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Last light of the Old Republic

Once upon time in a science fiction market long, long ago, SF was something that was run by loving fans with nary a sniff of big media money. (Incidentally, true fans with a capital F hate the term sci-fi … for them it's either SF or science fiction, not this media-invented word).

Anyhow, the old market produced such serious tomes as Science Fiction Chronicle and Locus … dusty 'just the facts'-type magazines.

But this was the Old Republic.

Today we live in the new shiny world of magazines like the UK's SFX - where every cover has some semi-naked Xena-ish bird on the cover, obscuring the bottom of the F in SFX so it looks like SEX.

Alas, Science Fiction Chronicle and its owner/editor Andrew Porter has fallen victim to this trend towards glossy TV-series driven popularism, as his increasingly depressed and morose editorials attest to.

He's been complaining nobody sends him press releases, and complaining about how his readers don't bother sending him back survey results and, well, generally just complaining.

Indeed, even our sister company, Crowsnest Books, recently got a testy e-mail from him berating our journalists for their irreverent and sensationalist approach to reporting events in the e-book world (I believe we had referred to the print publishing world as clueless shagwits).

Obviously finding it a bit of an uphill struggle to wage his one-man band guerrilla war against our industry's slow slide into televised and literary pap, our Andrew has finally thrown in the towel of independence and sold SF Chronicle to DNA Publications.

We had never heard of DNA Publications before, but looking at the press release below, it looks like DNA have a history of acquiring magazine titles … many of whom we mistakenly thought had gone bust years ago. Weird Tales? Is that really still going?

All the best to SF Chronicle, and we hope that this stalwart old SF magazine's fortunes will be reversed now Monsieur Porter can concentrate on the editorial side of things and leave all the drudge work to the admin hats over at DNA.

You can pay them a visit at their new home of http://www.dnapublications.com/ and take out a subscription.

<start press release>

May 19, 2000, New York, N.Y.

Science Fiction Chronicle Editor/Publisher Andrew I. Porter, 54, has sold SFC to Warren Lapine, whose DNA Publications already publishes and/or handles the business end of several small press SF/fantasy/horror magazines--Aboriginal SF, Absolute Magnitude, Dreams of Decadence, Fantastic Stories (formerly Pirate Writings), and Weird Tales.

Porter remains with SFC as news editor.

The sale relieves Porter of many pressures of small press publishing, including such important and time-consuming business details as maintaining the mailing list and sending out renewal notices, dealing with a rising load of paperwork, soliciting and tracking advertising, and increasing the magazine's retail bookstore and subscription base.

It will allow him to concentrate on some of the things he does best, including gathering, organizing and writing the news.

Another goal of DNA's purchase is to ultimately increase the frequency from the current bimonthly back to monthly, and provide a wider base, with the other DNA magazines, for consumer-oriented advertising campaigns.

Warren Lapine published his first issue of Harsh Mistress (now Absolute Magnitude) in 1993, launching Dreams of Decadence in 1995. He acquired his first outside magazine, Weird Tales, in 1998.

Porter, a 3-time Hugo Award winner--for Algol (later Starship) in 1974, and for SFC in 1993 and 1994--started SFC in 1979, with several earlier proto-issues, as a counter to Locus, which began 1968--just a month after the demise of Porter's own SF Weekly, an earlier news magazine, which started life in 1964 and morphed into a newszine in 1966.

Porter was Associate Editor at Lancer Books in 1967-68, Assistant Editor on The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1966-1974, an editor on Quick Frozen Foods (working under Sam Moskowitz), and Production Manager for several trade magazines in the 1970's.

He was Fan Guest of Honor at the 1990 World SF Convention.

http://www.dnapublications.com/

</end press release>

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