New Kid On The Block...

This must be a golden age for genre TV if it merits a new magazine to challenge the venerable SFX.

Launched this week, SciFiNow is thick, glossy, monthly from Imagine Publishing, the Bournemouth-based publishers that I did a week's work experience with when I was at university, working on the short-lived Uri Gellar's Encounters paranormal magazine (i.e. a Fortean Times clone).

Imagine is best known for video game and computer mags, but SciFiNow isn't much of a leap for them as it's still archetypal geek fodder... just with prettier pictures and tasty actresses.

As a first issue, it's all glamour and shine, but a lot of the content is sadly below par. On one hand, it appears to have been put together some time ago as there are plenty of "to be announced" tags for things that have now been announced and some things that are just incorrect - such as slamming The Runaway Bride DVD for having no extras, when it has an hour-long documentary about the Children in Need/Dr Who concert.

Yet, while it obviously had a long deadline and therefore a lot of time to put it together, it is still littered with typos - the best I've found so far being in the TV section where the title of a future Dresden Files episode is listed as Things That Go Bum (instead of "Bump"!).

However, my biggest complaint with what I have read so far is the general negative attitude of many of the contributors. Sci-fi, fantasy, horror and cult TV by their definition require a large suspension of disbelief, but the writers of SciFiNow seem so intent on being controversial that many of the pieces come across as being rather cynical.

For instance, rather than just jumping on the Lost backlash bandwagon, I would have been more impressed with a "Why Lost is Still Great" article, encouraging people to stick with it and show their support for innovative, experimental TV.

As it is, the same people who heralding the first season of Heroes as "the next big thing" are the same ones who praised Lost's first season, then turned on it in the second and third seasons because they couldn't be bothered to invest the time in it and had found new toys to play with. I'm predicting a Heroes backlash in a year or so ... and I'd expect SciFiNow to be at the head of the charge, if the magazine is still around.

I did like SciFiNow's TV listing section - a day-by-day run down of the best of geeky TV - and many of the articles were very interesting, such as the 10 years of Buffy, the retrospective of the 10 Doctors, the guide to the Friday 13th movies, the overview of the disco-era Buck Rogers TV series etc, and their comic book section was informative (if slightly outdated), even though it ignored the existence of DC Comics, chooseing instead to focus on Marvel and the small/indie press.

But nothing in the magazine was particularly original. It even has a "spoiler zone" (although not sealed) in the same vein as SFX, but then again I suppose imitation is the highest form of flattery!

And one other thing. It's front cover is unfortunately very similar to the latest issue of the offical Doctor Who magazine ...