Omni was published from 1978 to 1995. It’s somewhat possible I have all of the issues except for the first one, packed away in a box somewhere. (It’s also possible they’ve been lost.) I think it was the second issue that had an article on Burt Rutan’s Vari-EZ. I remember reading it on my way up to Tahoe for my fateful ski trip. Oh, how I wanted one of those! (Still do, but there are more practical – for me – aircraft out there.) I liked the speculative science articles. And then there were the science fiction stories. I missed out on the heyday of Amazing Stories and Analog. Omni was my introduction to SF short stories published in a magazine. I remember the photo of Ben Bova they’d have in each issue. I’d always wanted to draw him as a cow and caption the cartoon ‘Ben Bovine’.
Great 'zine. Some of the later issues were a little fantasical (at least, ISTR they were), but I’d love if publication was restarted.
Up until very, very recently, there was an OMNI sign (rack, bike rack, something) outside of a local 7-11.
Yeah, me too. At least through the mid- to late-80s. I stopped reading it after that, but I don’t really recall why.
Someone started a site devoted to scans of the covers and promised to eventually post scans of the full content of each issue, but they never got far enough to get shut down, as best as I can tell. I’d actually pay real money for digitized back issues.
I also loved Omni and purchased every issue until sometime in 1990. For some reason, I never got a subscription and purchased every issue from the newsstand every month. Go figure. I also have all of them boxed up in my basement. I kind of lost interest when I went back to school, but yeah, good stuff. I should crack open a few just to see how far sci-tech has evolved. Omni was first published before the first personal computers were available to the general public, wasn’t it.
My only real recollection of Omni was sitting in the school library, thinking I was reading a run-of-the-mill sci-fi story, only for the whole thing to suddenly go Penthouse Forum. Considering who the magazine was owned by, I guess that shouldn’t have been a surprise. I suppose our school didn’t exactly do much vetting of what reached the magazine rack.
No, I don’t think Flynt had anything to do with it. It was all Guccione and his wife Kathy Keeton, and they pulled the plug on the print magazine and put it online, where it lasted a few more years.
Ellen Datlow did a terrific job as editor, and Omni was the heart of the cyberpunk movement in the 80s. Its stories won a bunch of Nebulas in that time frame.*
*It helped that they sent copies of all their nominated stories to all members of SFWA. It wasn’t asking for votes, but it did allow them to read everything in the magazine of import; in any award, the more people who see the work, the better your chances.
That Slate article doesn’t mention it, but Kathy Keeton - Bob Guccione’s wife, who had taken over running the magazine - turned all her time and money to Longevity magazine when she went nuts over alternative medicine. Longevity started in 1992. Omni was undoubtedly doomed by then, but that was the final nail in the coffin.
Robots that clean the rug! Preposterous! Next you’ll tell me that people will use their super-8 and VHS cameras to make home movies of cats riding on top of them!
The closest thing we have now is Wired, but they’re always playing around with the style of the magazine from issue to issue. Some here undoubtedly disdained the drift towards pseudoscience after its “resurrection.”
I remember the cool sci-fi and futuristic artwork they featured. One series in particular were hypothetical tourist art posters from a commercial space travel agengy. One such poster was about a vacation on mars and it’s moons championing the low gravity for tourist hijinks. I still remember the poster tag line: Visit Phobos, it’s one Hot Potato!
Jonathan Coulton wrote The Future Soon as a kind of tribute to being a kid, and reading Omni at home in your bedroom and dreaming about the future. It fits.
Me, I remember devouring every issue… and then learning about this hot new wave thing called Cyberpunk… and realizing it was all the stories I loved most from Omni. Yeah, there was a lot of psuedoscience, but a lot of it was inspirational anyhow.
I’m impressed. It takes a lot to confuse your pornographers. Ron Jeremy, Ginger Lynn and Traci Lords managed it once, but it took all three of them and they were all tripping balls during the shoot. Gerard Damiano was strangely quiet for some time afterwards.
