http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/11416587.htm
I’m looking forward to this. Yeah, it was pretty wacky, which might be less tolerable to my more skeptical nature these days, but I liked it. And it published GREAT science fiction. I have some collections of sf published in Omni, and they are some of my favorite short stories ever.
God, I loved OMNI when I was a kid. I think I checked out every single back issue from the county library and read them cover to cover. It tapped right into everything I was fascinated with at that age (10-12 years old, IIRC): UFOs, astronomy, sex, The Future, unlocking the hidden power of the mind, etc.
Oh yes, I loved OMNI! My parents kept it around when we were kids and it was always fascinating, and the fiction, which generally went whooshing around over my head, was just plain awesome. It did seem to get whackier in later years (I remember something about a man who was convinced that he’d seen Jarvier Perez Cuellar be abducted by aliens, and it wasn’t written as fiction) but it was a great magazine to have around to spark my interest in science and science fiction when I was younger. I can attribute my love of cyberpunk directly to OMNI. I hope it comes back in good shape!
I’m unwilling to register at the Herald to read that article.
Is it really Bob Guccione who’s doing this? Or Bob Guccione Jr.?
Junior was the one who ran OMNI last time, wasn’t he? Or am I thinking of SPIN?
I loved OMNI. Even though it was often pseudo-science, I loved it. I’ll subscribe.
Fiver,
Bob senior and Bob jr are launching it together. Jr did SPIN, not Omni, before.
FYI, use www.bugmenot.com to get a public registration for sites like that. If you are using Firefox, I heartily recommend the extension that fills in the info for automatically.
Me too! I remember I had the first issue, but I lost it. (I may or may not have found another copy, and I may or may not have my old copies in a box somewhere.)
OMNI had an article in the first or second issue about Burt Rutan’s Long EZ. Dad was building a BD-5A years before (smashed in a move, he collected enough insurance money to buy a used Cessna 172 Skyhawk), and we both thought the Long EZ was great. I think dad was done with airplane building, since he had his Cessna (he may have had his 182 Skylane by that time as well); but we were both excited about the design. A few years later, I went to Rutan Aircraft Factory at Mojave Airport (we lived ‘down the street’ in Lancaster) to see Rutan’s weekly (?) presentation. I might have been able to scrape up enough money from my job (and a loan from dad) to buy the kit; but I was ‘a kid’ and had little enough time to go out and have fun, let alone spending a year or so making an airplane.
But man I remember drooling over the Long EZ photo in that issue of OMNI!
There’s a 7-11 in town that still has an OMNI bike rack out in front of it.
Count me in as someone who will at least buy a few issues, if not subscribe to it.
Weren’t the two of them having a big feud for several years?
Yeah, the article says they reconciled.
Weren’t the two of them having a big feud for several years?
Oops! :smack:
I used to love reading OMNI as a kid. If they do bring it back I will get a sub for my son.
Once upon a time, I learned ‘cyberpunk’ was the new hot thing. So I found some, and I started reading. And I knew all the stories. They were the good stories I remembered from Omni.
I still have the 100th issue with the robot plans.
It would cool if they got Ellen Datlow back as fiction editor.
Dit-to!
It was a great magazine until it got into new age pseudo-science. Let’s hope they can recapture the felling of the late 70’s version.
Yeah, it really might be too bullshitty for my present tastes. But if they publish the same caliber SF they did before, I’m willing to tolerate some UFO and bigfoot articles.
Great news.
Err, I have every issue from the first go-round…
I agree. I loved the science and technology overviews (especially aerospace), and the SF. (There’s one story I still rememeber called The Jam, about people trapped in a huge tailback.)
The New Age stuff really got up my nose, even at though I was young.
I too had a subscription and remember the stories and some of the articles fondly. I suspect now, holding a graduate degree in the sciences, I will be too put off by the inevitable pseudoscience and sensationalism to be a big fan, but as a kid, it was perfect. I remember I almost made a robot-car whose plans they published (supposedly with the intelligence of about a cockroach) for a science fair project in middle school. I was absolutely captivated by the idea, but I was convinced by higher ups that citing OMNI in a science fair report was perhaps not the best way to impress judges. Ended up making a solar powered electric glider instead.