Appropriately enough on International Star Wars Day (May The Fourth Be With You ...), I discovered yet another science-fiction magazine has just been launched - Death Ray.Now I can accept that the trendy new Doctor Who has (almost) made geekdom fandom (almost) mainstream in the UK, but can our relatively small market place support THREE magazines devoted to, what is in all honestly, a niche genre?
Death Ray claims, I believe, to be a "serious" take on SFX - but personally I've never found anything wrong with the balance of serious articles and humour in over a decade of SFX. To be fair to the new, new kid on the block (arriving hot on the heels of the less than impressive SciFiNow), I couldn't afford yet another £4 magazine this month and so only skimmed through it in WH Smiths.
The daft name also didn't encourage me to part with hard-earned cash ... for what may well be an excellent read.
Just because the general public are starting to watch the things we like (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, Doctor Who etc) doesn't mean they'd all be interested in reading about the minutiae of making these awesome programmes, the backstories and story arcs, what the actors' had for lunch and so on.
Of course, these magazines also cover sci-fi literature - but let's be honest: if sci-fi on television is a niche, then sci-fi literature is a niche of a niche. How many non-geeks could name a hard sci-fi writer or even a 'proper' comic book writer?
It will be interesting to see, in six months, which, if any, of these new pretenders to SFX's throne of dominance have survived.
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