Random thoughts about OMNI:
1.) They were originally going to cal it NOVA. I’ve seen mock-up covers with that on it.
2.) If you turned the title sideways, it looked like “0 3 2 1”. Maybe this is why they changed the titled from “NOVA”.
3.) Didn’t they have an article about The Straight Dope in one issue? With a picture of Ed Zotti from behind?
I think they changed the name from NOVA to avoid confusion with the TV series with the same name. Or the TV series wouldn’t allow Guccione to use the name. Somethin’ like that.
Bought my first ever freelance article, they did. So, fond memories, indeed!
I was introduced to Omni when I was a fifteen year-old babysitter for an American computer programmer and his family. That was back in about 1985. After the kids were put to bed, I’d kind of have free run of whatever videos or magazines were in the living room. I was never much into magazines, but Omni took me by the balls. The babysitting job faded out after I graduated from High School, and I missed my Omni fix, but maybe I’m better off for it it it did indeed fade into the woo.
If I recall correctly, Omni also featured the occasional nudity, usually in tiny artwork accompanying stories. I remember one in particular having to do with Kelp-Women on the ocean floor. (Yeah, that must have been in the woo decline period.)
Weird, I was actually thinking the same thing a few days ago before I saw this thread. I do have some issues saved but unfortunately with poor storage in my garage I’m having to purge a lot of old magazines and stuff.
I too miss the magazine. It was one of the first publications to turn me on to sci-fi short stories. I remember “Body Ball”, “Sam and the Dirty mudder”, “The Mickey Mouse Olympics”… lots more.
If you’re Jonesin’ for some good sci-fi, let me put in a plug for a few of the podcasts I narrate stories for:The StarShip Sofa, EscapePod and The Drabblecast. All a little different, but showcasing the best sci-fi of the day…and the narrators are pretty good too.
I miss Omni.
And 3-2-1 Contact.
So, woo is loosely defined scientific ideas that have little evidence but might be possible?
Is that about right? Like terraforming? Or cold fusion?
Woo is defined as nonsense that the credulous take to heart. Terraforming isn’t woo because nobody is making bizarre, unscientific pronouncements about how we could turn the Moon into an Earthlike world with crystals and Krazy-Glue. Cold fusion is closer to being woo because it stubbornly defies all attempts to be replicated and the only people promoting it now are the scammers and the scammed. Homeopathy is the absolute essence of medical woo: It has absolutely no mechanism that’s even internally consistent, it has absolutely no evidence of it working in controlled trials, and the people who promote it are either scammers cynically attempting to fleece the ignorant or the ignorant who are too duped to even realize they’ve been duped.
One of the hallmarks of woo is the idea that testing for it destroys the effect somehow, that the ‘negative energy’ of skeptics makes it all a-scared an stuff an makes it run an hide.
At the other end of the spectrum, things like the Higgs boson are not woo. They might be wrong – the result of flawed theories – but they at least make sense and can be tested for in a controlled fashion.
I did love Omni, back in the day. I particularly liked the humorous essays and short stories which ran on the back page. One, in particular, still sticks in my mind – a company attempting to genetically engineer legless cats (in time for the holiday gift-giving season).
I still remember a series of marketing travel poster adds for a hypothetical space tourist travel agency. Visit a hotel on Phobos, “It’s one Hot Potato!”
Sounds like a story Asimov wrote, but for the life of me I can’t recall the name. Something about rocks that were intelligent, and one witnessed a murder or something.
Omni was where I first read Stephen King’s End of the Whole Mess.
Sigh
It would be awesome if Google put up every issue like they’ve done with other magazines (Spy, Popular Science).
One thing I loved about it was the magazine itself. The weight and that rounded little spine. It just felt good to hold.
YOU feel old? I was 26, 27 the year when I picked up my first issue, #2.
One of my fondest memories was being introduced to the word artwork of Scott Kim.
One example was the word false in lower case, with true as a colored subset of the thick letter space. Another example that is unforgettable is an anniversary cake for his parents, with each of their names in an invertible ambigram also called an inversion.
For that and dozens of reasons I miss it.
- Smilin’ Jack
Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes! That George R.R. Martin short story is actually my strongest memory of Omni. A friend of mine thrust the Best of Omni fiction collection into my hands in high school and said, “You have GOT to read this story.” He was right - still a classic.
While I was working on a freighter, my copy of Omni went missing. A few days later, the thief confronted me, mad as hell, because he thought I had cut the porn pictures out of it. Chalk one up for Guccione.
Yeah, I had a somewhat parallel experience.
Yeah, I had a somewhat parallel experience.
I brought a copy in to show an article to a youngish genius. His church-busybody-self-appointed spiritual-leader father showed considerable disapproval, without actually saying that I shouldn’t have brought it into the church basement.
Just starting off, is …um… issues 
were…
1.) Bob Guccione was also the editor of Penthouse.
2.) It was a very “slick” magazine. (This guy led a very simple, hands-on, DIY life-style, so no one could say he was hypocritical in denouncing “slick” as he saw it.)
He then took the initiative of paging through the magazine, frequently showing disgust at many of the features. He was especially annoyed that someone title his fiction-short “God is an Iron” without bothering to ask me or anyone why the title was chosen. Neither did he read enough (apparently) to discern the author’s intent. Sigh.
Is there anything like OMNI out there now?