REVIEW - Gateways to Forever by Mike Ashley (2007)
Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1980
By Mike Ashley
Paperback, 507 pages, £20, Liverpool University Press
*
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
There is a case to be made for reckoning the history of science fiction over the last century, at least since Hugo Gernsback began to include scientifiction stories in his popular mechanics magazines, in terms of the history of its magazines. Certainly anyone considering science fiction since the launch of Amazing in 1926 has to pay attention to the magazines. And usually, in any one period, there is one dominant publication. It may not have the biggest sales, it may not publish the majority of the award winners, but it somehow captures the zeitgeist, in some way it reflects the spirit of science fiction in that one age of the world.
The first such standard bearer was, of course, Amazing, but in the late 30s Astounding took over as pulp adventure gave way to a more thoughtful hard sf. In the 50s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction came to be the representative of a new, more literary sf. The title briefly crossed the Atlantic to New Worlds in the 60s as the counter-culture found voice in an sf that looked to the avant garde, the iconoclastic, the idiosyncratic. In the 80s the standard was taken up by Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, which pushed at no boundaries but, in its combination of hard sf ideas with a more literary sensibility, provided a safe, all-things-to-all-people sf. This, in turn, may explain why it has held on to poll position for longer than any other magazine, though its grip now seems to have loosened in favour, perhaps, of a loose and ever-shifting conglomeration of online titles.
The obvious gap in this chronology is the 1970s, when no magazine held dominance and the most interesting work was coming from original anthology series, such as Orbit, Universe and New Dimensions.
At first glance, then, it would seem perverse that Mike Ashley’s ongoing history of the sf magazines, having devoted just two volumes to the 44 years between the birth of Amazing and the first death of New Worlds, should now devote one entire volume to that desert of the magazines, the 1970s. Indeed Ashley begins his preface by revealing that he originally intended to bring his series to an end with just one volume covering the 30 years from 1970 to 2000.
Of course, the big magazines – Amazing, Analog, F&SF, Galaxy, If – were still being published, though mostly going through tough times. Analog lost its iconic editor, John W. Campbell, who died in 1971, necessitating a change of direction at the magazine. Amazing, Galaxy and If all had to endure changes of ownership, falling sales and some frankly bizarre publishing decisions, which combined to kill off the latter two and leave Amazing a feeble shadow of its former self. Only F&SF continued on its way largely unchanged but also frankly uninspired. Meanwhile, New Worlds, which had made such a splash only a year or so before, folded as a magazine, reappeared as an irregular anthology series, folded again, and again re-emerged as a scrappy semi-pro magazine.
None of these, therefore, was in a position to achieve any sort of dominance in the field. There was, however, no shortage of candidates trying to fill the vacuum. In a sense, one can see exactly why Ashley found himself devoting an entire volume to this one decade, because there were probably more magazines published than in any other comparable period in the history of sf. But most of these – Other Times, Vortex, Science Fiction Monthly and SF Digest in Britain alone – lasted a handful of issues at most before disappearing forever. They were, almost without exception, underfunded, ill-conceived, poorly distributed, badly edited, and incapable of having anything more than a glancing impact on the field.
Yet Ashley devotes as much attention to each of these myriad, long-forgotten, minimally-important publications as he does to those which actually shaped science fiction. We are introduced to the publisher(s) and editor(s), we are told about paper stock, page size (and every change in size during the run of the magazine is documented), the nature of the funding, the price, the cover artists, the method of reproduction, the contents, the critical reception. If the magazine published any new writers, they are listed, even if they went on to write no more fiction (which happens quite a lot); if stories are reprints we are told where and when they first appeared; we are told about every award nomination, and selected stories are précised (though it is never clear why some stories are picked out for this treatment and not others). Finally we are given the gory details about how and when and why it failed. Since every magazine, big or small, is subject to the same exhaustive treatment, it becomes impossible to gauge one against another, to tell that, for instance, in Britain Science Fiction Monthly had, during its brief life, a far bigger impact than the other three combined.
But that is a judgment call, and you don’t turn to Ashley for analysis. There are, effectively, three approaches to a specialist history such as this, you can catalogue the data, you can analyse the data, or you can provide context for the data, though in practice in most instances you are likely to get a combination of the three. Ashley is very much a cataloguer.
In so far as the history of the magazines is also a broader history of the genre, the 1970s were a curious period. In pop culture terms (and sf picks up an awful lot on popular culture) the lush progressive music of the early 70s gave way to the harsher, stripped down punk. In political terms events like the Vietnam War, Watergate and the shooting of four student protesters at Kent State University all had a seismic effect, an effect that shook its way through the science fiction of the period also. Yet none of these is even mentioned in the book. Even the release of Star Wars, which effected a transformation in the genre, is mentioned mostly in the context of the rise of non-fiction magazines devoted to science fiction movies. In other words, context is almost totally absent from this book.
The Vietnam War in particular drove a fault line through American science fiction. Many writers came out publicly as pro or anti, most of those in favour of the war wrote the sort of hard, technical sf associated with Analog. It was one of the things that made this style of science fiction, and by association the magazine, seem out of touch and dated. Analog remained popular with older readers, but its younger readership fell away. It would be twenty years before younger readers, and younger writers, returned whole-heartedly to hard sf again. But if, to many in the sf world at the time, Analog felt like a spent force, you would gain no sense of that in Ashley’s book. Indeed, Analog consistently comes across as the liveliest and most successful of all the magazines.
This is because, purely within its own terms, Analog was a success in the 70s. It acquired a new editor, Ben Bova, who introduced new features and acquired stories by top name authors. That was enough to earn glowing comments in the magazine’s own letter column, which is the only critical perspective on Analog that Ashley quotes. The fact that despite its makeover it was still seen as backward looking in both political and literary terms by many in the sf community did not matter to any of its readers, and so does not feature in Ashley’s coverage of the magazine. This is not to gainsay Bova; he proved to be a very good editor indeed and at this period Analog did publish some seriously good stories. But it was not the unalloyed tale of glory that Ashley makes it out to be. And the tenor of these remarks can be applied just as forcefully to Ashley’s coverage of the other magazines, large and small. We get a mass of information on the magazines that is clear, non-judgmental and, so far as I can tell, entirely accurate (the only obvious error I spotted was when he suggested that John Varley’s expansion of his story ‘Air Raid’, the novel Millenium (1983) was a novelization of the film Millenium (1989), which implies a twist in time worthy of the story itself); but that is as far as it goes, because there is no analysis of the data.
The history of the magazines throughout the 1970s (in fact, probably the history of the magazines, period) is full of bad financial decisions, bad editorial decisions and downright appalling stories. But Ashley can never quite bring himself to say so. At his most damning he might suggest that a story was less successful or not quite so popular. One reason for this is quite plain to see: at a rough estimate, well over half of the references and quotations given throughout the book are from private letters and emails to Ashley from the various players in these games. He has been at this a long time, working on histories of the magazines in one form or another for over 30 years, and over that period he has built up a personal relationship with many of the publishers, editors, writers, slush-pile readers and so forth who populate this story. In those circumstances it is hard to turn their contribution to his work into what might be seen as a personal attack. In those circumstances, indeed, it is all too easy to accept what he is told as gospel. There are a few occasions during the course of the book where he presents different versions of events from different correspondents, but I wasn’t aware of a single occasion upon which he questions what he is told, even though, with the best will in the world, memories of what happened 30 or 40 years ago are liable to be a trifle cloudy.
None of which should be taken as implying that this is a bad book. Far from it. It may not be doing some of the things we might expect of a history; but as an accumulation of raw data it is magnificent. Any future historian of science fiction will, rightly, treat Ashley’s work like a goldmine. He has done the research, and presented his findings in a stolid but accessible manner. If you want to know what was happening in science fiction during the period, it will be your first port of call. In Chapter One you will find all you might want to know about the major sf magazines between the late-sixties and mid-seventies, short of ploughing through every issue yourself, and even then you’d miss out on most of the behind-the-scenes stories provided by Ashley’s myriad contacts. In Chapter Two you get the parallel story of the original anthologies, not just the major ones like Orbit, Universe and New Dimensions, but the smaller ones like QUARK/, Weird Heroes and Stellar. That Ashley clearly prefers magazines to even the best of the original anthologies is an understandable prejudice; that he then leans over backwards to be fair to Roger Elwood is, perhaps, less excusable. But then, Ashley does like to be fair to everyone. Chapter Three takes us into the realm of the small magazines: the semi-pro zines, the fanzines that aimed high, the magazines that failed after one or two issues, the science fiction magazines devoted to film that eschewed all fiction, the gaming magazines with genre cross-over, the news magazines, the critical journals. Another historic development during the 1970s was that this was the period when science fiction became academically respectable: Extrapolation first appeared in the mid-60s, but Foundation and Science Fiction Studies both followed in the early 70s. Curiously, although Ashley looks at these three magazines, he devotes far more attention to magazines like Algol and Riverside Quarterly that gave science fiction critical consideration but away from the academy, so he doesn’t, for example, have to wrestle with the Marxism of Science Fiction Studies. Finally, in Chapter Four, he returns to what the major fiction magazines were doing towards the end of the decade, and looks in particular at the two new magazines that had both the financial backing and the editorial nous to survive: Asimov’s and Omni. A last brief round-up chapter revisits the story we’ve just been told, and we’ve still got over 100 pages to go. Because Ashley now adds a round up of non-English Language magazines (an incredible number; we tend to forget that sf is nowhere near as Anglophone as we are inclined to imagine it); a table showing publication details and schedules for every magazine and original anthology series covered in the book; a checklist of editors and publishers; another checklist of cover artists; year-on-year circulation figures for Analog, F&SF, Amazing, Galaxy, If, Fantastic, Asimov’s, Heavy Metal and Omni; not to mention bibliography and index. This is solid meat for everyone who comes after; it’s easy to find the analysis elsewhere (or to do your own), it is not so easy to find so much basic information in one place.
Gateways to Forever is, at heart, a labour of love by a fan and an obsessive collector; we should value it for that.
The first such standard bearer was, of course, Amazing, but in the late 30s Astounding took over as pulp adventure gave way to a more thoughtful hard sf. In the 50s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction came to be the representative of a new, more literary sf. The title briefly crossed the Atlantic to New Worlds in the 60s as the counter-culture found voice in an sf that looked to the avant garde, the iconoclastic, the idiosyncratic. In the 80s the standard was taken up by Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, which pushed at no boundaries but, in its combination of hard sf ideas with a more literary sensibility, provided a safe, all-things-to-all-people sf. This, in turn, may explain why it has held on to poll position for longer than any other magazine, though its grip now seems to have loosened in favour, perhaps, of a loose and ever-shifting conglomeration of online titles.
The obvious gap in this chronology is the 1970s, when no magazine held dominance and the most interesting work was coming from original anthology series, such as Orbit, Universe and New Dimensions.
At first glance, then, it would seem perverse that Mike Ashley’s ongoing history of the sf magazines, having devoted just two volumes to the 44 years between the birth of Amazing and the first death of New Worlds, should now devote one entire volume to that desert of the magazines, the 1970s. Indeed Ashley begins his preface by revealing that he originally intended to bring his series to an end with just one volume covering the 30 years from 1970 to 2000.
Of course, the big magazines – Amazing, Analog, F&SF, Galaxy, If – were still being published, though mostly going through tough times. Analog lost its iconic editor, John W. Campbell, who died in 1971, necessitating a change of direction at the magazine. Amazing, Galaxy and If all had to endure changes of ownership, falling sales and some frankly bizarre publishing decisions, which combined to kill off the latter two and leave Amazing a feeble shadow of its former self. Only F&SF continued on its way largely unchanged but also frankly uninspired. Meanwhile, New Worlds, which had made such a splash only a year or so before, folded as a magazine, reappeared as an irregular anthology series, folded again, and again re-emerged as a scrappy semi-pro magazine.
None of these, therefore, was in a position to achieve any sort of dominance in the field. There was, however, no shortage of candidates trying to fill the vacuum. In a sense, one can see exactly why Ashley found himself devoting an entire volume to this one decade, because there were probably more magazines published than in any other comparable period in the history of sf. But most of these – Other Times, Vortex, Science Fiction Monthly and SF Digest in Britain alone – lasted a handful of issues at most before disappearing forever. They were, almost without exception, underfunded, ill-conceived, poorly distributed, badly edited, and incapable of having anything more than a glancing impact on the field.
Yet Ashley devotes as much attention to each of these myriad, long-forgotten, minimally-important publications as he does to those which actually shaped science fiction. We are introduced to the publisher(s) and editor(s), we are told about paper stock, page size (and every change in size during the run of the magazine is documented), the nature of the funding, the price, the cover artists, the method of reproduction, the contents, the critical reception. If the magazine published any new writers, they are listed, even if they went on to write no more fiction (which happens quite a lot); if stories are reprints we are told where and when they first appeared; we are told about every award nomination, and selected stories are précised (though it is never clear why some stories are picked out for this treatment and not others). Finally we are given the gory details about how and when and why it failed. Since every magazine, big or small, is subject to the same exhaustive treatment, it becomes impossible to gauge one against another, to tell that, for instance, in Britain Science Fiction Monthly had, during its brief life, a far bigger impact than the other three combined.
But that is a judgment call, and you don’t turn to Ashley for analysis. There are, effectively, three approaches to a specialist history such as this, you can catalogue the data, you can analyse the data, or you can provide context for the data, though in practice in most instances you are likely to get a combination of the three. Ashley is very much a cataloguer.
In so far as the history of the magazines is also a broader history of the genre, the 1970s were a curious period. In pop culture terms (and sf picks up an awful lot on popular culture) the lush progressive music of the early 70s gave way to the harsher, stripped down punk. In political terms events like the Vietnam War, Watergate and the shooting of four student protesters at Kent State University all had a seismic effect, an effect that shook its way through the science fiction of the period also. Yet none of these is even mentioned in the book. Even the release of Star Wars, which effected a transformation in the genre, is mentioned mostly in the context of the rise of non-fiction magazines devoted to science fiction movies. In other words, context is almost totally absent from this book.
The Vietnam War in particular drove a fault line through American science fiction. Many writers came out publicly as pro or anti, most of those in favour of the war wrote the sort of hard, technical sf associated with Analog. It was one of the things that made this style of science fiction, and by association the magazine, seem out of touch and dated. Analog remained popular with older readers, but its younger readership fell away. It would be twenty years before younger readers, and younger writers, returned whole-heartedly to hard sf again. But if, to many in the sf world at the time, Analog felt like a spent force, you would gain no sense of that in Ashley’s book. Indeed, Analog consistently comes across as the liveliest and most successful of all the magazines.
This is because, purely within its own terms, Analog was a success in the 70s. It acquired a new editor, Ben Bova, who introduced new features and acquired stories by top name authors. That was enough to earn glowing comments in the magazine’s own letter column, which is the only critical perspective on Analog that Ashley quotes. The fact that despite its makeover it was still seen as backward looking in both political and literary terms by many in the sf community did not matter to any of its readers, and so does not feature in Ashley’s coverage of the magazine. This is not to gainsay Bova; he proved to be a very good editor indeed and at this period Analog did publish some seriously good stories. But it was not the unalloyed tale of glory that Ashley makes it out to be. And the tenor of these remarks can be applied just as forcefully to Ashley’s coverage of the other magazines, large and small. We get a mass of information on the magazines that is clear, non-judgmental and, so far as I can tell, entirely accurate (the only obvious error I spotted was when he suggested that John Varley’s expansion of his story ‘Air Raid’, the novel Millenium (1983) was a novelization of the film Millenium (1989), which implies a twist in time worthy of the story itself); but that is as far as it goes, because there is no analysis of the data.
The history of the magazines throughout the 1970s (in fact, probably the history of the magazines, period) is full of bad financial decisions, bad editorial decisions and downright appalling stories. But Ashley can never quite bring himself to say so. At his most damning he might suggest that a story was less successful or not quite so popular. One reason for this is quite plain to see: at a rough estimate, well over half of the references and quotations given throughout the book are from private letters and emails to Ashley from the various players in these games. He has been at this a long time, working on histories of the magazines in one form or another for over 30 years, and over that period he has built up a personal relationship with many of the publishers, editors, writers, slush-pile readers and so forth who populate this story. In those circumstances it is hard to turn their contribution to his work into what might be seen as a personal attack. In those circumstances, indeed, it is all too easy to accept what he is told as gospel. There are a few occasions during the course of the book where he presents different versions of events from different correspondents, but I wasn’t aware of a single occasion upon which he questions what he is told, even though, with the best will in the world, memories of what happened 30 or 40 years ago are liable to be a trifle cloudy.
None of which should be taken as implying that this is a bad book. Far from it. It may not be doing some of the things we might expect of a history; but as an accumulation of raw data it is magnificent. Any future historian of science fiction will, rightly, treat Ashley’s work like a goldmine. He has done the research, and presented his findings in a stolid but accessible manner. If you want to know what was happening in science fiction during the period, it will be your first port of call. In Chapter One you will find all you might want to know about the major sf magazines between the late-sixties and mid-seventies, short of ploughing through every issue yourself, and even then you’d miss out on most of the behind-the-scenes stories provided by Ashley’s myriad contacts. In Chapter Two you get the parallel story of the original anthologies, not just the major ones like Orbit, Universe and New Dimensions, but the smaller ones like QUARK/, Weird Heroes and Stellar. That Ashley clearly prefers magazines to even the best of the original anthologies is an understandable prejudice; that he then leans over backwards to be fair to Roger Elwood is, perhaps, less excusable. But then, Ashley does like to be fair to everyone. Chapter Three takes us into the realm of the small magazines: the semi-pro zines, the fanzines that aimed high, the magazines that failed after one or two issues, the science fiction magazines devoted to film that eschewed all fiction, the gaming magazines with genre cross-over, the news magazines, the critical journals. Another historic development during the 1970s was that this was the period when science fiction became academically respectable: Extrapolation first appeared in the mid-60s, but Foundation and Science Fiction Studies both followed in the early 70s. Curiously, although Ashley looks at these three magazines, he devotes far more attention to magazines like Algol and Riverside Quarterly that gave science fiction critical consideration but away from the academy, so he doesn’t, for example, have to wrestle with the Marxism of Science Fiction Studies. Finally, in Chapter Four, he returns to what the major fiction magazines were doing towards the end of the decade, and looks in particular at the two new magazines that had both the financial backing and the editorial nous to survive: Asimov’s and Omni. A last brief round-up chapter revisits the story we’ve just been told, and we’ve still got over 100 pages to go. Because Ashley now adds a round up of non-English Language magazines (an incredible number; we tend to forget that sf is nowhere near as Anglophone as we are inclined to imagine it); a table showing publication details and schedules for every magazine and original anthology series covered in the book; a checklist of editors and publishers; another checklist of cover artists; year-on-year circulation figures for Analog, F&SF, Amazing, Galaxy, If, Fantastic, Asimov’s, Heavy Metal and Omni; not to mention bibliography and index. This is solid meat for everyone who comes after; it’s easy to find the analysis elsewhere (or to do your own), it is not so easy to find so much basic information in one place.
Gateways to Forever is, at heart, a labour of love by a fan and an obsessive collector; we should value it for that.
____________________
Paul Kincaid is the author of What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction and editor (with Andrew M. Butler) of The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology. He received the 2006 Thomas D. Clareson Award for services to science fiction.
Comments