I just didn’t realize how much there would be.

My eyes aren’t clouded. I remember well the casual homophobia that permeated all media during the Seventies and Eighties. I knew early on what a faggot was and that I was one. Every time I ran into that word in a book or movie, it hurt a little because I secretly knew it meant me. But that part of me quickly grew calloused, which allowed me to maintain my voracious consumption of genre novels and short stories.

Going back and re-reading now I feel sorry for my younger self — and other young queer readers of the time — because the homophobia was so endemic to nearly everything. This isn’t just about genre, homophobia (and its partners in bigotry, racism and misogyny) were everywhere, even books and movies that purported to be sympathetic to homosexuality.

Perhaps sometime I’ll go on my rant about how much I loathe The Boys the in the Band.

All to say that when I decided to dip back into the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey — the film and the book — I wasn’t expecting to be smacked in the face with the anti-gay tropes of the time. Stanley Kubrick’s film has grander ambitions than interpersonal human relationships. Arthur C. Clarke was a fairly progressive humanist and quasi-closeted gay man living with his partner in Sri Lanka. There wouldn’t seem to be a lot of space for inserting random homophobia into either film or book.

One would think.

I no longer have the original version of Clarke’s novel from 1968 (so many books lost to moves and time) so I picked up the “Millennial Edition” from 1999, which includes a foreword recounting his collaboration with Kubrick. It was a unique process, with the two of them crafting the screenplay and Clarke drafting the novel, he says, “with feedback in both directions.” It’s fascinating to learn how Clarke actually rewrote sections after viewing early scenes from the movie.

He includes some moments from his journal, which is where I hit on this nugget from Oct. 17, 1964:

“Stanley has invented the wild idea of slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at ease.”

Goddammit.

Clarke — again, a gay man — included this in his 1999-written foreword so you can see that standards have still only recently and imperfectly changed for this kind of stuff. Though it is darkly amusing that Kubrick almost created C-3P0 and R2-D2 a decade before George Lucas got around to it. This moment also puts one of the ending scenes of the movie — Dave Bowman living out a lifetime in a old-world European hotel room — into a new context.

Does this change the status of these two works of art or my opinion of them? No. It’s just a reminder that homophobia in all these works that I love is like a pebble in my shoe that I’ll never get out, nagging and inescapable.

Mercifully, that pebble doesn’t show up in the actual film or novel, which are both keenly focused on human evolution, consciousness, and technology. That’s not to say that they’re devoid of social context — the relegation of women to the furthest of sidelines may be a product of the time but it is so extreme that it begins to feel like a deliberate choice.

Clarke includes this howler in the novel regarding the use of female names for the extravehicular pods onboard the spaceship Discovery: “They were usually christened with feminine names, perhaps in recognition of the fact that their personalities were sometimes slightly unpredictable.”

No wonder so many women felt there was no place for them in science fiction and fantasy.

To step back and look at both separately, it’s hard not to argue that Kubrick’s film version is the superior work of art, by lightyears. It is audacious in ways Clarke’s can’t even begin to emulate. One of the most visually striking films in movie history actually opens on three minutes of a black screen and haunting orchestral score, that feels like a dare or a warning. Then there’s Kubrick’s devotion to showing the story rather than telling it, especially in the opening section where the monolith bestows the use of tools on our ancestors (and who promptly get to killing).

Kubrick’s 2001 has been analyzed to death so I’m not jumping into takes that have been done ad nauseum for decades. What actually struck me the most was how fast this supposedly ponderous movie feels. Perhaps I’ve grown more patient with age but my memories of the movie — especially the Dawn of Man — were that they were interesting but interminable. Those were false memories. Kubrick is certainly deliberate but everything on screen is communicating something, whether it’s the origins of man’s technology or the intricacies of interplanetary physics. Plus, he goes full on horror movie in the middle: the doomed astronaut’s final spacewalk is terrifying both from the vastness of space and the stalking space pod that the computer Hal commandeers.

Also, it’s quaint that a two-and-a-half hour film has an intermission embedded in the middle, a bladder-friendly accommodation we can’t get these days even during three-hour blockbusters.

The funny thing about 2001, a movie that has launched thousands of interpretations and analyses, is that if you’re confused you don’t have to be. Clarke spells it all out in the book.

Truly, Clarke’s novel is a 1968 version of a YouTube explainer video, answering every who, what, when, where, why and how you may have. Do you have questions about how the monolith changed the early humans, or what they experienced when the monolith touched them? Clark spells it out with the entranced apes:

“They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated. … Then the man-ape nearest to the slab suddenly came to life. … his body lost its trancelike rigidity and became animated as if it were a puppet controlled by invisible strings. The head turned this way and that; the mouth silently opened and closed; the hands clenched and unclenched. Then he bent down, snapped off a long stalk of grass, and attempted to tie it into a knot with clumsy fingers.”

Or, near the end of the film, when Bowman encounters the giant monolith in space and begins his final kaleidoscopic journey that inspired both acid trips and questions of What does it all mean? Well, here’s what it means:

“Call it the Star Gate.

“For three million years, it had circled Saturn, waiting for a moment of destiny that might never come. In its making, a moon had been shattered, and the debris of its creation orbited still.

“Now the long wait is ending. On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle. An ancient experiment was about to reach its climax.

“Those who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been men — or even remotely human. But they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they had felt awe, and wonder, and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the stars.”

It would be easy to dismiss this literalism as a bit of a joke when comparing it to Kubrick’s vision, which hints and alludes to these ideas. Despite all the stories of people leaving the theater perplexed about what they had just seen, 2001 the movie isn’t actually all that complicated. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen it multiple times and I am deeply familiar with the core ideas that fuel so much science fiction that it feels very obvious to me.

Still, Kubrick took their shared screenplay and created a meditation on humanity’s place and potential in the cosmos, leaving much unsaid and open to interpretation.

Clarke, on the other hand, had no interest in leaving things unsaid. Clarke was a proselytizer for science and human advancement — he saw the pursuit of space travel as a glorious goal for our species that would drive us outward into wonder as well as heal our worst tendencies. He was deeply optimistic about the use of technology to bring about more equal societies and potentially contact other civilizations that transcended their humble biological beginnings to create cultures of consciousness: beings able to not only observe the universe around them but to appreciate its beauty and wonder.

Which brings me to the other point of difference between these two versions of a story born through collaboration. Kubrick’s work is a masterpiece of film, using every tool at his disposal — editing, lighting, cinematography, visual effects — to create an enduring work that not only holds up beyond its dated world of U.S.-Soviet domination and rigid gender roles but makes profound statements on humanity and the nature of consciousness.

Clarke’s novel is, well, notable for the ideas he conveys.

I don’t mean this as an insult to Clarke who, like many of the writers of “classic” science fiction, was a competent writer rather than a literary stylist. This is “big idea” science fiction, where the premium is on the scientific concepts on display. Isaac Asimov definitely wrote in this vein, particularly his Foundation series, and you still see it today among many “hard science fiction” writers who spend pages on the technicalities of spaceship design while tossing perhaps a paragraph or two to character development.

Again, not an insult. I enjoy a lot of that hard SF focused on orbital mechanics, time dilation at near light-speed travel, and all sorts of fun science stuff. But if you’re looking for stirring prose, this is not the type of work where you’ll find it.

Also, to be fair to Clarke, he does generally consider the film and the novel two separate works despite him being the common creator of the two. And the book does differ in some significant ways, primarily making Jupiter — the climactic location of the film — a waypoint on the journey to Saturn, where the book’s climax takes place. Still, as Clarke himself notes in his foreword, “[E]ven in my own mind, book and movie tend to be confused with each other.”

That’s unavoidable given the status of the film. It’s so unavoidable, in fact, that Clarke abandoned his differentiation when he wrote the sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two, moving the action back to Jupiter. And that novel was then made into a movie sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, an overall fascinating series of events in terms of creation and collaboration. I haven’t seen or read those since the Eighties, so I may add those to my list just to compare. Hell, I could probably do an entire series on science fiction works of the time that posited distant futures dominated by U.S.-Soviet tension and/or collaboration.

Nearly everyone back then really did overestimate Russia and underestimate China.

So, when it comes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, are both the movie and the novel worth spending time with nearly sixty years later? When it comes to Kubrick’s film, unequivocally yes. While some stuff around the edges doesn’t hold up — the lack of women most prominently — the rest is astoundingly prescient and we have Clarke to thank for that just as much as Kubrick’s ability to bring the concepts to life with special effects that still look amazing.

For Clarke’s novel, I’d say that’s for completists, especially if you’re interested in following the story through his entire four-book series, continuing through 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey. It’s been a while since I read them but I recall it getting a little wild by the end. Also, despite the early trip-up I had with the mention of fag robots, overall Clarke remains a charming, if often naive, optimist about humans and technology.

Given the techno-dystopia currently being foisted on us by techbros who claim to be inspired by him, it’s worth going back to the source to see what they’re missing.

This is too bad for a number of reasons, such as not having convenient transporters, gorgeous starships, and lots of alien species who look suspiciously like us. Naturally, the most fun reasons are the unlikeliest ones — that’s the appeal of sci-fi stories.

But the real reason life isn’t like Star Trek is a downer: the show’s techno-optimism posited a happy and healthy humanity living in a better world because of human ingenuity and technology, a future that seems increasingly fragile for many and out of reach for most.

Star Trek grew out of early and Golden Age science fiction, tales of rocket ships and derring do, computers and manifest destiny among the stars. It’s long been accepted conventional wisdom that scientists who love science fiction are partial to Star Trek over Star Wars, an intellectual property that is filed under sci-fi but is actually fantasy.

I know, conventional wisdom does not equal truth, but we’re about to delve into a lot of vibes here.

There’s a reason our old flip phones derived from Capt. Kirk’s communicator and our smartphones channel the Next Generation’s data PADDs, while light sabers are still toys. Fun toys, but just toys. Star Trek created a feedback loop of fans who became scientists and engineers who took inspiration from the show, the writers of which in turn took inspiration from the work of scientists and engineers.

That’s the root of tech optimism that drove so much science fiction in its earlier forms. And that root is near death today.

I started down this thought path when I picked up this Flashback’s subject: the March 1982 edition of Analog: Science Fiction/Science Fact, one of the SF mags that carried the biggest torch for that feedback loop between science and speculation. I chose this issue because the cover seemed a perfect encapsulation of tech optimism from the early space and computer revolution: famed writer Arthur C. Clarke on “Future Communications and the Third World.” (Which, to be fair, is headlined inside the magazine as “New Communications Technologies and the Developing World,” which is less problematic from today’s perspective.)

This was a subject close to Clarke’s heart. As a “futurist” writer he did predict many of the things we take for granted today — GPS, small portable computers, near instantaneous communication anywhere on the earth, and more. One of his beliefs, that he delves into here, is that communications technologies would be the liberation of people from politics, that free and open exchange of information across imagined national boundaries would be the primary goal of future generations.

To oversimplify at bit, I consider Clarke to be one of the prime examples of science fiction writers as tech-optimist preacher. Yes, he created the iconic killer computer HAL 9000, along with Stanley Kubrick, for the book and film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Clarke tended to view humanity and its worse impulses as the problem — HAL only went bad because politicized bureaucrats gave it contradictory orders — and technology as the potential solution, whether it comes from humanity or outside the solar system.

In this essay, which he adapted from a presentation he made to a UNESCO gathering as a representative of his adopted home country of Sri Lanka, he argues this explicitly: that the expansion of communications tech from telephone to telex to television for bringing growth to developing nations would require the establishment of a network of communications satellites. He was particularly keen on bringing television worldwide: “Every TV program has some educational content: the cathode ray tube is a window on the world — indeed, on many worlds. Often it’s a very murky window, but I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that, on balance, even bad TV is preferable to no TV at all.”

I’ll skip the Mr. Beast and Real Housewives joke here and move to Clarke’s idea that follows: that the easy recording and broadcast of events would lead to a more free and open society. He specifically looks ahead to a world where cameramen and journalists no longer need cumbersome cassettes but can simply beam the video out to the world.

“The implications of this are enormous,” Clarke writes. “Just one example: how many soldiers would shoot a cameraman, if they knew that millions of people were watching?”

In 2026, we know the answer to this question: far more of them than you would ever have imagined.

The naiveté of sci-fi tech optimists such as Clark is both charming and sad in retrospect. They really wanted a better world and believed we were developing the tools that would deliver it. Clarke gestured at the idea that those tools could be used by both good and evil people, but in his estimation the good of the many would emerge victorious over the politics that had held them back.

Looking back as an adult on the writers and works that I drew inspiration from as a kid, I see that they were simply too optimistic about the power of technology when placed directly in the hands of the people. Blinding themselves to the pessimistic potentials of these technologies is their biggest failing and, I believe, one of the reasons so many evil people today — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others of my generation who claim to draw their inspiration from classic science fiction — have developed technologies designed to suppress and oppress.

As a young fan and writer, I bought into this idea that connection and computing power would bring people together across national and ethnic lines and held onto that belief for most of my life. But ultimately, we’ve used those tools to sharpen those lines, retreat into more rigid ethnic divides, allow ourselves to be bamboozled by charlatans who sell us surveillance disguised as safety, and watch as social media tears apart the foundations of civil society.

No technology is going to fix us. AI will not solve our problems, Palantir will not protect our nation, Ring will not respect our civil rights when the police state comes calling. Technology will only feed back to us what we feed into it, so any solution can only come from ourselves.

Speaking of evil assholes, hardcore right-winger Jerry Pournelle — a.k.a. “this asshole again” — once more rears his warmongering head, reminding us that while a lot of science fiction writers skewed utopian, there was a large contingent insistent that the idea of utopian peace was for commies and pansies. In his op-ed, “The Defense of the Realm,” Pournelle once again flaunts his militaristic and belligerent attitude toward science and society.

For Pournelle, science (and his science fiction) is about projecting force. Here he’s railing against a lack of government interest in dominating and militarizing space, right about the time when he was part of the ersatz group of writers and thinkers pushing Reagan’s space defense system (i.e. “Star Wars,” the proposed tool of death, not the movie). At one point he proposes a system of “space lances,” a series of satellites armed with hard metal rods that could be fired at ground targets at high speed with massively destructive results. You get the feeling that Pournelle experienced a hard rod when thinking of this crap.

Because I believe that Pournelle — both a writer and a defense contractor — was a pernicious influence on society in his militarism and proximity to the Pentagon, I want to highlight something he complains about here that has always been a hobbyhorse of the right, all the way to the present day: university professors and college students. Pournelle presents without any example or evidence the claim that students of the time were being taught that technology was evil:

“One reason for our technology deficit was our war against technology during the whole of the ‘70s. For a decade our students were taught that technology was evil; that everything is crap and there’s no help for it; that civilization as we know it is wasteful, and even with the most stringent conservation programs, even with the most drastic cutbacks in consumption and standard of living, things will never get better.”

This is bullshit. Pournelle confuses two pessimistic movements in the 70s with “anti-technology” activism.

First, there was the anti-nuclear movement. There was a reason for this movement: we were all living in a Cold War under a constant background threat of nuclear annihilation. Pournelle and his ilk all got boners from the idea of nuclear weapons and mutual assured destruction, while those of us who were kids were taught how to hide under our desks from atomic blasts. Relatedly, there was the fear of nuclear power, which given the technology of the time proved well-founded in 1979 with the Three Mile Island nuclear plant disaster, just seven years before Chernobyl. This was a movement about a specific type of technology, not technology writ large.

Second, there was a lot of Malthusian nonsense in the air during the 60s and 70s, most popularly rendered in the classic sci-fi overpopulation movie Soylent Green (1973), which was based on Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel, Make Room! Make Room! To again oversimplify a bit, Malthusian theory says that increases in agricultural production leads to unfettered population growth that will ultimately spark social disorder and societal collapse.

The thing is, that turned out not to be true. What actually happened in the U.S. (and other wealthy, highly developed countries) is that living standards rose, birth control became widely available, and the population never exploded because the majority of women didn’t want to or need to give birth to four, five, six, or more babies.

Again, Malthusian theory is not an argument that technology is evil in the way that Pournelle is trying to claim. And the theory was controversial, as well as pretty racist, given how focused its proponents were on the so-called “third world” countries that Clarke was advocating technological solutions for. Pournelle is just a perpetually aggrieved right-wing warhawk who hates university professors because they teach ideas he personally hates.

Hilariously, he said this in 1982 during the first age of personal computing, at the dawn of 80s tech glam. We were sending Voyager probes on journeys to deep space, where they continue transmitting data to this day. The nation was agog with pride for the successful new Space Shuttle. I may not consider Star Wars to be “real” science fiction but I’ll be damned if it didn’t play a crucial role in re-popularizing sci-fi for the masses, along with films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hell, E.T. the Extraterristrial came out three months after Pournelle published his claptrap. Pournelle holds a willfully blinkered view that belies his sclerotic, anti-liberal, and anti-humanities thought.

But what Pournelle is ultimately arguing for is the privatization of space: “that NASA and the government cannot and should not continue to dominate the space environment, and the sooner they get out of the way, the sooner we will have a real space program.”

You’ve probably noticed that this is the reality with live in today, with the refocusing of the government’s efforts on the militarizing Space Force and leaving space access and future exploration to Musk’s Space X, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and others. Sadly, it hasn’t gotten us much beyond exploding rockets, Katy Perry in space, and multi-billionaire megalomaniacs. And it has to be noted that these privatized programs have yet to surpass what NASA, even with its flaws, accomplished during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Instead, they’ve made wild promises and subordinated science and research to crony capitalism.

We’ve lost so much to the neo-Gilded-Age billionaires currently running the country’s technological explorations and Pournelle helped pave the way. While I maintain some level of optimism for our future — and the futures we imagine and hope for via science fiction — we’re living through dystopian times driven in part by the dark side of sci-fi writers who were sowing the seeds for that collapse for decades.

One last moment of crankdom from this issue: editor Stanley Schmidt’s lead op-ed is a classic, “I just got back from vacation and have a deadline, so here’s a notebook dump,” in which he muses about 1) the perception of overpopulation driving bad public policy (good point), 2) why private cars should be prioritized for transportation policy (bad point), and 3) how some people are hypocrites about the environment because they don’t realize that some natural formations in the western desert closely resemble strip-mined lands back in the east (truly bonkers point).

Finally, he complains about the “idiot lights” on car dashboards and his perception of a society reverting from the pinnacle of written language to the crass pictograms used for road signage and other areas where language barriers may pose actual dangers. I’m curious how he’s adapted to a world of emoticons and The Office GIFs.

Out of all the sci-fi mags of the time, Analog was certainly the crankiest.

And the Rest…

The short stories in this issue made no impact on me at the time or on this revisit, with one notable exception: Greg Bear’s “Schrödinger’s Plague,” which was my introduction to the concept of Schrödinger’s cat, quantum mechanics, and the uncertainty principle. It’s too much for me to attempt to explain so if you’re unfamiliar I’d recommend the wiki. Suffice to say that there is a cat in a box with a bottle of poison that may or may not be released by the the quantum-level decay of a radioactive atom, which means that the cat is both alive and dead until someone opens the box and observes it.

In Bear’s box the cat is replaced by a deadly rhinovirus and the story plays as if the beginning of Stephen King’s The Stand was an academic comedy of manners. One rather prickly professor has decided to prove or disprove Schrödinger’s paradox and now the fate of the world potentially depends on whether the other professors unwillingly pulled into the experiment can believe that the rhinovirus was dead when the box was opened.

Easy enough. Unless you’re a hypochondriac.

This was also my introduction to Bear, who would become one of my favorite science fiction authors in the 90s. I would highly recommend checking out his work, from his nano-tech thrillers Queen of Angels and Slant, to his space operas The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. He’s a versatile writer with a broad range, certainly on display here in Analog.

Elsewhere in the issue, book critic Tom Easton argues that in order for art to be Art it must be widely read, universal, and controversial. I’ll just say I think that’s hogwash and leave it at that. The letters to the editor section exists for aggrieved men to complain that their competence isn’t acknowledged. Seriously, the letters capture the vibe that infected GenXers who are ruining us today through their solipsistic megalomania in Silicon Valley.

And that’s a wrap on the March 1982 Analog. For the next Flashback, we’re going to jump back further in time to 1968 for a book and movie combo that debuted when I was still an infant: Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The two worked closely together but the film and novel have some significant differences that are interesting both in their predictive nature and in their creative process. I know the movie holds up, but does the book? We’ll find out next time.

I hadn’t yet entered my packrat era at fourteen years old. But they stuck around in various boxes and apartments and townhouses until settling here in Falls Church where they made their way onto shelves where I keep my various relics of the past.

When I picked up the subject for this Flashback — the March 1982 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories — the cover immediately struck me as unfortunately relevant, what with the Nazis and Hitler and the babe with a machine gun. Ha ha, Nazis, guess we’ve been seeing a lot of those lately! Fine, …

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So do Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and all the other tech bros who cite their favorite science fiction and fantasy novels as their inspiration for running roughshod over the country in their pursuit of wealth and power.

Musk has cited Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels as an inspiration for many of his companies but seems to have missed the point of a post-scarcity future where humans routinely change their gender to experience more of what humanity encompasses. Thiel takes the names of his companies from The Lord of the Rings then makes Palantir into the real-world equivalent of the Eye of Sauron. Bezos loved the hard-SF series The Expanse so much he saved the TV adaptation from cancellation but never seems to have comprehended the deeply humanistic themes contained in the meticulously realized physics of space travel. Brin (along with Mark Zuckerberg) read Snow Crash and took it as aspirational rather than cautionary.

I could pr…

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It’s a shame that all these decades later, it’s the non-fiction one of those that’s no longer active, with the shuttle’s actual scientific legacy cancelled and overshadowed by tragedies. My childhood dreams of space stations and moon bases have been delayed by decades and co-opted by tech-bro megalomaniacs.

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Given that we were still using rotary-dial phones and our home computers came with a whopping 48K RAM, it can be hard to understand now how much it felt like we were living in the future science fiction had been dreaming of for decades. But in some very real ways, it was true. Robots were invading assembly lines. Computers were encroaching on traditional office work. Satellite TV was bringing dirty movies to rural America.

The Space Shuttle was the crown jewel of 1980s space age life. It was a rebirth of American can-do-ism that was lost with the cessation of moon missions in 1972 and the spectacular disintegration of Skylab over Australia in 1979. Before it even flew, the shuttle was embedded in culture — Star Trek fans successfully campaigned to christen the prototype Shuttle Enterprise and Jam…

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I was more of an Asimov’s kid — there’s a reason this project started with two issues of that magazine. I suspect that getting positive feedback from the editor for my first submission played a lot into that. Kindness goes a long way. But Asimov’s was a little more “gee whiz, bang bang” science fiction compared to Amazing, which I considered to be — to borrow a word of the moment — weird.

That’s obvious from the cover of this issue, a prime example of ‘70s surrealism by fantasy artist and illustrator Ian Miller. There’s nothing wrong with it, as a piece of art. It just has n…

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Naturally, I do a book report on God Emperor of Dune. Mrs. Suitor dismisses it in class as something weird “about worm men” and so I never did something like that again.

Fables about nuclear apocalypse were fair game — the Cold War was colder than ever, after all — but everything else got you labeled as a nerd. Lesson taken.

Fortunately, while this experience did change my approach to self-selected book reports, it didn’t change my own p…

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It’s not because of my own family, although my father was drafted into the Marines in the mid-1960s. He never deployed to Vietnam, instead serving his military time at Camp Pendleton Marine Base, where I came on the scene in December 1967. But none of that led directly to my sitting here typing on my computer in Northern Virginia.

The actual instigating event was the fall of Saigon in April 1975, when the U.S. evacuated its embassy and I was finishing up my successful stint as a third grader. Over on the far side of the world that I was only vaguely aware of through the NBC Nightly News, the first of my future in-laws escaped Vietnam with her family (she worked for the embassy). Skip forward to 2002, when I meet my future husband — his mother brought them over when they were sponsored by her older sister, above — while playing tennis.

Toss in a wedding and a slew of aunts, …

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Asimov’s was the first science fiction magazine I subscribed to and the first I submitted a story to. As such, it taught me a lot about SF and publishing even if I never became published as a science fiction writer. The first story I submitted was “The Space Scream,” about an interplanetary political assassination attempt on a space rollercoaster.

I got a rejection that included a lovely little note of support from editor George H. Scithers, pointing out what was good (my descriptions) along with what needed work (not cramming so much story into so few pages). I still have that story and rejection slip in my files because I am an insane packrat.

This was one of the first few issues I received in the mail, which means it helped get the Space Scream rolling, so it’s a fitting start for Flashback.

Stories

“Sea Changeling,” by Mildred Downey Broxon

At r…

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So, how did we end up here, with me critically reviewing science fiction and fantasy magazines from my childhood? The answer isn’t complicated — as with most writers doing solo projects on the internet it’s because I want to.

But it’s a little more interesting than that, trust me.

For those who already know me, I spent more than 15 years covering LGBT politics, arts, and entertainment. Ten years later, I miss writing about culture, whether interviewing creators or reviewing movies, games, books, and more.

I don’t miss writing about politics; one thing 2016 and onward has taught me is that leaving journalism when I did was a damn good choice.

But while I’ve missed writing about culture, culture commentary has exploded since the mid-aughts, with mainstream media, indie outlets, YouTube, TikTok, and more flooding the zone with evaluations, re-evaluations, exegeses, and recaps of any cultural work with a critical or comme…

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