Starlog Cover Fun

Okay, you're taking a break from all of the bad news about the sequester. What's a person to do? Here's something: See how many things you can find different on these two magazine covers. Start ... now.

1,000 Points of Sight: Galaxis Number 3

Open publication - Free publishing - More battlestar

The third edition of my free digital science & science fiction magazine, Galaxis, has reached its first milestone in record time. Not even a full month since it was published on issuu.com, Galaxis #3 has racked up 1,000 views. That is, I believe, faster than the previous two issues or any of my digital magazines has reached that milestone.

My thanks to everyone who has looked at the issue, read it, shared it with their blog/Facebook/Twitter followers, sent me feedback, or showered me with offers of glory. Granted, none of the last has happened, but one can hope.

On to 2,000!

Sci-Fi TV Arises: The Starlog Project, Starlog #201, April 1994

Starlog called this a special "Robots Issue," but it's really a special TV issue, and a good reminder from a point in history when SF TV was really establishing itself in a very big way. In early 1994, science fiction series are beginning to flourish on the small screen, especially in the syndicated market but also in the network world, where Chris Carter's The X-Files is starting its groundbreaking run.

A few months before The X-Files premiered, I was able to see the first episode thanks to a friend of mine who worked at a large advertising agency. She got a preview cassette of a different new TV show, which was what we really wanted to see; The X-Files was also included as an afterthought. I don't even remember what the other show was or if it lasted long before cancellation. But after we watched The X-Files premiere episode, we both looked at each other with surprise and said, "That was really good." And we were correct. It was.

We should note that on the upper left-hand corner of the cover, right above the "SPECIAL ROBOTS ISSUE" headline, is a photo of Star Wars' C3PO, who isn't featured in the issue. Oopski.

Starlog #201
84 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $4.95

The last two pages of this issue reprise a humorous if odd thing from issue #191: Fake trading cards of Starlog correspondents. This issue features Tom Weaver, Ian Spelling, George Kochell, Lynne Stephens, and Michael Wolff, who, when asked about "what he wants to be when he grows up," replies, "The dim face spotted at the end of a dream. Why? Because the shadows are blessed and there's treasure in a secret." Okay.

The rundown: Richard Eden, the newest actor to be RoboCop, graces the cover, while the contents page features Robert Llewelyn as Red Dwarf's Kryten. David McDonnell's Medialog rounds up the news bits, including the tidbit that RoboCop's Paul Verhoeven "may end up directing Starship Troopers," which of course happens and results in a film that in my humble opinion is far better than RoboCop. In his Gamelog column, Michael McAvennie reviews Absolute Entertainment's Star Trek: The Next Generation and others, including GURPS War Against the Chtorr, based on author (and former Starlog columnist) David Gerrold's well-received series of novels. And the Communications section ranges from a letter that almost single-handedly previews the entire SF TV landscape, to a complaint about the Sci-Fi Channel's hacking-up of genre series, as well as the final installment of cartoonist Mike Fisher's Creature Profile, this one featuring Dr. Cyclops. (In his end-of-the-book editorial column, editor McDonnell reveals that genre expert Tom Weaver provided some assistance during the 40-issue run of this comic feature.)

CBS/Fox Video unleashes some more Doctor Who episodes, according to David Hutchison's Videolog. A brand new column debuts from an old Starlog hand: former editorial staffer David Hirsch returns to the fold with Audiolog, reporting on records and CDs from SF media. Among Hirsch's many accomplishments during his years at the magazine was editing the Space Report column, which was written by producer Gerry Anderson (Space: 1999, Thunderbirds), so it's either very fitting or a case of astonishing coincidence that right next to Hirsch's inaugural column is an ad for a science fiction convention featuring Gerry Anderson. The Booklog department includes reviews of The Voyage, The Positronic Man, Under the Eye of God, The Fabulist, Nevernever, The Stalk, Brother to Shadows, Orion and the Conqueror, The Disinherited, The Woods Out Back, Firedance, The Broken God, The Outcast, Martin the Warrior, The Armageddon Inheritance, Eternal Light, The Legend of Nightfall, and Nimbus. The Fan Network pages include Marc Bernardin's listing of fan organizations, some comics, and the usual convention calendar. And former publisher Kerry O'Quinn uses his From the Bridge column to talk about NASA's attempts to regain its lost luster by creating a space station.

In another of his speculative genre overview articles (that's a category, right?), Michael Wolff sticks to the "Robots Issue" theme by looking at robotic characters in SF film and TV; illustrations are by George Kochell. One of the most famous television robots, the aptly named Robot from Lost in Space, was brought to life by actor Bob May, who tells interviewer Tom Weaver, "There was one requirement I had to meet in order to play the Robot: The outfit was almost completely built, so therefore I had to fit into it—there was no way around that!" And one of the most famous cyborgs (well, they're part robot) from television was the young Borg Hugh from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Pat Jankiewicz chats with Jonathan Del Arco, the actor who brought Hugh to life on the show as a guest star, having been unsuccessful in his screen test to portray Wesley Crusher.

Cover boy Richard Eden tells Peter Bloch-Hansen about his new gig bringing RoboCop to TV life every week. The British TV series Red Dwarf is updated in a report by Joe Nazzaro. Ian Spelling does the same for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine by talking with Siddig El Fadil. The magazine goes further back in time with a profile by Joe Nazzaro of Colin Baker, one of the 3 million British actors who portrayed Doctor Who. Tom Weaver's second article this issue is a Q&A with Kathleen Crowley, who starred in Target Earth, Curse of the Undead, Flame Barrier, and other films. Kyle Counts checks in with producer Chris Carter, who unveils his new Fox TV series The X-Files. And in his Liner Notes column, editor David McDonnell says goodbye to exiting managing editor Maureen McTigue, who's heading over to DC Comics and who was featured in the previous set of Starlog contributor trading cards. Circle of life.

"I have not read a tremendous amount of science fiction. … I wouldn't call myself a science fiction fan; when I go to the library, I don't gravitate toward the SF section. I was never a huge Star Trek fan. But I'm interested in certain types of science fiction, what people oftentimes call science fact. I prefer books that don't talk about a world in the future but rather that take human situations and play with them in a fictionalized, scientific way."
–Chris Carter, X-Files producer, interviewed by Kyle Counts, "Scientific American" 

For more, click on Starlog Project below or visit the Starlog Project's permanent site.

The Fake Magazines of Blade Runner

Over at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal tracks down and displays some of the fake magazines used in Ridley Scott's great film Blade Runner. Worth a look.

Along that same line of thinking, Shortlist.com has a look at some fake covers of real magazines that were used in non-science-fiction films through the years.

And if that amuses you, but you don't have InDesign and Photoshop on your computer, check out this Fake Magazine Cover Creator (they even have Future magazine, how sweet). Such as the bit of fun I had creating my own Fangoria cover (at right).

Fake is fun.

Famous Magazines' First Covers

Huffington Post has an amusing (but slim) gallery of the first covers of some famous magazines, such as Sports Illustrated and Seventeen. See it here.

For those of you who come to this blog because of its widespread fame as a source of info on science fiction publications, well, then here's something for you. The first issues of some famed SF mags, mostly film mags.

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.

Looking at Wookies: This Week in Cool Magazine Covers

Apropos of nothing whatsoever, I serve up for you today two covers that feature the same cool photo of Chewbacca from The Empire Strikes Back.

The Fantastic Films cover on the left is the September 1980 issue, one of approximately 4 zillion Empire-themed covers that FF published. (Hey, you go with what sells newsstand copies; no argument there.) The cover on the right was actually not an external cover; it was inside the July 1980 issue of competitor Starlog, serving as the intro page to its special anniversary section.

Though I take second place to no one when it comes to over-the-top Starlog appreciation, I have to give first-place honors here to the Fantastic Films cover. It's colors are better, and even the piling on of endless cover text works in the manner they did it. Either way, we need more Wookies on magazing covers.

Click on the image to biggie-size it.

Japan's SF Magazine: Great Magazine Covers, Continued

As another in my occasional series of great magazine cover appreciation, I present this 1971 issue of SF magazine from Japan. For more Cold War-era SF magazines, see Meanjin's Spike, and for more Japanese Sf magazine covers, see Pink Tentacle.

Rumors about Fangoria's Fate

Blogger JadedViewer provides a roundup of rumors and questions concerning longtime horror film magazine Fangoria (and its related online operations and other media).

As I've noted recently (here and here), the web sites for Fango and science fiction sister brand Starlog have been down for weeks. Starlog's web site has been restored to life, or at least existence; but the Fangoria site has not. If you do some hunting on Twitter and Facebook, you can piece together a bit of the story. It sounds like the online staff walked off the job a in January. I haven't found out the reasons why, but generally when you have a mass defection from a company, either it's not paying its staff or there are terrible management problems.

Fango/Starlog have been through hell and back in the past decade. After original owners Starlog Group fell on rough times in 2001 and had to close most of their dozen-or-so titles, the rump company continued under that management for a few years before being sold to Creative Group. A couple years later, Creative Group went bust, and Tom DeFeo -- one of the Creative leaders -- bought the two brands and continued as The Brooklyn Company. Earlier this year, Starlog ceased publication as a print magazine, continuing as an online-only property; in December, longtime editor David McDonnell resigned -- again, no further info, but there's probably an interesting story there.

It's interesting to read the online comments from readers. There's the usual claptrap about "print is dying anyway," which simply isn't true. Magazine readership is actually up over the past decade. What there is right now is an advertising depression, and there's a near impossibility even for successful small businesses to get the financing they need to stay afloat. You can thank the global financial collapse for that. Companies generally need a steady supply of credit, because there is always a lag between the expenditure of money (salaries, printing costs, office rent, insurance, etc.) and the receipt of revenue (advertising, newsstand sales, etc.). I have no inside knowledge whatsoever about The Brooklyn Company's situation; I'm just suggesting that tight credit is hobbling a lot of companies these days and could well be a factor if there are money problems there. (The credit issue is the reason President Obama is planning to pump $30 billion into small banks for loans to small businesses. There's only so long a business can stretch and delay paying its suppliers before it runs into hard money problems.)

So how does this all relate to Starlog and Fangoria? As I noted, nothing conclusive. I suspect the two titles aren't dead (and magazines are kind of like Spock: even death isn't the end of life). Whether The Brooklyn Company knows how to make the titles flourish again as print magazines is an open question. Personally, I now believe the field is wide open for a smart publisher to create a new title and take over Starlog's old science fiction media magazine territory -- and I write that as a longtime Starlog supporter. It's sad, but I think it's true. And I'm working on something in that space. We'll see.

As for Fangoria, the magazine is still alive and lively. Inveterate readers of magazine staff boxes, like I am,  will probably glean some info from the next issue due to come out later this month. But by then, we might already have heard more about the future of the longest-running horror film magazine in this country.

UPDATE: Inside the turmoil.

James Cameron's Avatar Takes over the World of Magazines

Nothing deep to report here. Just a note that the 3-D science fiction film is going to be everywhere this December on magazines. The latest, from Germany and the UK:

DeathRay Science Fiction Magazine Is no Longer of This World

I have to admit I'm very late in passing this along, but then, I'm very late in hearing about it. There were three oversized UK science fiction media magazines not too long ago: DeathRay, Sci Fi Now, and SFX. As of October, apparently, DeathRay is no more, according to blogger Lee Harris.

The official site of Blackfish Publishing, which produced DeathRay and Filmstar, currently includes a note that both magazines are "on hold," which could mean anything. EIC Matt Bielby writes on that page, "Quite what the future holds for Filmstar, Death Ray – and, indeed, Blackfish – remains unclear, but we hope to have more definite news over the next week or so. Keep watching this space, because as of now quite literally anything (or nothing) could happen." That was several weeks ago, so "the next week or so" will have to be elastic.

It's always sad when a magazine goes under, especially if (a) it's a science fiction magazine, and/or (b) it's an ambitious magazine, which DeathRay was. Still, as I've noted here before, I never thought DeathRay was different enough from SFX and Sci Fi Now -- all three are pretty interchangable in their snarky, laddish approach to covering the genre and in their graphic presentation. That's not necessarily bad; Brit attitude can be refreshing at times. I just miss having other voices that sound like real other voices and not echoes. That won't change with DeathRay's passing. Er, "on hold"-ness.

There's still a big hole in the U.S. magazine market for a quality SF print magazine. The UK magazines are nice, and I did recently fill the void in my mailbox by taking out a subscription to SFX. But they don't cover the U.S. market the way an American magazine would. And the French-sourced Fantastique doesn't do it, either. Will a champion arise to take up the mantel laid aside by Starlog? ("Hiatus" is just another word for "on hold.")

Tony Timpone's Elegy for Starlog

Elegy, indeed.

For months now, former readers of Starlog's print magazine have been told that it was on print hiatus, not "dead forever." Readers of surviving sister mag Fangoria might assume otherwise, because not a word about print revival appears in Fango Editor Tony Timpone's "Elegy" column in the September issue of that magazine.

In a column titled "Starlog Lives!" and giving brief history of the genre media market, Timpone does a nice job of giving props to his publishing elders. Most likely, the article was intended to remind people that Starlog lives -- online, at a good but still-developing web site. But after reading the piece, I'm left with the impression that the lack of any mention of print tells us something. No hope.

Which means that those of us who like to have a print science fiction magazine to relax with on the couch will have to continue our search elsewhere. Newsstand trollers will probably have already spotted the first couple issues of the Fantastique, the new English-language edition of L'Ecran Fantastique, a 40-year-old French fantasy and SF mag. Among its contributors is Keith Olexa, a former Starlog managing editor. I'll do a full-blown review of it in the future; for now, I'll just say it's worth watching because it is something different from the British lad SF mags (SFX, Sci Fi Now, DeathRay, etc.), which all seem to have the same attitudes and busy layouts. Too bad its own design is dark and unpleasing.

Alas.

Playing Taps for Music Magazines

Slate.com blogs about the difficulties that music magazines are having surviving (or not), and the author -- a veteran of defunct music rag Blender -- offers his three reasons for their demise:

• Too few superstars, and all the magazines cover the same ones.
• Music magazines have lost their access to the top stars and previews of music, so there's less reason for fans to read them.
• Social networking has stolen the audiences.

I personally think his first and third reasons are minor and uninteresting. After all, music magazines that want to be mass market best sellers have to prostitute themselves to the flavor of the month to make sure they eet their rate base; but what makes a music magazine -- or any other genre-specific magazine, such as science fiction films or politics -- a must-buy for readers is when it helps find the up-and-coming or overlooked artist/film/book/thinker and puts that person on the cover. So stop whining.

But the second reason probably indicates more of what's wrong with the music magazines and how they've stopped knowing how to serve their audiences. They are not the only publishers who have lost their niche exclusivity; back in the 1970s and early 1980s, science fiction films and television programs were almost completely the purview of SF magazines, which could get all kinds of access to filmmakers and authors that fans could not find elsewhere. But as SF became more of a mainstream success and as traditional media chased pop culture to lure audiences, even mainstream publications were putting out special Star Trek issues and featuring Battlestar Galactica on their covers. That's great news for the fan; but it obviously created a big challenge to the niche publications that were selling their access and now had to start selling their unique outlook and any value-added content related to the media.

The same, I think, is true of music magazines. Rolling Stone has always mixed politics in heavy doses, as did Spin from its early years. But politics and artist interviews and concert photos and all the rest aren't enough to keep feeding big audiences.

Music magazines, in my humble opinion, are niche magazines and should be operated like such. The MBAs running them don't want to hear that their natural market probably limits them to 100,000 or 200,000 circulation ceilings, but, as I keep saying on this blog, that's a great opportunity for smaller, entrepreneurial publishers and investors to come in and play where the big guys no longer can.