That should be “short fiction and essays appended”…

Yeah, it’s really funny — print SF is undergoing a micro-renaissance in Korea, and one of the big signs is that a print magazine took off (and has seemingly remained sustainable) as a step up from cheap or unpaid webzine publication. The publication path here looks like it goes from webzine to magazine to novels (with fiction and essays appended). The anthologies seem to sell well enough to sell out. But the real killer is this print SF magazine, Fantastique. (I’ve linked it under Read in my homepage blogroll, if you’re curious, but you won’t be able to read a thing!)

I’m planning on doing some analysis of what they’re publishing, because their choices of translations are really, really interesting: Yoon Ha Lee, well, she’s Korean American so obviously of interest. But also Ted Chiang, Nancy Kress, a good number of Japanese SF authors (and some Chinese, I think I saw), and a bunch more older stuff I was surprised to see — including Lewis Carrol serialized.

But the killer is that the magazine is beautiful and colorful, with tons of art, about three hundred pages long, with ads… tons of ads, and — this was a surprise to me — plenty of them are actually aimed at women. (ie. instant coffee, cosmetics, and other products primarily consumed/marketed-to by women college-aged and up.) Many of the ads appear in the front 70 pages, which (in the couple of issues I looked at) are glossy, but the other 230 pages are also colorful, pretty stylish, some in full-color, and have some ads too.

It’s stylish, it’s eye-catching and inviting, it has all kinds of stuff from movie and book reviews — reviews of books in translation as well as long, ardent wishlists of books not yet translated — interviews with writers (Korean or otherwise), discussions of events, of “SFnal fashion,” of trends in SF abroad, (I think I saw something on “Suh-tim-pun-keu” — Steampunk), artists who do SF or other genre work, political issues from an SFnal perspective, and so on. Manga and other comics, as well… a good chunk of that. It’s literally packed with stuff. Having it in my hand, I genuinely wish that reading a story in Korean wasn’t a Herculean task for me.

Oh, and it costs $6.50 a month off the newsstands. Less if you subscribe. (Though, to be fair, Korea’s a small place postally, and I bet most of the subscriptions are in Seoul.)

But really, beside it, even the loveliest of SF magazines looks, well… sigh.

I should say, though, what might be making the difference is simply fandom. SF has way fewer fans here than in the West, I think, but it’s growing here, and there’s a kind of murkiness still on where the genre boundaries matter less than the relief of meeting other people into genre stuff, and having a print magazine to give you a monthly dose. Stuff to collect, to look at again and again. It’s like this magazine is making an effort at helping fans in the construction of a kind of life of fandom — here’s art exhibits SF geeks will like! Check out these SF-geek-friendly fashions! Here’s some funky fan-art! Movies! Manga you should be into! Literary essays on the meanings of certain SF tropes (say, robots in SF)! Interviews with people in the genre — SF-friendly lit professors, publishers, artists…

The fandom thing… I bought an older SF anthology produced with stories in one of the (older) webzines, and you know — the last 150 pages or so were an appendix describing the history of SF, major figures and their novels (with a blurb for each), major schools in SF… the same kind of “crash course in foreign literature” that a friend of mine says the first translations of Western literature were accompanied by back when such things first began appearing here, too.

The magazine has less of that, but plenty of little features on famous SF authors of all kinds of different origins and backgrounds. There’s also lengthy reviews of new books in translation or new Korean books, and lots of other content that creates buzz for the whole industry. And there’s still a LOT of fiction in there. Over a hundred A4 pages of it, all told, and seemingly themed by month. (Vampires! Space Opera! Romantic Fantasy!)

Anyway… I’ll probably be reproducing a great deal of what I’ve said here in a more in-depth post sometime this month or next, but… I think there could be a way of doing a print SF magazine when there’s no competition. If something like FANTASTIQUE came along in the Anglophone world, say, tomorrow, though it’s probably easier when there’s nothing else on the market in your language, and when you still have the newness to stuff in all kinds of random things into the scope of your publication.

I regretfully add that I don’t think the model would work so well in English… for all kinds of reasons. But it’s just sad we don’t have something lovely like that.

(Even if, as an author, I prefer multiple markets, and so on… but I prefer sustainable, buzz-creating markets too. The SF magazines I subscribe to are for people who love SF already. FANTASTIQUE is for enchanting people who haven’t really looked into it, but could be converted (though they expect a magazine to look like, well, like any other modern magazine), as well as building genre/fandom-competency — which seems a very Korean idea, I guess — and also being interesting to people already into the genre. It’s a worm and hook at once… Hm. We don’t have a magazine quite like that, do we?)

I hope to be posting nothing but meaty content from now on, and a big reason I redesigned the blog was to get this commenting community going.

I love that my commute is when I get some reading done, via podcasting. I’m glad there’s already more of it. I spend an hour a day walking to and from work, so that’s 5 hours of podcast fiction I can reasonably consume.

Seriously, it’s a tricky situation, because it’s hard to criticise the current state of play without standing accused of “wanting to destroy paying short fiction markets” or somesuch. I want to do no such thing - I only discovered short fiction markets a few years ago! I want them to live, the more of them (and the more diverse) the better. Only time will tell, I guess.

Good to see you posting some meaty stuff, BTW … and doing so somewhere I can comment on it!

The big magazines producing podcasts is going to be great. Podcasting, especially Escape Pod and Starship Sofa, has massively increased the amount of short fiction I consume since it happens in time that’s otherwise wasted (like driving to work).

You say the mobile web might lead to a different type of fiction. I think certain types of stories lend themselves more readily to podcasting as well. Perhaps we’ll see people adapt their own short fiction into full audio dramas?