OT: New Guardians of The Pulps
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From Jason Sanford’s Substack:
For months there have been rumors in the science fiction and fantasy genre that the traditional “big 3” print magazines – Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and Fantasy and Science Fiction – were being purchased by new owners.
Confirmation of this has now appeared on the websites of Asimov’s and Analog, as first reported by Amazing Stories.
Ellen Datlow said 1 Paragraph has also purchased Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Nick Mamatas said the same thing on Bluesky. Both magazines were previously owned by Penny Press and, like Asimov’s and Analog, now have the same 1 Paragraph ownership information on their websites.
Andrew Liptak at Transfer Orbit expands on the report:
Modern science fiction owes its existence to the magazines that published short stories: they were an integral part of the formation of the genre and helped its best-known authors to legions of readers. The heyday of print magazines seems to have passed, and as these three remaining legacy publications move into the future under new ownership, they’ll face an uncertain future.
With an update of the new owners responding.
The pair note that with the acquisition, they have a number of plans to update and modernize each of the publications. Salpeter explained that the magazines have fallen behind their digital counterparts, and that they “have significantly lower digital readers than any of the other genre fiction magazines out there and on average sell a far fewer percentage in digital than readers who buy ebooks in the same genre. There’s an audience we’re missing.”
To that end, Salpeter says that “we’ll launch a new web vertical at the end of this summer to house each magazine.”
In my youth I haunted used bookstores and during my Ron Goulart fanboy period F&SF and Hitchcock’s were go-to magazines to find Goulart short stories. An added bonus being Gahan Wilson as a regular at F&SF.
As I visit the local Barnes and Noble I still stop and check the index pages of the above five pulp magazines (yeah, I still call them pulps). And page through The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to read the four or five cartoons they still buy and publish every issue.
End of my trip down Nostalgia Avenue.
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