Science fiction magazines are a bit like the undead in a Hammer film: you can drive a stake through them, but sooner or later someone opens the coffin. Worlds of IF, the title that started in 1952 and later won three Hugos in a row under Frederik Pohl, has been revived by Starship Sloane Publishing, and the new issue, #180, is out now. The publisher calls it the “biggest issue ever at nearly 300 pages,” which for a digest is a doorstop with ambitions.
Editor-in-chief Justin T. O’Conor Sloane announced the issue, the fourth of the relaunch, on 31 October. The front cover is by Ninja Jo, but British readers of a certain age will turn it straight over, because the back cover is by Bruce Pennington. If you browsed a paperback SF shelf in the 1970s, you saw Pennington’s work even if you never knew his name: those glowing, grandly strange landscapes on New English Library’s Dune paperbacks and on Heinlein, Aldiss and much else besides. He also painted the front of the previous issue, #179, so the magazine is clearly keen on keeping him busy.
The print digest costs $12.95 through Amazon, a PDF is $3.99 through Payhip, and an ebook edition is promised. The masthead brings its own pedigree, with Robert Silverberg as contributing editor, and the contributor list for recent issues mixes established names with newcomers, as the old pulps always did. We haven’t read #180 yet, so we can’t tell you which stories are the gems. But at nearly 300 pages for less than the price of a cinema ticket, it is a better bet than most of what is showing this week.
There is something cheering about a magazine number in the hundreds still turning up on the doormat, decades after the original run folded. IF was always about the possibilities in the question, and plainly somebody has decided the answer is still “yes.”
Join the conversation (0)