Someone probably knows this in more detail, and I can easily get the magazine wrong. But I’ll share the anecdote, maybe it’ll ring someone else’s bell.
Back in the day, talking 40s to 50s, Analog published a letter to the editor that was “from the future”. Several years in the future. The writer was commenting on the stories, the topics, the writers, etc. in that issue.
Several years later (and I want to say it was, like, 9 years), Analog published that issue based on that letter. They contracted the authors and stories, the whole thing.
>In the November 1948 issue, Campbell published a letter to the editor by a reader named Richard A. Hoen that contained a detailed ranking of the contents of an issue "one year in the future". Campbell went along with the joke and contracted stories from most of the authors mentioned in the letter that would follow the Hoen's imaginary story titles. One of the best-known stories from that issue is "Gulf", by Heinlein. Other stories and articles were written by some of the most famous authors of the time: Asimov, Sturgeon, del Rey, van Vogt, de Camp, and the astronomer R. S. Richardson.
mcswell 11 hours ago [-]
Analog used to publish the rankings a few months after each issue came out. When the actual rankings for this issue came out, was there any correspondence to Hoen's prophesied rankings?
droideqa 18 hours ago [-]
Anybody reading this might appreciate ‘Astounding’[0]:
“Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers—John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard—who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world. ”
Be warned, I found it a bit depressing though. Never meet your heroes they say...
ethbr1 15 hours ago [-]
I'm hazarding that a lot of the early scifi luminaries weren't the most well-adjusted humans?
mcswell 11 hours ago [-]
Campbell was a racist, and I believe bought into the theory that smokers smoked because their bodies were trying to prevent or fight off lung cancer. He also appeared to be a believer in psi. He attracted (and doubtless encouraged) authors who shared those beliefs. If you go back and read the stories from the 50s and 60s, the heroes were invariably heavy smokers, and many of the stories involved telepathy, telekinesis, etc. The role of women in the stories was usually secondary (and the boy got the girl in the end), although that was probably true of most scifi back then. I don't recall any stories in Analog where the hero was other than a white man.
southernplaces7 3 minutes ago [-]
>Campbell was a racist
Back in the 50s? Most people of all kinds were, either implicitly or explicitly, even those who could have known and embraced better with a bit of context improvement.
Judging the people of the past by all the biases and ingrained assumptions of their time is myopic at best and a dumb path to disregarding a lot of wonderful knowledge too.
No human is free of at least some absurd ideas, it doesn't necessarily make the rest of what they create or say worth denigrating.
I'd hate to imagine all of us in the early 21st century only being mocked because of certain absurd things we surely take for granted as truths today.
dmurray 37 minutes ago [-]
Asimov's Susan Calvin stories first appeared in Analog (when it was called Astounding, but already under Campbell).
swombat 16 minutes ago [-]
Granted, he did. At the same time, Asimov was well known to be a groper, and even wrote a satire book called "The sensuous dirty old man" which would probably have landed better as satire had he not been fairly well known in scifi circles to be in fact a dirty old man.
There were some decent scifi authors at the time - not least, Ursula K LeGuin.
sbierwagen 10 hours ago [-]
>although that was probably true of most scifi back then
In 1950? That was true of all media, including novels written by women. Is Dagny Taggart the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged?
r0uv3n 10 hours ago [-]
Arguably Bayta is the lead in The Mule maybe? But of course the basic plot was very much influenced by Campbell still
I found the the Hubbard sections most unpleasant, but I also knew the least about him.
dcminter 2 hours ago [-]
I knew he was behind scientology, so I wasn't too surprised there. Heinlein wasn't completely unexpected (although his gullibility with Hubbard was). I was more thinking of Asimov turning out to be a serial groper.
I read a bio of John Wyndham shortly afterwards and I was so relieved that he seems to have been one of the good ones.
rendaw 15 hours ago [-]
Asimov was controversial?
mperham 14 hours ago [-]
He was a known harasser at cons.
KerrAvon 13 hours ago [-]
His writings weren’t controversial, though, except to anti-science nuts.
jimbob45 13 hours ago [-]
Nobody was saying this prior to the Foundation TV series coming out. It seems like marketing wanted to drum up some controversy for their series because the allegations would have required evidence from 40 years prior. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, but definitively saying so either way makes it seem like you have an agenda.
zimpenfish 5 hours ago [-]
> Nobody was saying this prior to the Foundation TV series coming out.
I knew about this back in the 90s. It's always been out there whenever Asimov is mentioned.
Finnucane 11 hours ago [-]
Lol, Asimov's reputation for being, shall we say, physically inappropriate with women at SF conventions goes back, well, for literally as long as there have been conventions.
BMc2020 17 hours ago [-]
The golden age of science fiction is twelve...
This is a good spot to post the omni magazine collection as well...
Those magazines from the 70s and 80s look so good!
ethbr1 15 hours ago [-]
As someone who bought originals of Gibson's omni stories... old issues are surprisingly cheap on eBay, if anyone is curious.
FpUser 16 hours ago [-]
I am 60+, read a lot and at least 50% is science fiction
ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago [-]
63, and read fantasy, the most.
I prefer fantasy, over scifi, because, in my opinion, with fantasy, the story is about characters in a fantastic world, while, in science fiction, the story is about a fantastic world, with characters in it.
I do have trouble liking newer stuff, though, and end up rereading a lot of “classic” lit. I feel as if authors aren’t well-edited, anymore, and that can have devastating consequences on the quality of their work. I hope that AI editors may help, there.
One of the things about these mags, is that they were a forge for great style. People learned to develop succinct, effective stories, and the editors for the publications could be brutal.
They forced authors to be good.
FiatLuxDave 13 hours ago [-]
I believe that is referred to as the Silver Age of science fiction ;)
pfdietz 3 hours ago [-]
As I get older, I find it hard to maintain suspension of disbelief when reading SF. Too many of the tropes have grown old and stale. I also find it hard to maintain interest, since too many stories are describing a time beyond when I can reasonably believe I'll be alive.
It's also clear that predictions of the future in SF stories are no more connected to reality than are outright fantasy stories. So why not just read fantasy if you want escapism? The takeover of SF by fantasy should have been predictable.
rom16384 17 hours ago [-]
I used to buy Analog on paper once in a while. A few years back I wanted to subscribe the digital version, but there wasn't a convenient way to do so, just closed platforms and drm'd readers, so I didn't subscribe. Don't make it hard for people to give you money. They could just email pdfs...
A_D_E_P_T 16 hours ago [-]
I made a post below on this, but I had previously subscribed to Analog via Amazon/Kindle. About two years ago Amazon killed all magazine subscriptions and forced the magazines to either make their issues available for free to "KindleUnlimited" subscribers ($10/mo) or get the hell off their platform.
Analog and Asimov's took the hit, and are, to this day, available to read for free if you have Kindle Unlimited. There's no way this didn't lose them tons of money and wreck their cashflow.
And, even though I personally benefitted, I'm still mad that Amazon did this & I'm surprised there wasn't more pushback from the magazines. They could have done a lot more to incentivize off-platform digital subscriptions.
jrootabega 3 hours ago [-]
Analog has been an all-around pain in the ass. I subscribed to the paper version and didn't receive an issue within the timeframe they advertise. It's bimonthly, so it was quite a while. When I wrote them, they said "Oh, we always skip the current issue in case you bought it in a store." I asked them to include that on the website, but guess whether they gave a crap.
When I let my subscription expire gracefully (because the overall quality of the writing and editing was bad), I got something like 6 - 10 letters warning me about it. They were the kind that scare elderly people with dementia into paying. They also included some dubious claims about renewing "now" and saving, but I couldn't work out how I would save anything if I did.
So things have been bad for a long time.
minihat 15 hours ago [-]
You can subscribe to Asimovs and/or Analog on their website today and they give you a download link for PDF, epub every other month.
jasonthorsness 17 hours ago [-]
In the 1990s my uncle gave me a ton of Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction from the 1970s of which I only still have maybe a half-dozen. Even in the 90s the perspective of the stories was super interesting and now even more so. Surprisingly they have almost no advertisement, just stories. I didn’t know they were still around!
bjelkeman-again 7 hours ago [-]
Another SF&F magazine I enjoy is Clarkesworld. I met the editor at Worldcon last year and it was nice hearing about how they manage to publish online for free and still pay authors.
I got really into short sf fiction, reading years best collections and then seeing they were all from analog ect started reading them.
The collections were better, just more filtered, but the history of these pulp magazines is amazing.
mcswell 11 hours ago [-]
There is a freely browsable and readable collection of stories from the 40s, 50s and 60s, and a few later, mostly from Analog, here: https://www.freesfonline.net/Magazines2.html
Luminist is one of the treasures of the Internet, right up there with Wikipedia and Archive - well worth donating to.
themadturk 13 hours ago [-]
I read Analog avidly in the mid-to-late 60s (yeah, 12 being the golden age of science fiction). I only remember one story for sure I read there, Dean McLaughlin's A Hawk Among The Sparrows, but I'm pretty sure I caught some others serialized there during that era. Good to see these mags are still around.
hnthrowaway0315 16 hours ago [-]
I never read any SF magazines, but "Analog Science Fiction and Fact" seems to be a super cool name for a SF magazine.
What are the most popular Analog/Embedded hobbyist magazines out there? I know Pi has one or more, but I always feel Pi to be a bit too high level for my taste.
11 hours ago [-]
dsign 7 hours ago [-]
I think we have killed science fiction with all sort of dumb things, but specially social media. And I don't mean that people spend more time on social media than reading (but they definitely do), but that in social media everybody is a bad critic, and that influences authors.
Just to give an example, I put off for many years reading Larry Niven's ringworld series, because I read in Twitter that the book was sexist. Well, it was sexist, but so were things at the time, and Ringworld is an amazing book otherwise, with some actual science sprinkled here and there, a lot of humor, and it's relatively low on drama.
Another science fiction killer was Hollywood. They want so much drama and special effects,and it should be appealing to people who don't know any science at all.
Who knows, maybe AI slop will save us by making us value logical consistency in art, something that current transformers and LLMs are very bad at. But I have more faith on our top-of-the-line AIs becoming logically consistent way before popular culture shifts in that direction, since current economic forces press for smarter AIs and stupider people.
throwaway81523 11 hours ago [-]
Yikes. I wonder if they will use the back catalog of science fiction stories to train AI and give us new forms of dystopia.
genewitch 6 hours ago [-]
What, you don't like the current dystopia?
greesil 13 hours ago [-]
I was gifted an Asimov subscription back in the late 90s, and when I went to college stopped reading. I recently had subscribed again and found it not as good as I remembered. As a kid it was definitely hit or miss, but as an adult it's all misses. I can figure out if the magazine has changed, or if I have changed, or both. But, it feels like it has gone downhill. Honestly, the whole genre. Maybe it's hard to write sci fi now what we're actually living it. Or, anyone with talent has gone elsewhere.
KerrAvon 10 hours ago [-]
No idea if Asimov’s got worse, but what we’re living right now is so much stupider than any science fiction. AI, but it’s not actually intelligent and it often produces garbage. A fascist takeover of the US from the inside by the dumbest billionaires imaginable, because an entire segment of society got bored with their lives during pandemic lockdown and decided they’d rather live in an action movie than consensus reality.
Nearly infinite computing power on a glass rectangle in your pocket, and it’s only made humanity stupider, again thanks to billionaires who are too stupid to understand where their money and power derives from. And how it can be taken away.
pfdietz 3 hours ago [-]
We're living in a time when chickens are coming home to roost. A nation can't sustain greatness by borrowing forever. SF could have helped people come to grips with this inevitability, but I guess it didn't.
HumblyTossed 14 hours ago [-]
Never got into these but loved AHMM for a while.
pfdietz 18 hours ago [-]
I didn't realize FaSF was teetering on the brink.
alabastervlog 16 hours ago [-]
Basically all of fiction except romance/porn is withering fast.
Henchman21 14 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that romance/porn is mostly written by LLMs at this point. Its all just churned out crap to make a quick buck on Amazon. My elderly mother reads this genre endlessly and frequently wonders if there are editors at all!
lmm 11 hours ago [-]
> My understanding is that romance/porn is mostly written by LLMs at this point. Its all just churned out crap to make a quick buck on Amazon.
It's always been churned out crap, I don't see LLMs making much difference.
smcin 14 hours ago [-]
"mostly written by LLMs... on Amazon" Do you mean in e-books, print books, or subscription based sites, or some/all of those? I think you only mean e-books, on Amazon. Then if people object to that, just avoid e-books on Amazon. Stay with human-curated.
throwaway81523 11 hours ago [-]
The deal with Amazon is you pay a fixed monthly subscription fee to read an umlimited amount of crap on your Kindle (RMS calls that device a Swindle). So if you have some favorite authors or get recommendations from a subreddit or something, you can keep your reading appetite satiated without buying individual titles. Particularly, that lets you DNF (do not finish) a work without incurring expense, if you read a few pages and decide not to continue.
The plan involved is called Kindle Unlimited and its terms for authors are quite onerous imho, but monopolies etc.
KerrAvon 10 hours ago [-]
If anyone needs an alternative: the current Kobo lineup is great. You can buy ebooks directly through the Kobo store, and they work well. And if you want to tinker with the OS, you can.
thaumasiotes 11 hours ago [-]
> Then if people object to that, just avoid e-books on Amazon. Stay with human-curated.
What does being an ebook have to do with it? You want to avoid self-published books. The typical self-published book is much worse than nothing. But most books are available as ebooks.
smcin 9 hours ago [-]
The only way most people are going to encounter self-published (e-)books being marketed to them is Kindle (Unlimited) or online stores. Brick-and-mortar stores wouldn't do this, it wouldn't even economically make sense to carry the stuff and it would damage their reputation.
Why are you recommending that we avoid reading it?
smcin 7 hours ago [-]
Do us a favor and don't misrepresent what I say. "Self-published author" connotes no-name author (or anonymous/pseudonymous) with no publishing history or reputation; whereas Neil Gaiman is already reputable and has sold 40+ million books.
Statistically, the average e-book that Amazon tries to advertise to you is far more likely to be the former than the letter. And that was before the current wave of "pay to learn our system to get rich publishing e-books".
I even have friends who tried it for a while. They hardly made any money.
thaumasiotes 6 hours ago [-]
> Do us a favor and don't misrepresent what I say.
Would you mind doing me the same favor, of not misrepresenting what you say?
> "Self-published" connotes no-name author (or anonymous/pseudonymous) with no publishing history or reputation; whereas Neil Gaiman is already reputable and has sold 40 million books.
...is this relevant to something you've said? I'm the only one so far who's said something about self-published books. Your recommendation was to avoid ebooks. That recommendation was stupid.
> Statistically, the average e-book that Amazon tries to advertise to you is far more likely to be the former than the letter.
Well, I just opened the Amazon front page. These are the ebooks they're advertising to me:
1. The Summer Dragon, Todd Lockwood. Publisher: DAW
2. Beren and Lúthien, J.R.R. Tolkien (and Christopher Tolkien). Publisher: William Morrow (= HarperCollins)
3. Daughter of the Empire, Raymond Feist (and Janny Wurts). Publisher: Spectra (= Penguin)
4. The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu. Publisher: Saga Press (= Simon & Schuster)
5. An Inheritance of Ash & Blood, Jamie Edmundson. Publisher: Rarn, which does appear to be Jamie Edmundson's personal publishing company. This could fairly be considered self-published. It's also available on Kindle Unlimited, which is a red flag. The author appears to be fairly prolific, so he's not exactly lacking a publishing history.
6. Heir of Ra, M. Sasinowski. Publisher: Kingsmill Press. This is another publisher that appears to be a vehicle for a single author. Probably self-published. This book is at pains to point out the many awards it's won, probably because it's self-published.
7. The Anvil, Christopher Coates. Publisher: Next Chapter, which purports to "combine the professionalism and quality of traditional publishing with the creative freedom of independent publishing". They review your work before publishing it; not self-published.
8. The Book That Wouldn't Burn, Mark Lawrence. Publisher: Ace
That concludes the front page. There are five books from major publishers, one from a minor publisher, and two most likely self-published. The biggest names appearing are J.R.R. Tolkien and Raymond Feist. Taking author quality into account, you appear to be roughly as likely to get Neil Gaiman as you are to get anything self-published. Ignoring it, you're far more likely to get something reputable than to get trash.
Unless, of course, you want to read trash, in which case Amazon's recommendations will probably lean that way.
smcin 4 hours ago [-]
No, we were talking specifically about things "mostly written by LLMs... on Amazon" in the ancestor comment by Henchman21 ("My understanding is that romance/porn is mostly written by LLMs at this point.")
Given that we're talking about the set of those, allow that it's pretty obvious to recognize a book by a known author vs an LLM based simply on the title, cover, author bio or lack of, publisher and whether they have links/catalog to any prior books, or a total absence of.
Those are going to skew disproportionately towards e-books and away from paper books. And you can "look inside" to get an idea of their quality. Which in my experience was often bad. So that recommendation wasn't at all stupid.
As to what Amazon recommends you, noone said frontpage, Henchman21 was talking about romance/porn, and as for me I use keyword searches. I see lots of obscure titles from unknown authors ranked above titles I know are reliable.
* EXAMPLE: Search Kindle Store for "guide visit Philippines"
The #1 hit is not any legit guide, but an obscure 32pp Kindle book by an unknown Portuguese(?) author averaging 3/5 stars, published way back in 2015 (which in itself would be a fail for a travel guide with timely information). I clicked Look inside and confirm it's garbage, really basic, possibly not written by a human.
#2 is a $9.99 title by an unknown Kindle author who managed to be amazingly prolific in the month of Dec 2024 alone, publishing "The Essential Philippines Travel Guide 2025: Things to know before visiting, Best Attractions, Best Hidden Gems, Antiquated Cultures, Culinary Delights, Travel budget, itineraries & Staying Safe"
but then you find in Dec 2024 she also wrote "The Essential XX Travel Guide 2025: ..." for XX = {Philippines, Paris, Malta, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Norway, New Zealand, Berlin, Valencia, Seoul, Serbia, Vietnam, Florida, Costa-Rica, Germany... Sedona AZ, and many more...} Did she visit all these countries in 2024? ever? ("What Makes This Book Unique?
Written by a Team of Philippines Experts: Crafted by those who know the Philippines inside and out, ensuring accurate and authentic recommendations."... "What Makes This Book Unique?
Written by a Team of Morocco Experts: Trust in the expertise of seasoned travelers and locals who know the country inside out... Regularly Updated: Enjoy the latest insights for 2025 and beyond... Impressive.)
The #4 hit is another KindleUnlimited 26pp "Visiting the Philippines as a Christian: Guide to Customs and Worship". Not even a relevant search result.
The #5 hit is "CultureShock! Philippines", the first relevant quality result (although it's a (superb) cultural guide rather than a practical visitor how-to-get-around guide). But it's the only decent item in all these results.
#7 is "Palau Travel Guide 2025: ..." (wrong country) and #10 is "BALI FOR TRAVELERS. The total guide" (wrong country).
Statistically, the average Kindle e-book that Amazon tries to advertise to you for "guide visit Philippines" is far more likely to be the former than the letter. Exactly what I said.
Lonely Planet Philippines doesn't even show up anywhere in the results(!) It should be in the top-3. (Bizarrely, if you know it's the result you want and search for that exact title "Lonely Planet Philippines", it shows up in all its editions.)
(Also: I almost never look for e-books on Amazon, so their A9 search results for me are going to have worse personalization than for you. Try repeating your own search logged out or incognito and see if doesn't get worse. (Search, not frontpage))
And as to "the current wave of "pay to learn our system to get rich publishing e-books [on Amazon]"" ad content I mentioned, I get an obscene amount of those ads on YouTube, for e-publishers that target Amazon. Which helps explain the above results.
mtVessel 16 hours ago [-]
I didn't realize they were still in print!
Finnucane 11 hours ago [-]
Gordon's had some issues--declining distribution (as with every magazine), and recently the printer he'd been using for a long time went out of business, and he had to scramble to find another.
DoneWithAllThat 14 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure how many people realize the number of great sci-fi stories that started as anthologies in these magazines. It’s a foundation of the entire genre that often goes entirely unappreciated.
fallingfrog 16 hours ago [-]
Well it was nice while it lasted
A_D_E_P_T 16 hours ago [-]
> In a public post on the official Facebook page of Asimov's Science Fiction, the magazine's editor Sheila Williams said "We're excited about Asimov's future with our new owners. We have lots of great stories lined up. There's no change to our editorial staff. Our new owners are readers who love genre magazines and we're looking forward to working with them."
Seems like things are going to be fine.
In all honesty, Amazon cutting digital magazine subscriptions and shifting everything over to "KindleUnlimited" was hugely damaging to these magazines and probably outright killed their business model. The new owners are apparently fans who are keeping the thing going practically as a charity.
KerrAvon 13 hours ago [-]
This is very likely. Bezos’ early investment in political lobbying really paid off for them; bought them a judge who effectively killed competition from Apple, and they’ve been free of antitrust scrutiny since 2005.
Won’t help them much under Musk’s governance, though.
zabzonk 15 hours ago [-]
Ooh, I hadn't thought of these mags (sort of the size of a paperback) for years. I used to read Galaxy and Analog in the mid-70s. I wonder where people sell or will sell SF novels these days? They were published multi-part in the mags.
I stopped reading them because I moved to London in the late 70s, and was frankly broke because of housing and other costs.
NoMoreNicksLeft 7 hours ago [-]
Someone tried to relaunch Galaxy last year. They produced an August 2024 issue, none since. No idea what's going on with it. The same people tried to do a relaunch of Worlds of If a year prior, just one issue too. I honestly don't know whether to wish luck to the people doing this, or if they'd just ruin them...
Rendered at 14:39:36 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
Back in the day, talking 40s to 50s, Analog published a letter to the editor that was “from the future”. Several years in the future. The writer was commenting on the stories, the topics, the writers, etc. in that issue.
Several years later (and I want to say it was, like, 9 years), Analog published that issue based on that letter. They contracted the authors and stories, the whole thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fac...
>In the November 1948 issue, Campbell published a letter to the editor by a reader named Richard A. Hoen that contained a detailed ranking of the contents of an issue "one year in the future". Campbell went along with the joke and contracted stories from most of the authors mentioned in the letter that would follow the Hoen's imaginary story titles. One of the best-known stories from that issue is "Gulf", by Heinlein. Other stories and articles were written by some of the most famous authors of the time: Asimov, Sturgeon, del Rey, van Vogt, de Camp, and the astronomer R. S. Richardson.
“Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers—John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard—who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world. ”
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Astounding-Campbell-Heinlein-Hubbard-...
Audio book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/astounding-john-w-campbell-isaa...
Back in the 50s? Most people of all kinds were, either implicitly or explicitly, even those who could have known and embraced better with a bit of context improvement.
Judging the people of the past by all the biases and ingrained assumptions of their time is myopic at best and a dumb path to disregarding a lot of wonderful knowledge too.
No human is free of at least some absurd ideas, it doesn't necessarily make the rest of what they create or say worth denigrating.
I'd hate to imagine all of us in the early 21st century only being mocked because of certain absurd things we surely take for granted as truths today.
There were some decent scifi authors at the time - not least, Ursula K LeGuin.
In 1950? That was true of all media, including novels written by women. Is Dagny Taggart the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged?
I suspect almost everyone has their own experience of „It happened to me!“: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295560
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/aklqck/breendoggle_a...
I read a bio of John Wyndham shortly afterwards and I was so relieved that he seems to have been one of the good ones.
I knew about this back in the 90s. It's always been out there whenever Asimov is mentioned.
This is a good spot to post the omni magazine collection as well...
http://www.williamflew.com/
I prefer fantasy, over scifi, because, in my opinion, with fantasy, the story is about characters in a fantastic world, while, in science fiction, the story is about a fantastic world, with characters in it.
I do have trouble liking newer stuff, though, and end up rereading a lot of “classic” lit. I feel as if authors aren’t well-edited, anymore, and that can have devastating consequences on the quality of their work. I hope that AI editors may help, there.
One of the things about these mags, is that they were a forge for great style. People learned to develop succinct, effective stories, and the editors for the publications could be brutal.
They forced authors to be good.
It's also clear that predictions of the future in SF stories are no more connected to reality than are outright fantasy stories. So why not just read fantasy if you want escapism? The takeover of SF by fantasy should have been predictable.
Analog and Asimov's took the hit, and are, to this day, available to read for free if you have Kindle Unlimited. There's no way this didn't lose them tons of money and wreck their cashflow.
And, even though I personally benefitted, I'm still mad that Amazon did this & I'm surprised there wasn't more pushback from the magazines. They could have done a lot more to incentivize off-platform digital subscriptions.
When I let my subscription expire gracefully (because the overall quality of the writing and editing was bad), I got something like 6 - 10 letters warning me about it. They were the kind that scare elderly people with dementia into paying. They also included some dubious claims about renewing "now" and saving, but I couldn't work out how I would save anything if I did.
So things have been bad for a long time.
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/
The collections were better, just more filtered, but the history of these pulp magazines is amazing.
Luminist is one of the treasures of the Internet, right up there with Wikipedia and Archive - well worth donating to.
What are the most popular Analog/Embedded hobbyist magazines out there? I know Pi has one or more, but I always feel Pi to be a bit too high level for my taste.
Just to give an example, I put off for many years reading Larry Niven's ringworld series, because I read in Twitter that the book was sexist. Well, it was sexist, but so were things at the time, and Ringworld is an amazing book otherwise, with some actual science sprinkled here and there, a lot of humor, and it's relatively low on drama.
Another science fiction killer was Hollywood. They want so much drama and special effects,and it should be appealing to people who don't know any science at all.
Who knows, maybe AI slop will save us by making us value logical consistency in art, something that current transformers and LLMs are very bad at. But I have more faith on our top-of-the-line AIs becoming logically consistent way before popular culture shifts in that direction, since current economic forces press for smarter AIs and stupider people.
Nearly infinite computing power on a glass rectangle in your pocket, and it’s only made humanity stupider, again thanks to billionaires who are too stupid to understand where their money and power derives from. And how it can be taken away.
It's always been churned out crap, I don't see LLMs making much difference.
The plan involved is called Kindle Unlimited and its terms for authors are quite onerous imho, but monopolies etc.
What does being an ebook have to do with it? You want to avoid self-published books. The typical self-published book is much worse than nothing. But most books are available as ebooks.
Why are you recommending that we avoid reading it?
Statistically, the average e-book that Amazon tries to advertise to you is far more likely to be the former than the letter. And that was before the current wave of "pay to learn our system to get rich publishing e-books". I even have friends who tried it for a while. They hardly made any money.
Would you mind doing me the same favor, of not misrepresenting what you say?
> "Self-published" connotes no-name author (or anonymous/pseudonymous) with no publishing history or reputation; whereas Neil Gaiman is already reputable and has sold 40 million books.
...is this relevant to something you've said? I'm the only one so far who's said something about self-published books. Your recommendation was to avoid ebooks. That recommendation was stupid.
> Statistically, the average e-book that Amazon tries to advertise to you is far more likely to be the former than the letter.
Well, I just opened the Amazon front page. These are the ebooks they're advertising to me:
1. The Summer Dragon, Todd Lockwood. Publisher: DAW
2. Beren and Lúthien, J.R.R. Tolkien (and Christopher Tolkien). Publisher: William Morrow (= HarperCollins)
3. Daughter of the Empire, Raymond Feist (and Janny Wurts). Publisher: Spectra (= Penguin)
4. The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu. Publisher: Saga Press (= Simon & Schuster)
5. An Inheritance of Ash & Blood, Jamie Edmundson. Publisher: Rarn, which does appear to be Jamie Edmundson's personal publishing company. This could fairly be considered self-published. It's also available on Kindle Unlimited, which is a red flag. The author appears to be fairly prolific, so he's not exactly lacking a publishing history.
6. Heir of Ra, M. Sasinowski. Publisher: Kingsmill Press. This is another publisher that appears to be a vehicle for a single author. Probably self-published. This book is at pains to point out the many awards it's won, probably because it's self-published.
7. The Anvil, Christopher Coates. Publisher: Next Chapter, which purports to "combine the professionalism and quality of traditional publishing with the creative freedom of independent publishing". They review your work before publishing it; not self-published.
8. The Book That Wouldn't Burn, Mark Lawrence. Publisher: Ace
That concludes the front page. There are five books from major publishers, one from a minor publisher, and two most likely self-published. The biggest names appearing are J.R.R. Tolkien and Raymond Feist. Taking author quality into account, you appear to be roughly as likely to get Neil Gaiman as you are to get anything self-published. Ignoring it, you're far more likely to get something reputable than to get trash.
Unless, of course, you want to read trash, in which case Amazon's recommendations will probably lean that way.
Given that we're talking about the set of those, allow that it's pretty obvious to recognize a book by a known author vs an LLM based simply on the title, cover, author bio or lack of, publisher and whether they have links/catalog to any prior books, or a total absence of.
Those are going to skew disproportionately towards e-books and away from paper books. And you can "look inside" to get an idea of their quality. Which in my experience was often bad. So that recommendation wasn't at all stupid.
As to what Amazon recommends you, noone said frontpage, Henchman21 was talking about romance/porn, and as for me I use keyword searches. I see lots of obscure titles from unknown authors ranked above titles I know are reliable.
* EXAMPLE: Search Kindle Store for "guide visit Philippines"
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=guide+visit+Philippines&i=digital...
The #1 hit is not any legit guide, but an obscure 32pp Kindle book by an unknown Portuguese(?) author averaging 3/5 stars, published way back in 2015 (which in itself would be a fail for a travel guide with timely information). I clicked Look inside and confirm it's garbage, really basic, possibly not written by a human.
#2 is a $9.99 title by an unknown Kindle author who managed to be amazingly prolific in the month of Dec 2024 alone, publishing "The Essential Philippines Travel Guide 2025: Things to know before visiting, Best Attractions, Best Hidden Gems, Antiquated Cultures, Culinary Delights, Travel budget, itineraries & Staying Safe" but then you find in Dec 2024 she also wrote "The Essential XX Travel Guide 2025: ..." for XX = {Philippines, Paris, Malta, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Norway, New Zealand, Berlin, Valencia, Seoul, Serbia, Vietnam, Florida, Costa-Rica, Germany... Sedona AZ, and many more...} Did she visit all these countries in 2024? ever? ("What Makes This Book Unique? Written by a Team of Philippines Experts: Crafted by those who know the Philippines inside and out, ensuring accurate and authentic recommendations."... "What Makes This Book Unique? Written by a Team of Morocco Experts: Trust in the expertise of seasoned travelers and locals who know the country inside out... Regularly Updated: Enjoy the latest insights for 2025 and beyond... Impressive.)
The #4 hit is another KindleUnlimited 26pp "Visiting the Philippines as a Christian: Guide to Customs and Worship". Not even a relevant search result.
The #5 hit is "CultureShock! Philippines", the first relevant quality result (although it's a (superb) cultural guide rather than a practical visitor how-to-get-around guide). But it's the only decent item in all these results.
#7 is "Palau Travel Guide 2025: ..." (wrong country) and #10 is "BALI FOR TRAVELERS. The total guide" (wrong country).
Statistically, the average Kindle e-book that Amazon tries to advertise to you for "guide visit Philippines" is far more likely to be the former than the letter. Exactly what I said.
Lonely Planet Philippines doesn't even show up anywhere in the results(!) It should be in the top-3. (Bizarrely, if you know it's the result you want and search for that exact title "Lonely Planet Philippines", it shows up in all its editions.)
(Also: I almost never look for e-books on Amazon, so their A9 search results for me are going to have worse personalization than for you. Try repeating your own search logged out or incognito and see if doesn't get worse. (Search, not frontpage))
And as to "the current wave of "pay to learn our system to get rich publishing e-books [on Amazon]"" ad content I mentioned, I get an obscene amount of those ads on YouTube, for e-publishers that target Amazon. Which helps explain the above results.
Seems like things are going to be fine.
In all honesty, Amazon cutting digital magazine subscriptions and shifting everything over to "KindleUnlimited" was hugely damaging to these magazines and probably outright killed their business model. The new owners are apparently fans who are keeping the thing going practically as a charity.
Won’t help them much under Musk’s governance, though.
I stopped reading them because I moved to London in the late 70s, and was frankly broke because of housing and other costs.