My favorite SF/F magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction is getting a lot of attention this week because of their new blog. I’ve been reading this magazine since the mid 1960s and I eventually collected most of the issues back to the early 1950s. Sad to say I had to sell my collection during lean college years.
A great way to get a feel for this wonderful mag is to look at their cover history. If you scan these covers you’ll discover that a lot of famous SF&F short stories and novels first appeared in this little digest magazine, including my all-time favorite novel, Have Space Suit-Will Travel.
You’ll also see the evolution of their cover art, and that makes this page a very neat art gallery. You can click on the thumbnails to see a larger image and it’s well worth spending some time doing that. Be sure and read the titles and authors listed on each cover. [By the way, if you love covers from old pulp magazines be sure to jump over to Cover Browser and look at the Astounding Stories. What a gas it is to compare the Astounding cover art from the 1930s and 1940s to the F&SF art of the 1950s, 1960s and later.]
I’ve even collected a few rejection slips from F&SF over the years. One of my personal wake-up-in-the-middle-of-night trying to get back to sleep fantasies is to sell a story to F&SF. A good way to deal with insomnia downtime is to imagine a short story plot.
A lot of readers don’t like short stories but I think they are a very special art form that is going the way of the poem. I hope the web brings F&SF more readers so it can keep publishing for the rest of my life. I wish there was some way to help people get into short stories and discover their potential for great entertainment. I consider the best SF&F short stories far more sense of wonder filled than any of the big SF blockbuster movies. Films are so conservative when it comes to fantastic fiction.
Back in 2003 Audible.com ran five bi-monthly audio editions of F&SF and a Best of 2002 issue that I think showcase just how good this magazine is and how entertaining short stories can be. It’s a crying shame this audio edition didn’t catch on, but you can still find those six audio collections on Audible.com and at iTunes. I wish all these stories were on MP3 and sold like songs. Maybe that’s the new meme for short fiction – sold one at a time for your iPod pleasure.
If you can’t find F&SF at your newsstand take a gamble and subscribe, or even hyperlink over to Fictionwise.com and buy an ebook edition to read on your computer, PDA and even Kindle.
Jim
Auxiliary Memory 
I love the cover art gallery that they put up. I was over there yesterday clicking around and found several covers that I would love to try to get a hold of someday. I have a very small collection of old sci fi magazines that I would certainly like to add to…like anything else it simply boils down to the fact that I have waaay too many things I would love to spend money on.