Success is always a mixed blessing. Kurt Cobain epitomized it and knew it, always identified with “our little group [who] has always been and always will until the end.”
What were all those stories I kept reading last year, about how now that the sci-fi conventions have gotten so big, they don’t really cater to, you know, sci-fi fans anymore? Now that absolutely everyone’s a nerd, those special, original nerds are getting lost in the mix, the ones you who actually were stigmatized in high school, who actually did take a social hit for wanting to master every detail they could about the original 79 episodes of Star Trek (before it was called Star Trek: The Original Series).
If you’d like to inhabit a world—just for a while—in which the term redshirt hasn’t become a well-worn concept and the status of Luke Skywalker’s parentage is still an open question, in which George Lucas is still everyone’s favorite human being and it’s pretty neat that Harlan Ellison wrote that one episode of Star Trek, there’s really only one place to go: to the Internet Archive and the whopping 224 issues of Starlog they’ve got there, just waiting for some nice person to come along and geek out about how the fuck they made that thing come out of John Hurt’s chest.
Just look at the cover of issue 37 up there—it’s from August 1980. What’s on it? Why, The Empire Strikes Back (no mention of “Episode V”), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Ray Harryhausen, Dr. Who, and the lightweight TV series Buck Rogers just for laffs. Now that’s some gooooooood stuff right there, and every issue is pretty much like that. It’s a serious sci-fi magazine for serious sci-fi fans.
Issue 1 came out in August 1976; topics included The Bionic Woman, Space: 1999, and The Man Who Fell to Earth, plus a detailed guide with plenty of photos of all 79 of those Star Trek episodes. In issue 224 (March 1996), the last issue represented here (the magazine folded in 2009), they were covering 12 Monkeys and 3rd Rock From the Sun. Think of all the great characters we met in between those two times: Snake Plissken, Sarah Connor, Seth Brundlefly, Officer Alex J. Murphy, Bill & Ted—it’s all covered in Starlog, and without the benefit of the hipster eye-roll.
Check out issue 100, from November 1985, in which they dared to list “the 100 most important people in science fiction,” stretching all the way back to Jules Verne. (J.J. Abrams isn’t on the list…...)
Here’s that link again. You can get the issues in PDF format, or text-only, or in a Kindle-ready format, and a few other ways. Apologies for making sure you get absolutely nothing done today….
Check out this 1984 commercial for “the most popular science-fiction magazine in the solar system” (they couldn’t beat out Reader’s Digest for the all-around champ, it seems):
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Alec Guinness, a.k.a. Obi-Wan Kenobi, kind of hated ‘Star Wars’
So, you’re a fan of ‘Alien’ and you’ve never seen the animal impersonator who voiced the Xenomorph?