Sales' problem with much of the science fiction often referred to as "touchstones" of the genre isn't necessarily with their quality - although he has problems with that as well - but literally their age, as he explains:

Readers new to the genre are not served well by recommendations to read Isaac Asimov, EE 'Doc' Smith, Robert Heinlein, or the like. Such fiction is no longer relevant, is often written with sensibilities offensive to modern readers, usually has painfully bad prose, and is mostly hard to find because it's out of print... holding up Foundation or Second Stage Lensman as good introductions to sf will no longer wash. They're historical documents. In those days, science fiction was a different place; they did things differently. And many "classics" of those days do not fare well when compared to modern works.

He accepts that such an opinion may be controversial ("I can hear howls of outrage across the tinterweb," he notes in the post), but he sticks to his guns, specifically pinpointing Asimov's "Nightfall" as an example of a particularly unworthy classic before concluding,

I don't think we should refuse to read old classic works, but we must recognise that they're historical documents. And add that caveat to any such recommendations or commentary. Further, modern sf readers shouldn't need to be aware of everything which has gone before, but modern sf writers certainly ought to.

Here's the thing, though: Surely he's obviously right? Not necessarily about the quality of earlier works, but if there's any genre that shouldn't be married to the idea of some untouchable canon of classic, must-read works, it has to be science fiction. There's still a lot of enjoyment and entertainment to be had from yesterday's visions of tomorrow, but once they become quaint and outdated, they fail at their original purpose - So why do fans still cling to them so tightly?

Don't Look Back In Awe [It Doesn't Have To Be Right...]

After summarizing what he perceives as the head-in-the-sand attitude of print magazine editors ("[N]aturally enough, the magazines’ various teams appear not to consider anything to be wrong [despite the declining readership]. They’ll provide what their remaining audience would seem to want, until they all finally die of old age, and then they’ll turn out the lights. And that’ll be it for the short-fiction sf print magazine as we know it," he writes), Ellis starts looking at the reasons why online magazines often get ignored by followers of SF fiction:

One of the reasons... is that we associate print magazines with an intelligent curation process overseen by functional salaried adults. That’s why so many people still look askance at the online scene as "not proper magazines." The people who believe that got their wish last month, when one of the editors of HELIX SF had his covers pulled as a bigot with clear psychological issues by a disgruntled writer. It gives credence to the bias, unspoken or otherwise, that a print magazine is a job of work and an online magazine can be thrown up by any drooling lunatic with access to the net and a credit card. A fanzine by any other name.

Regular readers will know that I like sending traffic to the likes of CLARKESWORLD and FARRAGO’S WAINSCOT etc from time to time. Aside from (patchy, beautiful) McSWEENEY’S, these are the places I look to for short fiction now. No real fireworks yet, no real movement, none of them seem to be really cresting the other in terms of profile, but the best work there has been head and shoulders over pretty much anything I read from ASIMOV’S, F&SF or INTERZONE (with one exception in the latter case) over the last several months... It’s time now, I think, to turn attention to the online sf magazines. I personally live in hope that, one day, some of them move from net to print, and create a new generation of paper magazines. But, regardless, it’s time to focus on them — on what they do, how they generate revenue, and what their own future is.

But will that future include spam-esque pornbabble, that's what we want to know.

SF MAGAZINES: Yes, I’m Here To Ruin Everybody’s Day Again [Warren Ellis]

Here is today, 2007, with its diseased ideas of drugs, Darfur disputes and suicide bombers. The truth is that we are at last living in an SF scenario. Little wonder the tiger is almost extinct, the polar bear doomed. How do you think the algae feel, in the great wastes of warming ocean? Can you not hear the ecosystems crashing down? Ideal fodder for SF, one might think. However, one might not if one was brought up on Isaac Asimov and AE van Vogt. SF is not designed for realism but for imagination.

Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the gene-rich and the gene-poor - Huxley's alphas and epsilons - and busily engaging in schemes for genetic enhancement and - to go one better than Brave New World - for immortality.

Our science fiction fate [Guardian Unlimited]
Everybody is happy now [Guardian Unlimited]