Before bemoaning the fact that science fiction “only” has three major monthly magazines and a handful of minor ones, take a look at how other genres are doing. Seen any magazines publishing westerns or thrillers or romance short stories lately? Even literary short fiction is an almost extinct market. There’s probably more short fiction being published in science fiction than there is in every other genre combined. I’m not saying this to imply that science fiction is better than other genres, but so we can appreciate what we’ve got.
Mysteries are represented by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, digests with the same pedigree as Analog and Asimov’s. And the same owner - Penny Publications. Which makes its real money by publishing puzzle magazines.
Westerns are a dead genre, despite the valiant efforts of the Western Writers of America.
Romances never needed a tradition of specialty magazines. All the woman’s magazines dating back decades have published romance short stories, so there was always an active market. Romance is by far the healthiest and wealthiest genre, with over half of the fiction novel market.
I have to disagree with you about literary short fiction. There still appears to be thousands of literary journals and magazines of all kinds and sorts, even if none of them pay real money. The major magazines - The New Yorker, Atlantic, Esquire, Harper’s - all publish high paying fiction in every issue. And a new generation of quality - and paying - literary magazines - McSweeney’s, Zoetrope - is creating a whole new audience for litfic.
And there are probably more short stories published each year in both f&sf and mystery original anthologies than in the magazines, although these are almost always invitation only.
There probably are thousands of literary journals and magazines. But if you define major magazines as ones where a thousand people are likely to read a story, then the list shrinks to the four you mentioned (along with, arguably, Playboy). Leaving aside the short stories written by already established authors how many short stories does the literary genre market buy each year? Perhaps five? Science fiction is the only genre where a new author of short fiction can realistically dream of getting published and read.
No, I’m sorry, but this is just silly.
First, you can’t judge a market by any terms except its own. The literary world has a century-long tradition of the best authors publishing in small press magazines and journals for honorariums or just copies. The best new writers submit to these and are discovered in these journals.
The Best American Short Stories 2003 had stories in it from, other than the “Big Four,” Missouri Review, Zoetrope, The Harvard Review, Tin House (2), Ploughshares, Callaloo (2), Ontario Review, The Yale Review, The Chicago Review, McSweeney’s, and The Georgia Review.
2002: Agni Review, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, Descant, Zoetrope (2), Ploughshares, Bomb, The Iowa Review, and Manoa.
2001: Salmagundi, Ploughshares (4), TriQuarterly, Elle, The Georgia Review, Five Points, Tin House (2), Descant, The Antioch Review, and Connecticut Review.
By any conservative estimation, dozens of times as many new authors break into the literary genre annually, as compared to mystery or science fiction. There are dozens of times as many major markets, as defined within the field. There are dozens of times as many literary single-author short story collections being published as mystery or science fiction short story collections. The literary short story world is extremely hale and hearty, much more so than sf.
I was going to recommend Aboriginal Science Fiction but I was pretty sure they’ve closed up shop.
I was half right.
They were bought out by Absolute Magnitude to make Absolute Magnitude & Aboriginal Science Fiction!
Exapno, if we let each genre establish its own independant standards, then anything goes. I guess I could claim I’m a published author; more people have probably read my posts on this message board than read the lead story in the latest issue of the Missouri Review. Counting the number of people who are able to and choose to read an author’s work seems a reasonable method of determing how successful the author is (without implying any judgement on the quality of the work).
Well, I’m speechless.
No, I’m not.
Circulation and importance have never correlated for one minute in the history of magazines or just about anything else.
Small circulation political magazines from The Washington Monthly to the Weekly Standard have far more influence and important than People and US.
By your standard anybody who ever published in Playboy or the Ladies Home Journal are far more successful as writers than anyone who published in The New Yorker.
By your standard, hell, I could go on all night saying that it puts Gigli over virtually any documentary ever made, or American Idol over every show on PBS, or Barbara Cartland at the top of all writers.
Of course each genre establishes its own standards. Otherwise everything becomes utterly meaningless.
Getting back to the original point of this debate I argued that science fiction was a successful genre for short stories than literary fiction. I based this on the fact that more people actually read science fiction short stories than literary ones.
Your argument, as I understand it, is that it doesn’t matter if virtually no one’s paying for literary short stories nor does it matter if virtually no one’s reading them. It’s important because it’s important. Even you have to admit that’s a pretty subjective standard.
As for influence; how can there be influence without readers? No unread work ever influenced anyone.
And please note that I’m not disputing the quality of literary fiction. But we’re talking about success not quality.
Let’s put it in your terms then. Even if we exclude the Big Four, as you call them:
More people write (and publish) literary short fiction than f&sf short fiction. Way more.
More people read literary short fiction than read f&Sf short fiction. Way more.
More people buy authors’ collections of literary short fiction than buy authors’ collections of f&sf short fiction. Way more.
Literary short fiction is bigger in every way that I can think of than f&sf short fiction. Not only that, it’s dynamic and growing while f&sf is dying and shrinking.
Writing f&sf short fiction is for the love of the field, not for success. As for pay, well all I can is that I would get more if I sold a story to, say, the Missouri Review than I would if I sold it to any of the sf print magazines.
And, obviously, the f&sf field has nothing at all to compare with the Big Four. A sale to any of them would bring in more than the collective take of all the authors in an entire issue of the print f&sf magazines, and be read by more people than read all the f&sf magazines put together.
Heck, between Conjunctions and McSweeney’s and a few others, the literary mags may already be publishing more f&sf than our mags do. :o
Omni folded in the early nineties if I remember correctly. It started going downhill when they became more interested in “pseudo-science” than real science. It was mainly a science magazine anyway. They usually only had a couple of science fiction stories per issue.
Another vote for Analog. I haven’t missed an issue since eighth grade (over 20 years ago).
I have found the quality of Asimov’s and F&SF to be inconsistent at best, and have not subscribed to either since high school. Even back then, I found myself not reading much more than the Good Doctor’s respective column in each mag.
Not a magazine, but the new Dozois *‘Best of’ * anthology is just out. (#21)
It always includes a round up of the previous year’s goings on, including a summary of sf magazines, new authors, awards, etc. And a lot of recently published sf stories.
David Hartwell also has a similar series - #9 came out last month, and Robert Silverberg also edits an annual anthology but I don’t think this year’s is out yet…
Obviously there’s a lot of duplication between the three collections so I wouldn’t suggest buying them all - unless you’re keen! 
Any one, though, should allow you to read some of the newer talents coming through - and some of the established ones as well.
The UK sf magazine market is almost dead; Interzone has just been rescued by the publisher of The Third Alternative, and apart from these two, um…there’s these two and, er… Spectrum!
Yes, Spectrum, but they haven’t had an issue out for 18 months or so… Of the three, only Spectrum published hard sf anyway…
*Interzone * was the greates SF magazine of all time. It was the only that took SF seriously as literature and didn’t lower its standards to the genre norm. I’m thrilled to hear it’s been revived. Where can I subscribe?
It never quite died, just that recently it’s been struggling to manage bi-monthly issues… #192 was cover date Nov/Dec 2003 and #193 is still meant to be coming from Dave Pringle but I haven’t seen copies yet; TTA Press take over from Issue 194 (meant to be August).
Subscription info, etc. should be found at www.ttapress.com or thereabouts - my computer’s acting up a bit so I can’t check right now.
What a coincidence… I did a sdmb search for “science fiction magazine” last week to see if there were any threads on the topic, and did not find any (maybe I should have varied the search terms…). I picked up the most recent issue of Asimov’s at the local Borders, but I am still keeping my eyes open for a periodical featuring a mix of scifi and fantasy. I’ll have to keep my eye on this thread.
Do established scifi/fantasy novelists like the ones listed in the OP still post short stories in these magazines? Where, for instance, did the stories in the Silverberg Legends anthology first appear?
In the Silverberg Legends anthology. They were commissioned specifically for it.
Oops, I forgot about that. I used a bad example. But back to my question, do the above referenced magazines publish stories from established authors, or are they more for the up and comers?
Any and every magazine loves to run stories by big names. It’s great for newsstand sales, and helps to sell subscriptions.
But unless you happen to be particularly facile, spending the time on writing a short story is almost charity work for a Really Big Name. Some of them refuse to do so, unless they are commissioned and highly paid, as would be the case for a major book anthology like Legends, or inside of your own universe as part of a special volume.
So the answer to your question depends on your own particular definition of who the established authors are. Many established authors deliberately do a number of short stories; many do them only rarely. All will be printed whenever offered.
I understand that all will be printed whenever offered, I want to know if established scifi/fantasy authors have their short stories printed in the magazines.
When I look at the bibliography of an established author, it usually starts with a bunch of short stories first published in magazines, followed by published novels, short story collections, etc. I was under the impression that these authors first get published in the magazines in order to get their foot in the door and a chance at having longer works published, but that once they became established it would not be economically rational to have their stories published in, for example, Analog because they could make much more money by publishing their short stories in their own collections or in bound anthologies. However, I am not sufficiently familiar with the publishing industry and in particular the economics of scifi/fantasy magazines to know that this is indeed the case. For instance, I do not know if Asimov’s can offer someone like Orson Scott Card enough money to feature a short story by him in one of their issues, which judging by Card’s bibliography they appear to have not done since 1989.
Back to the original question… Exapno gave an excellent overview of the main mags and state of the industry, but I would disagree slightly in his characterization of Asimov’s. While it does have some oddball stories, it usually has enough traditional science fiction to keep me happy, and my tastes run similar to Jonathon’s.
Now if only they would run some Star Wars stories! 