Starlog Internet Project: Starlog #16, September 1978: New Style

Starlog gets its third art director in three issues, as Robert P. Ericksen assumes the duties. Ericksen remains at the helm for some time, and in my humble opinion is the best of the magazine's long line of art directors. The design of the magazine beginning in this issue achieves a beautiful mix of a colorful, eye-catching look with a tasteful use of nice headline typefaces. Yes, this is all design geek stuff, but it helps cement Starlog's role as a professional magazine that's on another level from the rest of the science fiction media pack.

Starlog #16
80 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $1.75

And it keeps growing: included in the magazine's in-house ads are the release of the third Starlog Photo Guidebook, Fantastic Worlds, and the second Starlog-produced record, The Fantastic Film Music of Albert Glasser.

Kerry O'Quinn's inner Ayn Rand comes through in his From the Bridge column, in which he describes helping a youth from communist Hungary overcome idiotic government restrictions on freedom of thought; Communications letters range from DC Comics Editor Jack C. Harris on SF art to a critic of Capricorn One; Log Entries short items include the launch of the Japanese edition of Starlog and Future magazines (as one Japanese magazine under the Starlog banner), space mirrors to beam energy to earth, preview of the film Warlords of Atlantis, announcement of an Avengers TV revival, a progress report on Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings, and more.

Susan Sackett's Star Trek Report showcases a big color photo showing the back of one of the computerized bridge sets from Trek; Michael Cassutt interviews Alan Dean Foster, "SF's Hottest Young Writer," back when his Splinter in the Mind's Eye was throught to be a possible sequel to Star Wars: A New Hope; Mick Garris -- yes, the future movie director -- writes about the new Invasion of the Body Snatchers film, starring Leonard Nimoy; Ed Naha profiles producer Bert I. Gordon; Al Taylor and Richard Meyers remember the making of the Fantastic Voyage film; a three-page color photo spread reprints space-related postage stamps from around the world; Louis Broadhurst previews the new Buck Rogers, illustrated with pre-production paintings from the great Bob McCall (one of whose paintings graces the cover of this issue, see above); Gary Gerani remembers The Invaders TV series and provides a complete episode guide; James C. Odell covers The Body Human, a CBS science series; David Gerrold gets into serious geek territory with his State of the Art column, which digs into various aspects of Star Wars and looks for their meaning or extrapolates from them; David Hirsch -- the resident Gerry Anderson expert -- covers supermarionation in the SFX section; Robin Snelson reports on space-based solar power possibilities; Jonathan Eberhart's Interplanetary Excursions, Inc., visits"The Incredible Shrinking Planet"; David Houston explores "The Invisible Visions of Star Wars" in the Visions column; and editor Howard Zimmerman discusses his Close Encounters of the Third Kind controversy in Lastword.

"And so, barely out of his twenties, Alan Dean Foster is preparing to take the SF world by storm. Oddly enough, however, his phenomenally successful career started out as a goof. 'It all happened by accident,' he reveals."

--Michael Cassutt, writer, "Alan Dean Foster: SF's Hottest Young Writer"

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

Magazine Views: Making Good Plans

One of the two oddest moves that Playboy magazine made a decade ago was moving its main editorial office from Chicago to New York when it hired new Editorial Director James Kaminsky. (The other oddest move was hiring James Kaminsky.) The magazine undid one of those moves after a couple years, replacing Kaminsky with Christopher Napolitano. Now, in the midst of an economic downturn that's savaging pretty much every business in every country in the world, Playboy Enterprises is undoing the other move and is moving its offices back to Chicago.
That's a good move. There are too many national magazines that are published out of Gotham, and they tend to take on a similar world view and become less distinctive in the process.
In the process, they're making another change that gives one pause. Napolitano won't be making the trip, reportedly because of family commitments in NYC, but he will be staying on as editor-at-large. One never knows how long those "editor-at-large" gigs last; they're often a way to give someone a place to hang their hat until they find another job. But whatever it is, Napolitano has done a fine job as editorial director for the past six or so years, so one wishes him well.
But the eyebrow-raising move is the handover of the editorial director's title to Jimmy Jellinek, who has been heading up the magazine's digital content and will now oversee both print and online. That combo is being seen elsewhere, too. The question is whether Jellinek -- like Kaminsky, a veteran of crude-boy title Maxim -- is right for Playboy. Forbes raises questions about that, noting his past statements and actions that are more suited to a college humor magazine than a magazine that has housed John Updike and William F. Buckley.

But I'm heartened by Jellinek's stated intention with the magazine. As Forbes reports:

What he plans, he says, is "a return to our golden age," producing a magazine like "the Playboy of the 1960s, which occupied the political and moral high ground." There will be more columnists and the same classic interviews with leading thinkers like economist Paul Krugman, whose interview will appear in a upcoming issue.
Jellinek says his competition is not adult magazines or online porn but the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. "We want to be a magazine of ideas that leads the national conversation."

He's got the right aim, if that's his target. I'd bet that the vast majority of Americans who know anything about Ayn Rand or Sarte can attribute that familiarity to interviews the two thinkers gave to Playboy in the 1960s. A mix of fun and thought -- that's a great combination, and it gives one reason to expect a lively magazine and web site even in these brutal economic times.