Warren Ellis searched through the new edition of Gardner Dozois' latest Year's Best Science Fiction volume, and found the latest ill tidings for the big science fiction print mags. Analog Science Fiction And Fact lost 1,400 readers, or about 5.1 percent, falling to just under 26,000 copies of each issue in circulation. Asimov's Science Fiction and The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction both saw drops of 2.7 percent each, to around 17,000 copies and 16,044 copies respectively.

These are actually fairly gentle declines, compared to previous years. According to Ellis, Asimov's lost 5.2 percent of its circulation in 2007, 13.6 percent in 2006 and 23 percent in 2005. The last time we reported on circulation numbers, F&SF had seen an 11.2 percent drop, to around 16,489. (That was only six months ago though.)

As we pointed out last time, back in 2004, F&SF had a paid circulation of around 20,000 copies, while Asimov's was at around 30,000 copies and Analog was at around 40,000 copies.

So it's not just an ongoing attrition — there was a fairly steep dive, which has now leveled off somewhat. Does this mean we've hit a kind of floor, for now anyway? Are there roughly 16,000 die-hard science fiction fans who will always buy F&SF and Asimov's, no matter what? And another 10,000 who'll also pick up Analog? Or is this just a brief plateau before the next dive?

I'm actually fairly pessimistic: moves like F&SF going bimonthly are bound to decrease the visibility of these magazines on the newsstand, and a lot of the most exciting short fiction in print seems to be cropping up in themed anthologies lately. The newsstand digest format, itself, feels a bit like a relic, and magazine distribution is only going to get more and more brutal, as a business. I'm not sure what a magazine would have to do to get 40,000 copies in circulation, these days, but I suspect it would involve new distribution channels, like comic-book stores and coffee shops. [Warren Ellis]

Schmidt's book, The Coming Convergence, is trying to popularize the idea of the Convergence, in which vastly different technologies come together to produce unforeseen advances. Writing an op-ed in the Athens Banner-Herald, he gives a couple of already-existing examples of such combinations:

To get any idea what the future might be like, you need to look at all the "currents" of research that are going on at the same time, and think about what might happen when they converge. These convergences can be very beneficial, or very dangerous. The CAT scan, a vital lifesaving tool of modern medicine, is a result of one such convergence (of X-ray imaging, medicine and high-speed computing). The 9/11 World Trade Center attack was made possible by another (of aviation and large-scale building).

He adds that both "exhilarating and terrifying possibilities lie not far ahead, and we all need to think about where we're going so we can avoid being blindsided and reap the rewards while avoiding the dangers." He sees biotech, information technology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and cognitive science coming together in ways we can't predict, to create new technologies that will change our world:

We soon may have the ability to live much longer lives - but are we ready to deal with the resulting increase in problems caused by rapid population growth? We as individuals may be able to have great material wealth while having to work very little to get and maintain it. But how can we get from our present social and economic system, which depends on most people having full-time jobs, to the very different one that such a change would require?

New surveillance and data-mining methods can make life much more difficult for would-be criminals - but how much freedom and privacy are the remainder of us willing to give up for more security?

These sorts of issues are already discussed by "techies" and science-fiction fans, but everybody else needs to be talking about them as well, argues Schmidt. [Online Athens]