SFX Magazine

I've been reading SFX magazine for about four years now, and it's just got better and better. It's one of only two magazines that I have to buy every single month (the other one is Empire - The film magazine).

SFX is a magazine dedicated to science fiction and fantasy in general. Anything that falls into this remit is in, and even things that don't on occasion. For instance they included TOTP2 in one issue because it was having a vaguely SF based edition. Likewise the C4 sitcom gets quite a lot of mentions, because although it is a sitcom, it contains a huge number of homages to SF as well. But I digress.

SFX comes out every 28 days (there are 13 issues a year) and it costs £3.50 currently. For this you get 122 pages of SF delight.

The first thing that I turn to every month without fail are the opinion articles by Dave Langford and Paul Cornell. These have no fixed topic, but they are both consistently amusing and informative.

Next up are the letters pages. Just like all letters pages in every magazine you've ever read, except that it has a little boxout at the site filled with lots of little text with names of loads of people who wrote in but couldn't get a full space. It also has comments to do with what they wrote (if you see what I mean).

For the past goodness knows how many months, SFX has been publishing an in depth series on "The History of Trek". This is representative of the quality of the magazine. If it's going to tell you something, it will tell you just about everything you need to know about it, and then some more besides. Every month the magazine is filled with excellent articles that both inform and entertain.

Towards the front of the magazine you are treated to many small articlets with the pertinent SF news for the month gone by. Of course you could get all this on the internet anyway - but you can't be everywhere can you?

In the middle of the magazine is the "Spoiler Zone". This is a sealed part of the magazine containing spoilers for all the up coming SF shows. You can see the quality of a magazine that will take the extra step to actually seal a section that not everyone would want to see because it might spoil the program for them. Good show to SFX for that.

My only real problem with SFX is its magazine's cover. Most months (well 12 out of the last 21 anyway - he says, taking a quick loot through the back issues page) they decide to cover up the bottom of the F in SFX, meaning that to anyone who doesn't actually know the magazine it looks like you're buying a mag called "SEX" (you can check this out at the top of the page). I can tell you, I get some funny looks sometimes.

There is also a website (for the time being) at http://www.sfxnetwork.com/

Subscribers to the magazine get the limited edition which deosn't have any text apart from the SSFX logo on it.

Apart from that though, it's a great magazine. If you're into SF in any way, give it a read.