Starlog is coming back. The American magazine that taught a generation of fans to tell a matte painting from a miniature returns in print on 13 November 2026, numbered Volume 2, Number 1. The last issue came out in April 2009. That makes the gap a good deal longer than Doctor Who‘s wilderness years, and nobody even made an Eric Roberts TV movie to fill it.
There’s a catch. The new Starlog will appear once a year rather than every month. That puts it in the company of the Christmas annuals of a British childhood, the ones with a Dalek on the cover, a word search nobody finished and a comic strip in which the Doctor looked only faintly like the actor playing him. We are told the new edition will have more serious content than that.
The relaunch comes from the people behind Fangoria, so the old family is back together. Starlog’s original publishers launched Fangoria in 1979 as its gorier younger sibling. Abhi Goel owns both titles now. Meredith Borders, Fangoria’s senior editor since its 2018 revival, takes the same job at Starlog. The editor-in-chief is Annalee Newitz, founding editor of io9, who promises “a healthy dose of io9 vibes”. For readers who remember io9 at its best, that’s a good sign.
The first issue runs to 100 pages and mixes the film and TV coverage Starlog was known for with a hefty dose of futurism. There’s the art and science of Star Trek, sixty years on, plus pieces on Dune and The Lord of the Rings, a look back at how the original magazine covered the Star Wars trilogy, and the worldbuilding behind Dungeons & Dragons. A tribute to Future Life, Starlog’s old science spin-off, brings soft robotics and farming in orbit. There’s also a behind-the-scenes look at fictional starships and an examination of Hollywood lasers, which have always been noisier, slower and far more visible than physics strictly allows. Somebody at Starlog has clearly been waiting fifty years to say so in print.
The contributors include Charlie Jane Anders, Mike Chen, R.U. Sirius, Riley Black, Janelle Shane, C.L. Polk and Evan Narcisse. The cover is by Gabriel Yeganyan, a concept artist on the Star Wars Jedi games. And then there’s the bit Newitz seems proudest of: “We even have a poem!” The original Starlog called itself a science fiction magazine and printed no fiction at all, so a poem makes the new one practically a literary quarterly.
For the eleven and a half months between issues, there’s a weekly podcast hosted by Jordan Hoffman and Dave Gonzales, and a weekly newsletter called The Lodestar. Newsletter subscribers also get the Starlog 50, a list of essential genre books, films and other media picked by Newitz. The magazine will be sold in American supermarkets, bookshops and comic shops, and pre-orders are open now through the Starlog website. Nothing has been said yet about distribution in the UK. British readers who once searched the back shelves of newsagents for imported copies a few months late may find the old habit useful again.
A little caution is fair, because this has happened before. In 2014 Fangoria announced that Starlog would return as a website and then a digital magazine, and it never did. This time there’s a print date nine days away, a cover, a named editorial team and a podcast already on the air, which is a lot more than a press release and some hope.
Here at SFcrowsnest we’ve been going since 1991 without taking a seventeen-year nap, and we’re glad to see the old warhorse back in harness. See you next November. And the November after that, please.
Join the conversation (0)