The Rise Of The Cyberzines by Mike Ashley
(Liverpool University Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Martin Petto
The Rise Of The Cyberzines marks the culmination of a monumental project. When Mike Ashley started this project, The Time Machines: The Story of the Science Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (2001) was intended to be the first of three volumes. Transformations: 1950 to 1970 (2005) and Gateways to Forever: 1970 to 1980 (2007) duly followed. But so too—after a gap—did Science Fiction Rebels: 1981 to 1990 (2016). And now a final mammoth book covering 1991 to 2020: “This is my final volume covering English-language magazines, in a series over twenty years in the making. A companion volume, No Limits, will explore the development of non-English sf magazines. Beyond that, I pass the baton on to anyone who wishes to continue the story through future decades.”
The result is a book—simultaneously a history of the state of the industry and a review of the state of the field—that is essential yet frustrating. Covering a larger span than any of the previous volumes as well as more fundamental industry upheavals is just too large a task for a single book, particularly one with its genesis in a different task.
The Rise Of The Cyberzines is divided into four sections: ‘Before The Web’ (127 pages broadly on print magazines in the 1990s), ‘Into The Web’ (70 pages on the emergence of online magazines), ‘The Challenge’ (122 pages broadly on print and online magazines in the 2000s) and ‘Taking Stock’ (just 16 pages on—sort of—the 2010s). The caveats are because the sections are only roughly chronological and frequently overlap. This makes the book’s thread hard to follow and Ashley doesn’t help himself by taking a kitchen sink approach.
He writes that Kristine Katheryn Rusch “was invited to a three-day interview… At her interview, Rusch had stated that she saw no need for significant changes to F&SF but she would probably introduce her own individuality and do some things differently”. I’ve condensed the quote but it is still too long, not to mention deeply banal, and presumably only included because it is based on Ashley’s personal correspondence with Rusch. Of considerably more interest to the reader is that Rusch beat Algis Budrys and David G. Hartwell to the job at interview—but Ashley footnotes this.
Examples like this abound, leading to the fact that “this volume [became] longer than anticipated and has meant that I have had to prune the appendices.” There are still near enough a hundred pages of appendices, almost entirely a list of every issue of every magazine covered by the book. This raw data is a valuable resource…for a small number of people. What would have been more useful was greater analysis, but Ashley doesn’t take a very data-driven approach.
He opens the book with the killer fact that “the last short story from a traditional print magazine to win [the Hugo Award] was in 2012, and the last to be nominated was in 2018.” It is pretty eye-opening reading this now; from the standpoint of 1991, it seems miraculous. But the book contains only ten tables and not a single one of them compares 1991 to 2020. The first table summarises the venues responsible for the most Hugo and Locus nominations and ‘Year’s Best’ selections between 1991–5. This clearly shows Asimov’s domination of the field and is a fascinating and succinct snapshot of the first half of the Nineties. The exercise is repeated but in a different format and scope for 1996–2001. Then bizarrely we jump to Nebula nominees only for 2013–2016.
The Rise Of The Cyberzines is a treasure trove but it dilutes its power with its uneven magpie gaze, too often favouring minutiae over the big picture. ‘The Challenge’ is the strongest section of the book because of its analysis of trends but too often Ashley is merely descriptive. There is also too little of wider trends in the magazine industry or general readership demographics; the science fiction field exists in a bubble.
The reason I was so keen to review this book is because 1991–2020 is also my rise as a reader and later reviewer. When Ashley references ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ by Greg Egan, published in February 1995 by Interzone, I felt a frisson of excitement. I remember reading this! It was not long after my own personal Golden Age of SF when I subscribed to Interzone by cheque and was over two years away from having a modem.
But the story that emerges from The Rise Of The Cyberzines is not of one technology usurping another. Rather it is a story of one business model being replaced by another. The Big Three could only exist in one specific time and place—growing up in the UK at the end of the Twentieth Century they already seemed like alien relics. The only alternative was the cottage industries like Interzone. It was not until Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Uncanny that a new sustainable, replicable model for the 21st Century was established. This story is compellingly and comprehensively told by Ashley which is what makes the book essential.
The other story that emerges is that so many people chose to avoid the obvious realities of the market. Again and again, we see people losing tens of thousands of savings and getting hundreds of thousands in debt in pursuit of the dream of a SF magazine. Hubris repeatedly clobbered by nemesis. So why did they do it? Because of the power of that dream, because of the power of science fiction that captivated me as a teenage Interzone subscriber. What they produced in service of this dream were glorious follies, perhaps not unlike this very book.
Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.