I am feeling nostalgic. When I was a teenager in the 1980’s I had a subscription to Omni magazine for four years. It was a great publication, so optimistic about the future and where humanity was heading. The production was high quaility, the glossy cover art was eye candy, the science fiction was first rate. There is nothing like it today.
I feel old.
I miss OMNI, too.
Me too. It was great. sigh
It started great. It quickly fell into the woo.
I have lots of fond memories of Omni. Good fiction, great art, funny cartoons, interesting articles.
This distressed me (the fact, not the statement). When it was great, it was GREAT. I fondly remember the hexahexaflexagon that they printed. I wore that thing out. I should print up a new one and start flexing.
Totally agree with the OP, and am glad that I have kept my 50+ issues all these years.
Aside from excellent photography, articles and fiction, some of the illustrative art for the fiction is amazing.
One of the best magazines ever published.
Omni had a cartoon that illustrated in flowchart form how to put together every sci-fi plot ever filmed. I adapted the cartoon to run on an HP-41 calculator and had a great deal of fun with it.
Yeah, I miss the magazine.
Is there a link to this flowchart anywhere?
Some of the all-time best sf short stories. ‘Sandkings’ comes to mind.
Yep.
Have you guys visited the Omni Shrine?
It’s early, but developing.
Even the woo (with which, I admit, I was quite taken) was well-researched & well-written woo. And really, how long could a magazine like that ignore the woo?
What gets me was- near the end, there was a graphic (or comic) magazine being developed, and then it all suddenly ended.
My Omni Moment came a couple of years ago. I met an urban aboriginal visual artist whose work was very textual. Bought a piece from him.
Got to talking, and for some reason I mentioned reading about a work that was based on those Times Square moving script things, but was only one vertical column of the lights. It came with no explanation. If you looked at it with your head still, it just looked like blinking lights, but if you moved your head as you looked at it, you had the eerie sense of a word like “love” appearing in your head, and you had no idea how they got there.
He asked me if I had read about that in Omni magazine, because he had too.
This, a quarter of a century after the article. I thought that was extraordinarily cool.
Yes great story about astronauts crash landed on a planet with sentient rocks. They (the magazine) also turned me onto William Gibson.
Our high school valedictorian used to hide OMNI inside his calculus book and read it during class.
Yeah, two magazines I would buy every month with my allowance; OMNI and Discover. Now OMNI is gone, and Discover has been dumbed down to the level of Beauty & The Beast and Aladin, right after Disney bought it.-Hey, waitaminute… You don’t suppose…
Somewhere in storage, I have every issue ever printed. Provided the critters haven’t eaten them.
Same here.
I had a subscription during the entire run. I absolutely adored it in the beginning but towards the end when it go so damned woo-oriented it at least had amusement factor.
I don’t know what happened in 1980, but F&SF, Asimov were killer in the 70s. Of course, nothing compared to the 30s-50s. Feedbook.com has a flood of SF ranging from 25is to 60ish recently from the old pulp SF magazines, as well as novels. There was some interesting very purple SF/fantasy going on. I actually found a novel that had been turned more or less into a movie, it was very interesting reading it after seeing the movie! [Abraham Meritt’s Burn Witch Burn]