james_nicoll

I still wish to complain about the ageist nature of this poll.
And my cat's objections still stand as well.

I used to read Asimov's regularly but other stuff in my life eventually crowded it out (though I bring some of the unread issues I've accumulated on vacations and the like to read). I recently let my subscription lapse.

I used to be a subscriber to both Asimov's and Analog, but gave them up when money ran scarce and I got tired of the seemingly shallow gene pool from which the two magazines drew stories.

-- Steve does hope that they continue on with out him, as the institutional memory they carry should be an invaluable resource for folks wanting to study the genre.

I read but they're getting scarcer to find.

I stopped for a bit when they were getting to some really weird stories, but I've also read some really great stuff in there recently.

I get piles of them from my Dad and catch up on my reading in huge day-long binges. Only, lately, not enough time to do so. Ergo, pile is sitting there, hulking tragically.

For 'I rarely read F&SF' I believe the precise value is 'I own two issues'.

I'm slightly less of a chipper than you but still a chipper.

I would like to complain about this poll.

The options I selected ("never read") could be read as "I have never read them" or "I don't read them". It's true in any case, but I wanted to register my pointless pedantry anyway.

Pedantry is never pointless!

By "rarely" I mean "I bought a grand total of three or four issues of IASFM and read the three or four issues of F&SF my father had bought in the 1960s".

I'm not including best-of anthologies.

I selected "Sometimes read" for Analog and Asimov's, because it was the discovery that I could subscribe to them on the Kindle that pushed me over the edge into buying one. F&SF doesn't seem to have a Kindle version.

This exactly. I'm sure I'd read F&SF if it magically showed up on my Kindle like the other two!

I have not read analog in several years, but I have a box full of them in my basement purchased primarily at library books sales. So I have incomplete coverage from the 70's to the early 90's.

I'm under 30 and inherited a pile of old back issues with a mixture of things I'd already read in best-of collections and things I'd never read before, and was cheerfully reading them, but don't have subscriptions to the current publications.

I used to read F&SF but that was way back in high school and college.

Another "I used to read them but haven't in years" vote.

I read Asimov's religiously and F&SF sporadically when I was in college but I gave up on them years ago, so I clicked the "never" option.

Mom used to buy them at garage sales and we have a handful of hardbound Best of... collections in the library, but never had a subscription to any of them.

I'll pick them up at Barnes & Noble if the cover features the name of an author I like. The relative likelihood of that happening lately means I answered "sometimes" for Analog and "rarely" for the others. My father ( 72 in March ) has been an Analog subscriber for over thirty years, so they're still getting some income from my family.

I read all of my dad's Analog when I was a kid; he had mid-50s to mid-70s. I haven't read it since.

I'm trying to decide whether to resubscribe to Analog. The last few issues have struck me as very blah — dunno if the writing has gone downhill or I'm just able to predict the hidden twists in the stories better.

I have read them at times, but most of those times were at least twenty years ago. For a while, I would read them when I was looking for Hugo-nominated stories, but now that most of those stories are available online, I don't have to find the magazines.

I used to subscribe to Analog and Asimov's when I was a teenager, but grew bored with them by the time I entered college.

Fantasy and SF is actually a pretty good magazine. Asimov's occasionally has something good, but exudes soporific waves of stodginess, and I don't often feel the need to buy it because all the good stories get reprinted in the "best of the year" anthologies anyway. Analog is targeted solely at people who think "bland person solves engineering problem" is a plot.

Both Asimov's and Analog have some of the most off-puttingly ugly cover art on the newsstands, in an age notable for hideous magazine covers.

I used to read Analog a lot; hardly ever read Asimov's; went through a stage of getting what F&SF I could. Nowadays I hardly read any short fiction I can't get for free online. I still submit to all three though...

Used to read Asimov's and Analog a lot, haven't read any in over a decade.

I see them often enough, but between reading books and reading online, I don't have time for magazines on top of that! So, alas, I rarely read them.

I never got into the othher two magazines, but I used to read Analog until I got tired of the Libertarian Just-So stories and gloom and doom back in the late 80s. Of course the story with the roach-mobiles finally got me to fling the magazine at the wall.

I regret having ever wasted any money on Analog (the 50's are OVER, people), and miss my subscription to F&SF.

I'm above the age range again, but my favorite magazine was Science Fiction Age, which was closed because it didn't make enough money. It made money, just not enough.

I liked Omni, dammit.

Me too. I came across some issues in 1978-79 and they blew my 12-year-old mind.

First of all, I'm 42. I've bought an issue or even two of Asimov's a year for a while, but the last one I bought earlier this year was the last I'l be buying period, after seeing it full of yet more grim, depressing crap, and having nothing what-so-ever that would tie it to the actual "Asimov" in the title.

I used to subscribe to Analog back in the 80's and early 90's but stopped and haven't read it since once it became clear that the subtitle should have been, "The Magazine of Libertarian Science Fiction, and the club with which the stories beat you over the head with libertarian preaching continued increasing in size to something approaching the scale of Rush Limbaugh.

I don't read F&SF at all and never have.

I've always gotten my short-fiction fix from anthologies and best-of collections. Subscribing to the magazines is just too much, not sufficiently filtered. I used to feel vague twinges of guilt reading Gardner Dozois' yearly exhortation to subscribe to the SF magazine of my choice, but eventually realized that "for the sake of the genre" was a weird reason to subscribe to something I probably wouldn't read most months.

I read them when a) I remember, b) there's an author I like in them, and c) I remember when I'm near enough to Pandemonium to check and see if I want to buy 'em.

I used to read F&SF pretty faithfully and picked up Asimov's often. I picked up Analog once or twice, and have an issue of Galaxy that I got for my birthday but was only fleetingly tempted by an issue that had a Larry Niven story in it.

I pretty much stopped reading them because I never subscribed and moved away from any store that carried them.

I have to clarify that I _think_ the last time I read one of the three, I was still under 30. I've never subscribed to any of the three that I recall. (I have way too large a backlog of books to think of subscribing now, though three of my other magazines turn out to all have stopped publishing early last summer...)

And someday I need to figure out what to do with the piles of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine I can see sitting over --> there, as well.

--Dave