The Po Show

30 Years of SciFi Geekdom

Though that's *SF* to you! Most people who are true science fiction aficianados abhor the term "sci fi" and prefer "SF." Whatever.

Yesterday I received my copy of the 30th Anniversary issue of Asimov's Science Fiction in the mail. I've been a subscriber almost from the beginning. In fact, I have been a subscriber for as long as one could be a subsciber, from the second issue.

It was early 1977, and I was 10 years old. My school was doing one of those stupid magazine subscription fundraisers, and I was combing through list looking for more magazines to force my mother to buy, so that I could "earn" some stupid worthless prize. I lit upon the word "Science Fiction" in the title of one of the mags, as in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Oooh, science fiction. I had started reading science fiction at age 8, when my brother gave me an old copy of Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy. Not your typical 8 year old reading material, but I wasn't exactly a typical 8 year old (geeks go into training very early in life). And Isaac Asimov! One of the grand masters of science fiction, as I already knew! I had my mother cough up the money for a one year subscription.

And that was that. I have been reading it ever since, first quarterly, then bi-monthly, then monthly, for the last 30 years. It seems crazy to me that I've been reading anything for 30 years, but there you have it. And I still have almost every single issue. In the beginning, I didn't realize that magazine series were potentially valuable (and more importantly, as potentially worthy of respect as books), so I just chucked the issues after I read them. And there were a couple of issues lost in various moves. And, and this is very sad, I lent one issue to a friend in high school, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident, and I never got it back. I even remember which one it was: it was the issue with Barry Longyear's story "Enemy Mine," which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards (and was later turned into a very dumb movie with Dennis Quaid).

All the other hundreds of issues are boxed up at my mother's house or here in the pile of file boxes in the corner of my livingroom. About a dozen are lined up on the bookshelf next to my computer. A tribute to my years of fandom, my love of a genre so deeply associated with geeks. Which is really funny, since I know at first blush I don't seem like a geek. I'm a math-phobe, a technoweenie that has to cry to others when things go wrong with my computer, and oh yeah, female.

But at heart, by intellectual bend, I am a true geek, and proud of it. And Asimov's, which I used to call IASFM, probably played a large part in my development, so I salute the mag on its 30th anniversary.