Anyone heard? I have no idea what’s going on.
Latest issue I’ve seen any evidence is the one picture here from 2025. I understand they’ve had a bumpy ride (some controversy around politics of a featured writer, unpaid writers, and intermittent delivery schedule). And now of course they’ve been purchased by the same unicorn as Analog and Asimov’s I believe (you can tell by the change to pulpy construction, heh).
But have they even paid everyone they owe? Is anyone submitting stories??
I don’t think anyone can expect them fulfill their description as a quarterly magazine, but is there any evidence that we’ll get even 1 issue in 2026?
Yeah it never went out of print, as far as I know. I was a big fan of the ones from the 60’s after reading some on Archive.org, so I put in a year subscription to modern Analog.
To be honest, the quality of writing wasn’t compelling enough on average to subscribe for another year. There were two or three stories I really enjoyed, a handful were pretty good, and the rest (85%?) were either very much not to my tastes or boring.
To me, it seemed like the boring stories were divided between:
Actual scientists/engineers who clumsily shoehorned long descriptions of their own specialty into a flimsy plot full of weak characters who exist just to ask questions for the protagonist to continue their science explanations.
Or,
It’s not written by a scientist, but has no concept of how to craft an intriguing hook, or get a reader invested. One example I can give is a story that was about a woman who helps maintain the life support system aboard a ship, who, after a talk with her mom and looking through family photos, decides not to marry her fiance after struggling with it in her head for a few days. That’s it. Nothing else happens. There was no conflict, nothing interesting going on in the ship, just a person whom the reader will struggle to care about or relate to due to there not being enough pages making a personal decision, and everything is fine. Was really surprised the editor published it.
One of the stories I really enjoyed was The Last Days of Good People, by A.T Sayre (who spun it out into a standalone novel). It was a proper sci-fi adventure, with a very interesting focus on interactions with a well written and fleshed out alien race that really tugged at me and even got me to cry.
From what I’ve read, Asimov’s might have slightly higher quality stories, but I couldn’t justify the price to try a year of that too, especially when the competition, such as ClarkesWorld, is free to read online, and supposedly has higher quality stories than either.
But that’s just my two cents based on my personal fiction tastes (I can be a bit picky). I believe both Asimov’s and Analog have one full issue available to read for free on their site, which can give you an idea if you’d like them or not (if they no longer do that, there’s some fairly recent issues of both on Archive.org)
EDIT: I will say though, that it was really cool to actually receive a real printed sci-fi mag in the mail regularly. I really wished I enjoyed the stories more to justify keeping that, as I do really like that aspect.