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Long-running science fiction magazine SF Age gets a blaster bolt through the heart

Some sad news reaches us from the shores of the US of A. Apparently SF Age magazine, Sovereign Media Company's glossy title chock full of short stories, is to stop publishing. It's been going for eight years, but the May 2000 issue is to be the last.

They used to have about 100,000ish subscribers (we think) - but only a miserly 25,000 remain today. Heck, even we've got three times as many regular users than that. Coming to think about it, it's probably the missing 75,000 that used to buy SF Age !

In part their fall seems to be due to the drop-off of in popularity of written science fiction printed on dead paper - especially the short story form. In part their collapse was due to the defection of the SF fan base to the film and TV media.

But SF Age made a number of mistakes.

They never got their publication visible shelf-space in the UK, Australia and other English-speaking countries. Their coverage of SF was very US-centric, from the short fiction to the artists featured.

This is a mistake that even the more musty trade-oriented titles like Locus and SF Chronicle don't mistake. And as for the internet, which they could have used to sell into the massive on-line fan base, forget it.

For a media company not to have a headline web site for SF Age in the 21st century is an act of such unforgivable ludditeness, that we can only wonder as to their motives.

Did they want to die? Was this commercial suicide? Did their management accept a bet to see how long their media empire can last without going online?

SF Age aren't alone in this madness of course, StarLog, another glossy SF magazine (one that covers the more healthy film fan base) also seems to be lacking a serious web site for the title.

Here at the Nest we've always considered it ironic that in a genre that is meant to be looking at an imagination-charged future, some of the old hats in the industry are so conservative you might expect to bump into them toddling out of a House of Lord's Attila The Hun club-meet.

Anyway, Scott Edelman, who has been editor of SF Age throughout its life, is wisely moving on to new challenges, taking on the editorial helm of a TV guide called Satellite Orbit.

This still leaves Sovereign Media with magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, the fantasy opposite number of SF Age.

Oh well. Let's see how long they can keep that puppy alive before it goes into a kamikaze death dive.

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