A couple of months ago, I embarked on an experiment to read some SF magazines, and see if I was really missing out on the wonderful stuff that people are always haranguing con-goers about. I bought paper copies of Analog's November issue and the October/ November Asimov's, and commented on them here. I was unable to find paper copies of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, apparently due to their obnoxious return policy, but Kate got me an electronic version of the October issue, which I read slowly on my Palm over the next month or so. I finished it a while back, but never got around to writing it up, until some other posts (about which more later) reminded me of it.
If you recall, the Analog experiment was a failure, but Asimov's fared a little better. F & SF kind of ended up in the middle. There are a couple of real head-scratchers in here, but most of the stories are perfectly good, if not terribly inspiring.
Starting with the bafflingly awful, I have no idea what the deal is with "The Star to Every Wandering Barque" by James Stoddard. The "story" takes up the daring premise of "what would the world be like if everyone was nice to each other?," and proceeds to basically list the ways that the world would be a better place if everyone were just nice. There are scare quotes on "story," because it's really not a story. There's no plot to speak of, and absolutely no conflict. It's about as compelling as a shopping list, and as an extra not-bonus, it's kind of treacly. I can't begin to figure out why anybody would publish this.
In the "competent, but kind of pointless" category, there's Robert Silverberg's "Against the Current," which has a nice premise, but doesn't go anywhere, and Albert E. Cowdry's "The Recreation Room," which is basically a Twilight Zone script in post-Katrina New Orleans. If you put these two together with Daryl Gregory's "Unpossible" (which is better than the other two, but thematically similar), you have a brilliant demonstration of the article Patrick Nielsen Hayden likes to quote about how modern SF stories tend to be about the concerns of middle-aged men. "Two Weeks After" by M. Ramsey Chaman is another Twilight Zone story-- well done, but with a slightly-too-cute twist ending.
Two stories, "The Diamond Shadow" by Fred Chappell and "The Bird Shaman's Girl" by Judith Moffett are very good, but part of some larger sequence of stories. Chappell's story describes the exploits of a sort of magical investogator in a fantasy world, who has the power to manipulate shadows, and is evidently the second such published in F & SF. Moffett's is part of the third novel in the Hefn sequence, set on an Earth ruled by environmentally conscious aliens (after The Ragged World and Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream), and while it does have a resolution to the immediate plot, it reads very much like a chunk taken out of a larger novel.
(The Moffett story also sufferered, for me, from a distracting attempt to re-cast the modern world. The plot concerns a young girl who was raised in a deeply religious family and had been abused by her grandfather, who was an official of the church. In this particular religion, which is based in Utah and was founded by a Prophet who led his people there from the Midwest, all the male members of the church are part of the clergy, and they have a number of secretive practices and some offshoots have a rather troubling attitude toward gender roles. I'm speaking, of course, of the Ephremites...
(Now, the plot depends on the Ephremites being somewhat icky, so I can sort of understand why she wouldn't want to just call them Mormons. But they're so obviously intended to be Mormons that the renaming just ends up being really distracting.)
The other really notable story in the issue is Michael Swanwick's "Urdumheim," which is done as a sort of creation myth for the world of his forthcoming The Dragons of Babel. It's remarkably comprehensible for Swanwick, dealing with an attack of logophages on early humans not long after the creation of the world. It's probably the best story in the lot.
All in all, my reaction is basically "Enh." Most of the stories were fine, but I wouldn't really pay for this on a regular basis. It may be that this was a dud issue, and I'll probably try another one at some point (we got two copies in our swag bags from World Fantasy Con-- anybody want to put in a good word for either the January 2007 or June 2007 issues?), but so far, I'm not seeing a lot to convince me that I really ought to be subscribing to any of these magazines.
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This is why I rarely follow short fiction, whether magazine or book collections. 95% are either goofy style experiments or setups for Twilight Zone knock-offs. There's plenty of great sci-fi in novel form, esp if you look for european writers.
Some thoughts on SF/F mags:
Even going back to the glory days of the pulps, the quality of selections in a typical magazine was decidedly uneven. For every widely anthologized classic short story from the Golden Age, there were dozens of crap stories. Basically, when you buy a short fiction magazine, you're paying for the one good story. And that's always been the case, since Hugo Gernsback started publishing fiction in The Electrical Experimenter. So, the fact that in your experiments you found one or two good stories means that the experiment was a tremendous success, not a failure.
Part of the appeal of reading magazines, for those who enjoy such things, is the search for the one good story, not the expectation of solid entertainment across the board.
In the past, there was some truth to the stereotypical "hack writer," pounding out story after story just to pay the rent. It's like firing buckshot through a harp: You pump out lots of rounds in the hopes that once in a while you hit something. Think of it as a practical application of Sturgeon's Law. This meant that editors had a wide pool of submissions to choose from, so there was a certain amount of preselection going on, and even then not every published story is a winner.
At some point in time -- it seems to me it was around the early 70s -- being a hack story writer became not just difficult, but economically impossible. At that point, short SF fiction became either established novelists experimenting with ideas, or part-timers with the luxury of being different for the sake of being different. That economic change meant that a) there was a smaller pool of stories to choose from, and therefore fewer bad stories got weeded out, and b) a lot of vague, unfriendly fiction got published that alienated fans looking for a good yarn.
[Hmmm... This is point where I'm supposed to inject some Internet boosterism -- online zines, Creative Commons licensing, podcasting, yadda yadda -- but I think it's really too soon to draw conclusions.]
Chad, you have once again done a very good job on modeling the space of all possible science fiction magazines from limited data. You were right to bring in Patrick Nielsen Hayden's point on age and gender bias in the field (and nationalism in the Angloamerican bias, and racism for that matter).
HP was right to invoke St. Gernsback and St. Sturgeon.
My bias is from too many data points, rather than to few, integrated over half a century.
Back when dinosaurs walked the Earth (cf. SFWA Grandmasters) there were only 4 elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Hence there were only 4 major Science Fiction magazines in the USA (I'm carefully excluding Fantasy and Horror): Amazing, Astounding, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Galaxy.
Amazing carried the Pulp torch, and the Gernsback legacy, somewhat to the detriment of literary style.
Astounding (which later transmuted into Analog) was the one that Engineers and Scientists could read, and exemplified hard SF.
Galaxy probed into Sociology Space and Humor effectively.
F&SF was the one that English Literature majors could read.
Of course, all these overlapped, but the clustering was evident, issue by issue, and continued under changed of editor.
Now, of course, we laugh at the notion that there should be only 4 elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire; and only 4 major Science Fiction magazines in the USA. There came waves of magazine proliferation, but most had short half-lives. The Internet does seem to have been a major broken symmetry event in the history of the cosmos.
IN any case, the conventional theory is that the universe is made of, not 4 elements, but 4 whatchamacallits: Matter, Energy, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy.
The matter that we know is 4% to 6% of the mass of the universe. The stuff we didn't know about is the other 94% to 96%. The same applies to Science Fiction. There are magazines in other countries and languages, and books only weakly connected to the orthonormal basis of magazines, and and a Gernsback Continuum of fan fiction.
Still, your first-order extrapolations from limited data are insightful, very well thought through, and much appreciated.
I haven't read any of the magazines you mentioned, so I can't make a direct comparison, but I've been very pleased the quality of the stories in "Jim Baen's Universe", an online-only DRM free magazine put out not surprisingly, by Baen.
It's no longer to make a living selling short stories, so all the writers who actually write for the money stick with novels. What you get in the magazines is either hobbyists or novices trying to get a foot in the door or established pros doing it as a finger exercise. Hence the irrelevance of most short stories.
Myself, I stick to the best of anthologies or the collections by authors I like already anyway.
I've been very pleased the quality of the stories in "Jim Baen's Universe", an online-only DRM free magazine put out not surprisingly, by Baen.
Baen in general is a poor match for my tastes. I looked at the current stories on Universe (at least the previews of them), and I didn't see anything there that would change that impression.
The Zen question at this point is: "Why be rational?"