Sci Phi got a very nice review from Craig Bernthal over at victorhanson.com. The best part is that Craig is a philosopher and if all goes well you can expect to see him in a future issue.
The shelves of drugstores and news stands used to be crowded with “pulp” science fiction magazines: Fantastic Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Fantasy and Science Fiction, all of which sold for very little and provided a lot of entertainment. Many of them started in the 1920s and featured wonderfully lurid covers of giant flies attacking battleships or luscious blonds being carted away or molested by robots, green aliens, or perhaps just posing in front of a rocket ship. They shared shelf-space with a similar array of detective, mystery, western, and romance publications. In the twenties or thirties, at the height of their popularity, some of these magazines sold up to a million copies per issue. America and Britain had some great writers who got their start in pulp fiction or wrote it: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudyard Kipling, Elmore Leonard and H. G. Wells, to name a few. Pulp fiction was a national writing workshop, providing an enormous market for new writers, and the product was not just formulaic. A great editor, like John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction provoked wonderful, imaginative stories. This scene has now been replaced by the insipid university MFA writing program, which aims to produce sensitive stories for liberal professors, and pulp has given way to innumerable English Dept. journals. What a bad trade! We no longer see the successors to Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, or even Updike and Roth. American fiction has become the Oprah book club.
Given this, I am to happily announce the birth of a new venue for the un-MFA’d story: Sci Phi Journal, edited by Jason Rennie. You can buy Sci Phi on Amazon for $3.99 an issue. It publishes bi-monthly, and the first three issues are out. (The cover art, by the way, is beautiful.) May it start a trend, a rebirth of the popular short story magazine, requiring an on-line drugstore to hold them all.
The premise of Sci Phi Journal is to present science fiction stories and essays about science fiction that are especially aimed at exploring philosophy, which of course includes politics. I was delighted to find so many good stories and essays in the first issues. I’ve never read an anthology in which I thought every entry enjoyable, but I found enough here to keep me happy.
