soviet newsstand, with only one choice) to pick up other magazines and the occasional SF media magazine. Now, when I cruise through a magazine rack looking for magazines, I'm also seeing if there's a replacement for Starlog that might entice me. So far, I'm non-enticed.

This is not just because of pathetic loyalty to the Starlog brand, though long-suffering readers (reader?) of this blog know I've got that. It's that nothing else has that flavor of SF news mixed with affection for the SF fan. No uplifting columns urging fans to pursue their dreams. No acknowledgment of the difficulty of being a dreamer in a world that doesn't much understand dreamers. Instead, at least in the giant-sized British SF mags that dominate the newsstands today, I get the sense from the snarky attitude that the writers and editors are more likely to be the tormentors of a young SF fan than the supporter. But they'll take his or her dollar for the magazine.

Yeah, that's harsh, and I'm sure they're fine people, some of them. But when I pick up a Sci Fi Now or a DeathRay or an SFX, I see three magazines that are so much alike that they're hard to tell apart. To the casual reader at the news rack, they look alike, the tone is the same, and they are UK-focused, not US-focused. So I buy one or two a year, but none of them is a candidate for replacing Starlog as my regular SF print magazine.

Lack of originality is nothing new in the science fiction publishing genre. Back in the prehistoric 1970s, when Starlog started, an early competitor was Fantastic Films, published in the Chicago area. It was painfully Starlog-focused, yet they had none of the editorial magic (nor quality) that made Starlog a must-buy, making Fantastic Films a sometimes-buy. Like Playboy-wannabe Gallery's early years, the aping was sometimes so obvious it made one wonder whether the missing ingredient was a lack of funds or talent. (After Fantastic Films expired in the mid-1980s, the same publisher created FilmFax, which was its own animal and which, I'm pleased to say, continues to this day.) Others during Starlog's run -- Sci Fi Universe, Cinescape, Sci Fi Entertainment, etc. -- also lacked originality. Cinefantastique, the pre-existing original in the field, had long before lost its originality and vigor and seemed to rely on higher prices, fewer pages, and annual Star Trek special issues.

If all of that seems unduly harsh, it comes from a desire to see a publisher do something different and of quality. Sadly, most Starlog competitors did not. (I hold a special place in my pantheon of Starlog competitors for the short-lived -- lucky 13 issues -- Questar magazine. It, too, suffered from trying to succeed at a time when Starlog was redefining and dominating the SF media magazine market, but it did do things differently, taking cues from Omni magazine in terms of design and Future Life in terms of art and literature articles, and adding original comics to the mix. A business failure, but an honorable one. I'd have liked to have seen how that magazine wouldhave evolved over another five years.)

Where the hell was I? Oh, yes: It's ... it's ... it's ...

I don't think I'll explain it here just yet. Those long-suffering reader(s) of this blog might be able to piece together where I'd go with this, what type of magazine I think could redefine the SF media genre today, and which I believe could survive in an internet age and a brutal publishing marketplace. But I'm not ready to lay my cards on the table just yet.

But you probably know some of the key words: Global. Big. Quality. Imaginative. Adult. Human.

After Magazines Die: What Would the Next Issue Have Looked Like?

When a magazine goes to periodicals heaven, the news often strikes readers and staff alike with a sudden blow. They may have seen the writing on the wall -- falling sales, skyrocketing costs, the loss of irreplaceable editors or a publisher -- but the final decision itself is often a sudden one. I've been through the process myself, as a reader (anyone remember Epic Illustrated? my all-time favorite, Future Life? Comics Scene? Car Design?) and as an editor (Internet World, which was dearly missed, and another smaller publication that wasn't). Assuming it's a magazine I enjoyed reading, I'm often left wondering just what the next, never-to-be-published issue of the magazine would have been like had it been published -- had the publisher's axe been stayed at the last minute. Often, that issue is all prepared, ready to ship to the printer, when the bad news arrives.

So I've got a suggestion. With the recent popularity of digital versions of magazines, either current ones or resurrected ones, comes the possibility of publishers dusting off those old pasteboards or CDs or whatever media they have the unpublished "post-final" issue in, and making it available. Intellectual property rights seem to be working out much more easily these days than they were in the early days of the internet, when it was still unclear how to treat reproduction rights to articles and artwork created years before the Web browser caught on.
And surely those publishers can make a small buck off a property they never thought they'd see again produce a penny.

So let's see issue #32 of Future Life, and issue #146 of Creepy, or #140 of Eerie, or issue #4 of Comics Scene 2000 (or issue #57 of the second series of Comics Scene or issue #12 of the first series of Comics Scene -- it gets complicated; don't ask)! Because in the digital age, old magazines never die; they can always find new life and old audiences.
What do you think?

Shrinking Circulation: The Latest Wallops

The report last month that Newsweek magazine was considering cutting its circulation by up to 1.6 million may have sounded counter-intuitive to most people. But in these days of high printing and mailing costs and ever-heated competition from online sources, slashing the number of copies of magazines that are printed, distributed, and often just destroyed is not a crazy idea.

But yes, 1.6 million – more than half of the magazine's circulation – is a huge cut. But it follows rate cuts (which also mean reduced advertising fees for the magazine) in recent years from Playboy, Time, In Touch Weekly, Life & Style, TV Guide, and others. It's the name of the game, unfortunately.

This topic is also in my mind because today I picked up the newest issue of Starlog magazine (see my extended thoughts on Starlog's market position) and looked at the annual U.S. Postal Service Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation. For those of you non-magazine folks, that's the little data report that each magazine must print once a year laying out the details of circulation and mailing, such as how many total copies are printed, how they're distributed, what percentage of circulation is paid circulation, etc. As a magazine editor, I've written up my share of these reports, and I know the Post Office is very picky about how they're filled out. It is not uncommon for them to send it back to the editor and have them correct relatively minor problems.

(Side story: About 10 years ago, I contacted the editor of a major British science fiction magazine to ask why they were calling themselves the largest SF magazine in the world when their reported circulation was clearly below that of the market leader at the time, Starlog. He replied that all they had to go on was Starlog's word in the Post Office circulation filing, and there was no way to know if that was correct. I thought then and I think now that that was a silly response, having dealt directly with these circ statements and knowing they're not just hot air.)

Starlog's average total paid circulation for the past year, as stated in this year's filing, is a mere 27,868 (or 22,863 for the most recent issue; these circ statements require both types of reporting). For the past few years, Starlog had reported nearly 100,000 circulation in both categories (even that was down dramatically from the heights in the 1990s; the March 1997 issue of Starlog lists circulation figures of 257,862 and 255,920 for those categories). In the magazine's more than 30 years of publishing such Post Office circulation statements, I've never seen it much below 100,000.

So if I obsess over this particular magazine even amidst a steep decline in print circulations throughout the industry, chalk it up to a long-standing relationship with the magazine and a desire to see it remain alive and relevant. It can.

But another challenge is the drastic changes in newsstand distribution that has resulted in vastly fewer magazines receiving good distribution (for just one example, see Wal-mart's decision last year to drop 1,000 – yes, 1,000 – titles from its stores). Distribution problems are longstanding. Back in the early 1980s, the publisher of one of my all-time favorite magazines, Future Life, wrote that "We estimate that about 25 percent of all magazines are never put onto the stands at all, but go immediately into the wholesaler's shredders." The publishers, advertisers, and readers are of course paying for those destroyed copies as part of their costs to get the remaining copies.

The answer, I still believe, will be a mixture of continued traditional distribution of printed magazines and the increased distribution of the magazines through digital means, which will allow the readers (or even innovative newsstand operators) to print out the magazines themselves and not have to pay for destroyed copies.

But until that time arrives, it's going to continue to be a brutal atmosphere for print publishers, especially smaller ones in competitive market niches. Here's to hoping they hang in there and be creative.

Starlog: Quo Vadis?

The beginning of the new year is as good a time as any to address the matter of my long-promised review of Starlog magazine. But instead of reviewing a recent issue of the magazine, I wanted to review the magazine as a whole, as a brand.

I know that if someone had proposed to review any of the magazine brands for which I've worked, I'd have a mixture of curiosity, bemusement, and a chip on my shoulder. For the editors and publisher of a brand such as Starlog, you could probably add "weariness," because people are always airing their opinions about the magazine and how it should be run.

That's the burden of being an iconic magazine in its field. Playboy gets the same treatment. Whenever Playboy Enterprises reports a quarter of bad earnings, the blogosphere fills up with people saying the company should ditch its print edition, ditch its executives, adapt to the Internet age, etc.

And so it is with Starlog. For more than three decades, this magazine has covered science fiction films, television, books, plays, theme park attractions, comics, and much more, and at its height (arguably in the 1980s, but possibly in the 1990s) it was the flagship of a small but thriving publishing group that produced titles on everything from horror to teens to movie tie-ins to baseball and wrestling (and astrology and cars and cat calendars and soap operas and military history and women's magazines and bodybuilding and obviously much, much more). For a lot of that time, Starlog magazine dominated a field that included weaker competitors such as Fantastic Films, Cinefantastique, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Movieland, Sci-Fi Universe, Questar, and others.

But in recent years, it has fallen behind, both technologically and competitively. I'll write more about the competitive landscape below, but first let's take a look at Starlog-the-brand's many aspects and how it's doing with each.

In Print
The May 1980 issue of Starlog was the first edition of the magazine I ever purchased. Even now, without thumbing through a copy to refresh my memory, I can recall most of the articles in it. (Interviews with two of the new actors in Galactica 1980; a report on a backyard production of Alien; an editorial reviewing Galactica 1980; a column by David Gerrold in which "Harlan Ellison," "litchi nut," and "sex" all figured prominently in the lead; and on and on....)

That issue made me a lifelong reader. But being a reader from "way back when" doesn't make me qualified to critique a magazine, for which a small merry band of individuals spend a lot of time writing, editing, designing, and marketing. As a professional editor myself, I respect their work and dedication, but I offer this constructive criticism of Starlog magazine today in the hopes that they're listening.

The magazine remains timely, including coverage of all of the big -- and many small -- science fiction media projects. They get the big interviews, they ask the good questions, and they stay on target, which is reporting on the films, books, and television programs; thankfully, they do not do what so many other film publications do and report on the bedroom details of the actors or directors. If you want that, there's plenty of such reporting elsewhere. Instead, we learn about projects that are of wide interest and others that are targeted at niche-audiences, which is a great way to attract new readers and retain older ones. (If you're the magazine where readers can be sure of getting interviews with every star of a small WB fantasy-oriented TV series, that makes it a must-buy publication for the show's fans.) It also features excellent film historians Tom Weaver and Will Murray, who provide frequent must-read articles.

Editor David McDonnell is a well-known comics fan (having worked on three different iterations of sister publication Comics Scene) who gathers a large number of one-panel comics for each issue of Starlog. There are also book reviews, DVD previews, a monthly overview of changes to science fiction television programs, short updates on upcoming media programs, and photos of science fiction and fantasy celebrities at public appearances. All well-and-good.

The drawbacks of Starlog are not in what is there. McDonnell and his team produce a slick magazine each month (10 times annually, down from 12 a few years ago, but that's par for the publishing world these days), and reading it will keep any science fiction fan well-informed and entertained.

No, the drawbacks are what is not in Starlog. First, there are no editorials or columns, either of which (preferably both) can give a magazine personality and, perhaps more important, can give readers a reason to buy a magazine even if they're not particularly interested in the articles blurbed on the cover. The examples are many: David Schow in Fangoria in the 1990s; David Gerrold in Starlog in the late 1970s to the mid-1980s; Harlan Ellison in Future Life for the second half of its short life; Howard Cruse in Comics Scene's first iteration. Or -- in the non-Starlog Group world -- the late Asa Baber's column in Playboy, William Safire in the New York Times Magazine, and many other examples. The reader doesn't have to agree with everything or even a lot of what the columnist writes, but the reader does have to be served a column that is provocative and interesting. A good column doesn't have to be more than a page or two in the magazine, so it's not taking up too much real estate. But it should help sell the magazine and help define its character to readers who pick up the publication for the first time.

Editorials can be even shorter in length, but they accomplish a lot, as long as the editor or publisher writing it is allowed to say things and not just highlight articles in that issue. Editor McDonnell has written tons of these over the years for all of the magazines he's edited, but he currently does not. Nor is there a publisher's letter in Starlog, as there used to be when Publisher Kerry O'Quinn really set the tone for the magazine in the 1980s. The magazine needs an editorial voice, something to show that the magazine has a voice of its own, to help point readers to things not covered in the magazine, to give the magazine a personality with which the reader, one hopes, identifies and thereby makes it more likely that the reader will continue reading.

The other thing missing from the magazine is more difficult to define, but I believe it to be very important. That is a sense of the calendar, something to make the magazine the reader's guide through the year. This can be done best with annual special issues, such as anniversary issues, seasonal previews, and other special features or editions that don't appear each month but which give the reader something to look forward to (and a reason to plan on buying the next issue of the magazine). I remember well how much I anticipated each July's special anniversary issue of Starlog back in the 1980s. No, my life wasn't so empty that this was all that I looked forward to; but it was something that in the context of my reading and purchasing of magazines was very important. Not only does this sense of the calendar help sell the magazine, but it helps define the genre for the reader, and that makes the magazine that much more of an indispensible buy.

The Design
With the redesign of Starlog's longtime logo a couple issues ago, there was an assumption by some people that the magazine would itself undergo a redesign, but none has been forthcoming so far. None is called for, necessarily, because the publication's designers do a good job, and covers have been quite good of late. (Any magazine that has published more than 370 issues is going to have some great covers, a lot of good covers, a ton of so-so covers, and more than a few boners. Starlog is no exception.)

The magazine has lots of color, but it long ago learned the advantages of letting the color photos speak for themselves without needing to overload the reader with colored backgrounds to the text. One of Starlog's strengths has always been that it is a readers' magazine; even with a lot of sharp color photos in each issue, most of the magazine is text, and that plays to the strength of print publications in the Internet age: You get a headache after reading text on the web for too long, but a print magazine is something you lie down on the couch or sit in a chair and put your feet up while you read for extended periods, which gives the reader more commitment to the magazine and the brand.

ONLINE
Starlog has never been at the forefront of the Internet revolution. Sure, one of its editors had a Compuserve address in the 1980s, and it (along with sister publications Fangoria and Comics Scene) had a presence on the early MSN network in the early 1990s. But when the World Wide Web exploded and became the obvious platform for communication and dissemination, Starlog lagged, relying on its print presence and only belatedly creating a web site.

The web site the magazine has had for much of this decade has been underfed in terms of content or even attention. And, as of this writing, the site has been down ("Under construction and coming soon") for a couple months, following the purchase of Starlog and Fangoria from its previous, bankrupt owner.

There's no e-mail newsletter, no podcasts (video or audio), no blogs. Before the site went on hiatus, there was an online forum, as well as short reports on news of the day, excerpts from print articles, and an online store. Missing was any regular presence of the print publication's editorial staff, as well as anything substantive.

In brief, Starlog has missed the boat -- and a great many opportunities to promote its brand -- by ignoring or giving short shrift to the Internet. I believe that has to change, and I have some ideas below on how that can be done cost-effectively.

Competitive Landscape
In the early 1990s, there appeared within a very short timespan several new newsstand competitors to Starlog. My thought at the time was that, though Starlog remained strong and a favorite of mine, competition would be good for it and would perhaps impel it to step up its game. But the competition proved unworthy; Sci-Fi Universe, published by the Hustler group of magazines, remains the only magazine I've ever seen to publish an interview with provocative writer Harlan Ellison that is boring. The magazine died an early death, unbemoaned. Sci-Fi Entertainment and Cinescape offered nothing new, trying to play in Starlog's yard but beating it only in terms of color pages, not in quality or new ground broken (to mix metaphors).

But the real competition has come from England, where the economics of magazine publishing clearly are different from here in the United States. SFX magazine (which usually manages to cover part of its logo so it looks like "SEX") offers lots of pages and attitude, but it has no connection to the soul of the SF fan the way Starlog did in its early years and still occasionally today. In the past couple years, Sci Fi Now and Deathray have emerged from England, both of them, like SFX, at nearly 150 oversized pages, all color. In terms of paper quality and quantity, energy, and attitude, these magazines have raised the bar in a way that Cinescape and its sisters could never do.

How has Starlog reacted? In the past decade, the magazine has gone through one bankruptcy and another implosion (which saw the former Starlog Group close something like a dozen of its other magazines when financing ran out in 2001). Most recently, Starlog has cut its page count from 92 pages (including covers) to 84.

How should it react? Here are some thoughts.

My Suggestions for Starlog
First, don't stop doing what the magazine and its editors, writers, and designers are doing well, which is offering that broad coverage of science fiction media past, present, and future.

But much more attention needs to be paid to a basic magazine need: Advertising. Time and effort need to be spent to increase the advertising. Even if the mag's circulation has dropped from its peak, it's still a good vehicle for advertisers to reach readers.

Second, address the lack of "a sense of the calendar," as I call it above. Do something special for the anniversary issue each and every year. Have a couple special articles (featuring a special layout/design), a self-lauditory editorial (that's not as selfish as it sounds; any such editorial is doing two things: It does praise the home forces, but it also praises the readers as being a part of this great enterprise, and lets the readers know they are part of a very special breed of readers and thinkers), maybe a bust-the-editorial-budget special report on some aspect of the science fiction universe.

Other options could include devoting a portion of the December issue to a year-end review, which also lets you devote a good-sized article in January to a new-year preview. Both can be produced with little extra cost (i.e., time-willing, they could be staff-produced and not require freelance talent) and can even draw in the sorely lacking reader involvement (in October, tell readers to write in with their top-10 lists of the year, with a selection to be printed in the December issue, or with a tally to be taken and published, along with selected comments on the best/worst/whatever science fiction films/tv/books that make the collective list. Free content, but it lets the reader become a part of the magazine and maybe even see their name in print -- a not-to-be-dismissed plus) and it can be a fun use of two or three pages.

For several years in the mid-1908s, Starlog produced an annual end-of-summer issue that included reviews of the summer's movies. The theory they offered was that by then everyone's had a chance to see the movies for themselves, so they weren't straying from their mantra of letting the readers make their own judgements. Starlog could revisit this type of an issue, perhaps making the special section a collection of reviews by science-fiction writers, readers, and its own collection of the top genre journalists. With the dominant role that DVDs now play in the success of a film or television program, having a review issue that comes out after most of the big films have made their debut but before they have hit DVD (and before the new TV season gets really going) could be perfect timing.

If not those ideas, then something needs to be done to have a schedule in the year that offers the reader a map of the genre year and milestones along the way. Make them a part of that calendar, and make the magazine their official guide through it.

Other ideas for the print magazine would be (as I noted much earlier in this review) the addition of a regular opinion columnist and and monthly editorial. And the publication of the occasional episode guide wouldn't hurt, either. (Will they miss the boat by not doing a complete episode guide when the new Battlestar Galactica ends this season?)

But it's on the online front where Starlog can do some exciting but cost-effective things to build brand loyalty, market the magazine (and its related publications, such as Fangoria), and get the reader involved with the magazine in the weeks between the release of each new print edition.

First, produce a free weekly e-mail newsletter that people go to the web site to subscribe to. Sell banner ads for the e-newsletter, and come up with newsletter content that can be produced relatively easily but is still valuable to the reader. Some ideas: Short synopses of the next week's science fiction TV programs; release date in the next week of any science fiction, fantasy, or horror film, a short opinion piece (first paragraph only in the newsletter; link to the web site for the full article), an excerpt from an article in the current or upcoming issue of the print magazine, reader letters, a couple noteworthy reader posts from the bulletin boards, and maybe an original news report. I'd enjoy writing something like that. More important, I'd subscribe to it and read it, and I think thousands of other science fiction fans would, too.

Second, add a blogger or two to the web site. One could be an omnibus staff blog, as Playboy does with its editorial team. In that case, no one person is tasked with writing a blog posting every day, but every day still sees a new posting from one or another editor from a variety of perspectives and on a variety of topics. Another blog might be a movie and TV program review blog. Coming up with topics for possible blogs is not a difficult challenge.

Third, add audio (and, even better, video) podcasts. With the technology available today that ships with any new Mac, you can create audio and video podcasts and distribute them through your web site and/or through iTunes. Do movie reviews, short excerpts of talks with science fiction creators, and genre news -- it's a free or low-cost way to produce and distribute great content, and it again serves the bottom line of getting people involved and invested in the brand, helping sell the online content and the print content, which all cross-promote.

Fourth, take some of those brands that keep getting resurrected as special sections of Starlog magazine (Future Life, Comics Scene, Fantasy Worlds) and relaunch them as web sites. It'll keep your foothold on the title and logo, and it'll also let you cross-promote all of your brands to the betterment of all of them.

The Future of the Magazine
I don't know the source or sources of Starlog's current lethargy. I think I've pointed out that it has many current strengths and behind-the-scenes talent, not to mention a valuable brand name. Whether it's a lack of manpower, a lack of editorial vision, a lack of direction from the company's executives, or something else, it's simply not an excuse to let things go undone and let markets slip out from under them.

I write this article as both a longtime Starlog reader and as a publishing professional with almost 20 years of experience. I hope it's read by other readers and fans with sympathy for a great title, and by Starlog staff with an eagerness to break new ground. I'll be their biggest cheerleader.

What do you think? E-mail me or leave a comment on this blog. Thanks.