So I bought some science fiction magazines—fantasy and science fiction magazines and stuff— and read all of the short stories in them and went, 'OK, I just need to write something better than any these things.' I sat down and started banging away and eventually what I got was "Pocketful of Dharma.""

— Paolo Bacigalupi, interviewed by PBS' Wired Science Blog. via Free SF Reader, via William Gibson on Twitter.

Over at Borders' blog Babel Clash, Adams explains exactly how Lightspeed will differ from existing SF magazines. For one thing it'll publish only SF, no fantasy. But unlike other SF-only venues, it'll publish all SF, not just near-future stories. Another difference: Lightspeed will publish a 50-50 mix of reprints and original stories, because Adams figures its target audience is general readers, who haven't already read everything out there. Adds Adams:

[S]ince we're targeting new or casual readers of short fiction or science fiction in general, part of the reason for mixing the reprints and originals is to show them where science fiction comes from, where it is now, and where it's going.

And finally, the magazine's fiction and non-fiction will go together, so if there's a short story about robots, there'll be an article about famous robots from SF, or comparing Optimus Prime to Mechagodzilla.

Meanwhile, Lightspeed will also have its own unique revenue model, including advertising but also a monthly ebook edition that you can subscribe to. The ebook edition will have the following month's content all at once, so there's no waiting for the site to update twice a week. Adds Adams:

Other than that, we'll be experimenting with and exploring the possibilities of various new media like iPhone apps, and podcasts (which may not be a money-making venture, but can help us broaden our reach). Although there will be no print edition of Lightspeed, we will not be ignoring traditional media altogether; once a year we'll be publishing a Lightspeed anthology, which will collect all of the fiction that appeared in the magazine over the course of a calendar year.

With print magazines continuing to struggle and webzines having a hard time breaking out of the pack, here's hoping a more defined focus and some new revenue models will help magazine-publishing in general. Here's hoping.

Famous Monsters pretty much ceased publication in 1983, apart from a brief attempt at a revival in 1993. But now it's coming back, full steam. This is fantastic news for anybody who loves classic monsters. Here are the details, according to a press release from IDW:

Famous Monsters of Filmland, the classic sci-fi/horror/fantasy-specific film magazine that captured the imaginations of so many for more than three decades, today announced its return to print. FM has partnered with IDW Publishing, responsible for hit comic book titles such as 30 Days of Night, Angel, Transformers, and Locke & Key, to bring this new incarnation of the magazine to life. The new Famous Monsters magazine will begin its run on a quarterly basis starting in summer 2010, and will be available in major book retailers, comic stores, and online at famousmonsters.com.

Originally launched in 1958, Famous Monsters of Filmland was one of the first magazines to take readers behind-the-scenes of some of the most popular movies of present and past. Pulling the curtain back on the filmmaking process, the magazine became a lightning rod for legions of young fans, sparking the minds and hearts of future storytellers such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Guillermo del Toro, Stephen King, and John Landis. Under the guidance of beloved editor-in-chief Forrest J Ackerman, credited with nurturing and even inspiring the careers of early contemporaries such as Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, and L. Ron Hubbard, the magazine brought monsters to life and made household names out of writers, directors, creature designers, FX artists, and monster makeup technicians.

Editorial duties for the magazine will be handled by Michael Heisler, a veteran of the comic book industry for over 20 years, with experience logged at Marvel Comics, WildStorm Productions and IDW itself. "FM was far and away my favorite magazine when I was a kid, and there has been nothing quite like it since," said Heisler. "Our goal is to update that magic for a modern audience, with coverage of current horror in all its forms, while continuing to pay tribute to the classic films that started it all. Personally, I'm thrilled to be taking this step down the road that Forry Ackerman and ‘Chilly Billy' Cardille put me on so many years ago."

Famous Monsters cover via Godzilla Cover Gallery. [Comic Hero News]

And writer Paul McAuley says it may be about to happen again:

Sf publishing has always been a chancy, hand-to-mouth affair for most. It imploded again in the early 1980s, and there are signs that it's about to implode again. And because they can't hope for sinecure positions in creative writing in universities (although that's changing, now), sf writers have always been ready to turn their hands and minds to the kind of writing that can be churned out quickly and profitably.... While Silverberg et al were working in the titillation trade in the US, over here in the UK Michael Moorcock was editing New Worlds with one hand and writing Sexton Blake adventures with the other, while many of his contemporaries were writing westerns, biker novels and, yes, sexploitation novels. A little later, Kim Newman and Neil Gaiman worked for the British soft porn magazine Knave. And sf writers today are also working in comics and graphic novels, novels based on role-playing games (Kim Newman and a slew of authors associated with Interzone in the 1990s wrote innovative and highly successful short stories novels for Games Workshop), film tie-ins . . .

The question is, if SF publishing does have another implosion, where will authors go this time? Porn publishing has been even harder hit by the Internet than other genres. Where will the suddenly starving SF authors turn this time around? [Paul McAuley]

It makes sense that we'd end up talking about sci-fi magazines during Bookvortex week; after all, sci-fi pulps and magazines are responsible for publishing the first published works by writers like Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin, as well as early work by Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, so it'd pretty hard to imagine science fiction without them. But, as Warren Ellis, amongst others, has pointed out, the magazines' audiences are shrinking, and their impact blunted. Instead of just surrendering to the inevitability of the death of print, though, we thought we'd offer some possible ways for the magazines to survive for a little while longer, at least...

Sell Out (1)
If Marvel Comics can manage to become the subject of a $4 billion buyout, then I can't help but feel that sf magazines have done something wrong to be facing extinction. But what is that something? It might be the lack of repeatable franchise characters; one-off stories don't necessarily scream "multi-movie possibilities" to lazy producers looking for the next Spider-Man or Batman, after all. But maybe the fault is that sf magazines aren't doing the screaming themselves. Superhero comics have ensured their immediate future by, whether intentionally or accidentally, turning themselves into idea farms for other media. Why can't SF magazines do the same thing? They may not own the IP of everything they publish, but they own the venue: Couldn't magazines survive by becoming, essentially, agents and talent scouts for television and movies as much as publishing venues in their own right?

Go Highbrow Fetish Object
Where is the science fiction McSweeneys? A magazine that changes format and size with each new issue so that every edition is constantly an event for more than just its content? Maybe that would be too much for some longtime collectors, but by making each issue more of a standalone book instead of "just another" edition, there's potential for luring in new readers, even if it's just on novelty value alone. And, let's face it: Shouldn't a science fiction magazine of all things try and look new and unexpected as often as possible?

Sell Out (2)
Saying something like "Finding alternate revenue streams" sounds a little too much like I know what I'm talking about, but let's ignore that for a second and ask: Why can't magazines like Asimov's and Analog leverage their brand into merchandise based on, for example, the amazing cover art from years gone by, and use that to fund the magazine? Why don't we see Interzone licensing its name to Syfy for some Twilight Zone-esque anthology (Or, getting back to comics for a second, a comic book version of the magazine and/or adaptations of some of the most famous stories in the magazine's history)? Are the magazines' histories really worth so little?

Embrace The Mainstream
Maybe this is just my experience and bias talking, but it seems to me that sci-fi literature - and especially sci-fi magazines - are content to stay within their existing niche market, head down and hope for the best. There's no advertising (Considering the likely cost, understandable), and seemingly no outreach to anyone who's not already aware of the existence of the magazines. Considering the mainstream success of SF movies or TV shows like FlashForward and Fringe (Both of which offer more esoteric science fiction ideas than, say, Heroes or V), this seems more than a little frustrating. Am I missing various online efforts to entice people to read The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction, or is there really no attempt being made to get the word out?

Celebrity Endorsement
Four words: Megan Fox's Astounding Stories.
Like that wouldn't raise readership. Sadly.

Published in the February 1931 issue of Astounding Stories, "Werewolves Of War" by D.W. Hall takes place seven years in the future, after the Slavs have overrun Europe and are now laying waste to the United States. The last scrappy defenders of America are just barely holding off the Slavs at California, and doing battle in the hazardous no-man's land of Nevada. D.W. Hall gives us the kind of writing you just don't see nowadays. Witness:

Trapped again!

But this time, Lance swore, they'd not get away without paying dearly for it!

Under the mesh of his gas-mask the lean lines of his jaw went taut. Tense, steely fingers flipped to the knobbed control instruments; the gleaming single-seater scout plane catapulted in a screaming somersault. Lance's ever-wary sixth sense told him the tongues of disintegrating flame had licked the plane's protected belly, and for the fact that it was protected he thanked again his stupendous luck. He pulled savagely at the squat control stick; the four Rahl-Diesels unleashed a torrent of power; and the slim scout rose like a comet, and hurtled, the altitude dial's nervous finger proclaimed, to ten thousand feet. Lance eased off the power, relaxed slightly, and glanced below.

So the Slavs have amazing super-weapon, the disintegrating flame, which takes out American airplanes by the dozen and whose secrets baffle America's scientists. Only the heroic squadron leader, Lance, is able to strike back at the Slavs using his acidic bullets, which give off "acrid white smoke" after they hit. This is a "scientific war," as Lance's commanding officer notes. But there's a traitor amongst Lance's unit, the Werewolves Of War, and nothing can stop the relentless encroachment of the villainous Slavs:

Werewolves of War, the batch of planes he belonged to had been christened, and it was a richly deserved title. In front of the front they fought, detailed to desperate, harrying missions, losing an average of ten men a day. The ordeal of gas and fire and acid bullets added five years to a man's brow overnight-if he served with the Werewolves of War.

Lance was only twenty-four, but his hair was splotched with dead gray strands; his eyes were hard and weary; his face lined with new wrinkles. Ah, well, it was war-and a losing war, he had to admit, that they fought. If a miracle didn't come, America would crumble even as old Europe had, before the overwhelming Slavish troops.

Even now, as Lance knew through various rumors, the Slavs were massed for a grand attack. And with what could America hold them back?

The unit also includes a comical Cockney mechanic, a refugee from a defeated England. My favorite part is when the story mentions that Lance "Immelmanned up." That's going to be my new catch phrase: "Immelman up, why don't you?" Lance suspects his fellow officer, Praed, is a coward and a spy — but he little realizes the shocking truth about Praed's identity, and how it relates to an amazing new secret super-weapon... the Flying Torpedo! But to win, they must destroy San Francisco utterly!

The whole story just went online recently, as part of Project Gutenberg — and in fact, that whole issue of Astounding Stories is on the site, for your astonishment and delight. Also included in the issue: "Tentacles From Below!" by Anthony Gilmore, "Phalanxes Of Atlans" by F.V.W. Mason, and "The Pirate Planet" (not to be confused with the Doctor Who story) by Charles W. Diffin. Enjoy! [Project Gutenberg via Free Speculative Fiction Online]

Adams' latest anthology project is called Brave New Worlds, and it'll be published by Night Shade Books, which put out several previous Adams projects. According to Publisher's Marketplace, it'll consist of reprints covering "the best of dystopian fiction from best-selling authors."

But can Adams' new magazine publishing project, Lightspeed Magazine, help stave off the rise of dystopia in the world of short fiction? We can only hope. Published by Prime Books, which already puts out Fantasy Magazine online, Lightspeed will focus more on science fiction, posting four original stories per week. Says the press release:

Lightspeed will be edited by John Joseph Adams, the bestselling editor of anthologies such as Wastelands and The Living Dead, and Andrea Kail, a writer, critic, and television producer who worked for thirteen years on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Adams will select and edit the fiction, while Kail will handle the non-fiction.

Lightspeed will focus exclusively on science fiction. It will feature all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and writers will be encouraged to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope. New content will be posted twice a week, including one piece of fiction, and one piece of non-fiction. The fiction selections each month will consist of two original stories and two reprints, except for the debut issue, which will feature four original pieces of fiction. All of the non-fiction will be original.

Lightspeed will open to fiction submissions and non-fiction queries on January 1, 2010. Guidelines for fiction and non-fiction will be available on Lightspeed's website, www.lightspeedmagazine.com, by December 1, 2009.

Actually, reading Locus Magazine's write-up, it sounds like MacNeill predicted handheld devices connected to a mainframe, which was more in line with what we actually had in 1980. MacNeill told Locus:

I came up with the one about 'home computer terminals with interactive access to other home, business and academic terminals, and including hand-held terminals' mostly because I had been using the PLATO terminals in Uris Hall at Cornell and wished very, very much that I could have one of my own (and especially one that I could carry around with me).

Ed Ferman, who was editor of F&SF in 1980, says it's disappointing to see how optimistic many of the 30-year-old predictions for 2010 were, and how far short we've fallen. (Although there are still a couple months left — everybody innovate really really hard!) [Locus Magazine]

I'm dying to get into this volume, which does look staggeringly awesome. Writes Keith Brooke in the Guardian:

The word "classic" could justifiably be applied to many stories in this volume, which, as a tribute to the magazine and an introduction to some of the finest authors of fantasy, SF and horror, is a landmark anthology.

But while you're waiting to get your hands on a copy, you can listen to some of the writers who've made F&SF so classic, plus the magazine's current editor. According to book publicist and blogger Matt Staggs:

Peter Beagle, Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Swanwick, Mary Rickert, Jeffrey Ford, John Kessel, Delia Sherman, Ellen Klages, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, and Fantasy and Science Fiction publisher Gordon Van Gelder himself are among those interviewed.

You can listen to the first half of the interviews as part of Kleffel's regular podcast, Agony Column.

The reasons for the magazine's halt to publication speak to the challenges of starting any new magazine in this tough climate. Says Flint:

From the beginning, we were too dependent on the income from the Universe club. The Club's purpose was to provide the magazine with a much-needed initial surge of income-which it did indeed provide-and then, after the first year, to continue as an important but subsidiary source of income. Instead, the Club wound up being the source of about half of our annual income, from beginning to end.

That was just too much; or, to put it another way, a reliance on too few critically important subscribers. Once some of them began to fall by the wayside-which was inevitable and, indeed, something we expected-the magazine's income began to be badly squeezed.

It was our hope from the beginning that, as time went by, we'd expand our regular subscription base to the point where that base alone provided all the income we needed to keep publishing. Obviously, a situation where many customers are paying a small amount is a much more stable and dependable financial basis on which to operate a magazine.

Going forward, any fiction magazine that aims to become self-supporting either has to collect tons of donations, rope in some bigger advertisers, or find a pool of subscribers that's both large and die-hard. [via Locus]

Yesterday we reported on a bit of a controversy around F&SF launching a paid workshop whose participants get the inside track for publication in the magazine. And now F&SF has posted the editorial explaining about the workshop online, including some more details:

I don't know why we never tried this before, but F&SF is going to begin hosting a writing workshop.

We're fortunate to have the great Gardner Dozois running the show. I'm sure most of our readers know Gardner already, but just in case, he's the author of dozens of short stories (his most recent F&SF story is "Counterfactual," which appeared in our June 2006 issue) and he edited Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 1984 to 2004. He also has decades of experience with writing workshops and is widely considered one of the best story doctors in the field.

All F&SF readers should benefit from Gardner's workshop work, because he's going to have the option of selecting stories from the workshop for publication in F&SF. We're currently planning to run Gardner Dozois selections three times a year. (Writers, fret not: I won't be reading the workshop stories myself, so you can still submit your stories to F&SF regardless of what anyone in the workshop makes of the story.)

The workshop will be administered by Lisa Rogers, a former editor for Gollancz and Little, Brown.

Initially, the workshop will be available online only and the site will have a private message board to go with the critiquing.

Until the workshop is firing on all cylinders, we're limiting the membership to 100 people. You can find the membership prices and other information at www.FandSFworkshop.com.

Frankly, I'm very excited about the prospects for this new project and I think all of our readers will benefit from it.

We talked to Van Gelder, who says "the workshop isn't even ready to launch, so any angst about our policies seems very premature to me." And he says that the current plan is for the workshop to provide three stories a year to the magazine, but "we'll see how it goes." It's up to Gardner Dozois when he selects stories for the magazine, and any stories that end up in print will be highlighted as Dozois' selections.

We asked Van Gelder how many stories from previously unpublished authors F&SF currently publishes. He says:

You're welcome to go through back issues and check. My sense is that we average 2-6 stories a year, but I haven't actually tried to verify that. In fact, I'd be curious to see the actual numbers. One reason I thought of launching the workshop was because it seemed like we were running fewer stories by newbies in recent years.

I looked back through eight recent issues of F&SF, and pretty much every story seemed to be from a veteran author. One issue did include a story by John Langan, who seems to have gotten his start in F&SF back in 2007 or thereabouts. One of those eight issues was the all-star anniversary issue, however. In a few cases, an author's bio noted that his/her first publication had been in FS&F — but that first publication had taken place back in the 1980s in a lot of cases.

Also, we asked Van Gelder if he thought F&SF would end up publishing fewer stories by unpublished authors that didn't come from the workshop, since the workshop is expected to provide three new authors per year already. He replies:

No, I don't. If the workshop goes well, I'd expect to see the number increase.

He says the overall goal of the workshop is to get more good stories, regardless of the writer's experience — but one of the major driving forces is a desire to reach out to new writers. He points to other recent moves, like F&SF offering an extra $100 to the next "newbie woman writer" to publish a story in the magazine.

Once again, we're sorry we didn't seek comment from F&SF before posting our previous entry about this workshop.

To my mind, though, Van Gelder is just making explicit what everyone has always known about workshops: they're a way of meeting editors and making connections. David Marusek, to choose a random example, has told many times the story of his first story sale to Asimov's at Clarion West, and how it launched his career. Having read magazine fiction slush before, I don't know that there's a brilliant or equitable way to help new writers bypass it. At the same time, being so blatant about saying "Attend our workshop and you'll get the inside track to publication in our magazine" does feel a bit skeevy. I think the litmus test is whether the increased chance of publication is the main attraction, or just a fringe benefit on top of all the instruction you'll be getting, and that's hard to judge without knowing more.

What do you think?

Update: I've heard from the F&SF folks, and I'm hoping to post their side of this story soon. I apologize for not contacting them before running this piece, since it would have been better to include their viewpoint along with the original report.

[Innsmouth Free Press via Sean Wallace via Jay Lake on Twitter]

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]

Conjunctions #52, out now, has a theme of "Betwixt The Between: Impossible Realism," and here's the description:

Postfantasy fictions that begin with the premise that the unfamiliar or liminal really constitutes a solid ground on which to walk.

No, I don't know what that means either. I guess it's something to do with the idea that the standard fantasy trope - the dreamlike realm, in which the protagonist learns that everything is weirder and brighter than he/she realized - is actually more "solid" than reality. Or something. In any case, who really cares, when we're getting literary "postfantasy" from Joyce Carol Oates, io9 contributor Jeff Vandermeer, and Elizabeth Hand... plus a selection from China Miéville's new novel The City And The City? Can't wait to get my hands on this. [Conjunctions, Thanks Michelle!]

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]

However, in the announcement of this change, the magazine made sure to stress that the end of the print version would be only temporary, implying that it would return to a hard-copy format in the future.

From Starlog's Website:

It is also at this time that we announce the temporary cessation of the current run of STARLOG as a print magazine. After 33 years, and considering the present state of the economy, we feel its time for a major revamp and will be temporarily discontinuing publication while the model and redesign of the magazine are contemplated and executed.

Kerry O'Quinn and Norman Jacobs started the magazine in 1976, with Quinn serving as the first editor and Jacobs working the business end of things. During the early stages, the pair wanted to talk exclusively about a new television show, Star Trek, and sought to release never-before-seen pictures and interviews. But, because of rising costs and legal issues, they began to explore other aspects of the science fiction genre to cover. Their first issue, published in August 1976, sold out, and with such results, the publishers decieded to take the magazine to a new issue ever six weeks, up from the quarterly format that they had first envisioned.

Throughout its long history, the magazine covered up and coming science fiction projects, and has been the longest running magazine of its kind. In March of last year, the parent company for Starlog, Creative Media, filed for bankruptcy and Starlog was sold to The Brooklyn Company Inc. It seems that financial problems have followed the magazine, and are in part responsible for the move to a less-expensive online format.

The other reason for this move likely comes from the growing use of the internet when it comes to news. Anyone who's paid attention to the world today will tell you that the past couple of years haven't been the best for print newspapers, which face declining readership as readers go online to get news faster, and for free. Indeed, the science fiction world has had bigger problems when it comes to print magazines, with top perioticals such as Asimovs, Analog and others noting yearly declines in readership.

Yet, to quote Douglas Adams, "Don't Panic." The announcement stressed that this was a temporary absence from the newstands, and while there is certainly the chance that we'll never again see new issues on the newstand, we're hoping the Starlog crew will be working very hard to make it so.

The new issue of The New Yorker features "The Invasion From Outer Space" by Steven Millhauser, a slight amuse-bouche of a story about alien invasion. It's very short — you can probably read it on your coffee break — and packs just enough of a punch to justify its length. The first half of the story is the funny part, dealing with people's reactions to the news that aliens are going to land in their town — which are entirely conditioned by exposure to alien-invasion narratives in movies and television:

From the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn't we seen it all a hundred times?-the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer . . .

Of course, the alien invasion turns out not to be like a movie at all — in fact, it's something completely different, seemingly harmless at first but ultimately quite terrifying. Anyway, "Invasion" is a fun story, and winds up being very consciously science fictional, even though you think at first it's only going to be commenting on science fiction without actually embracing it. Check it out! [The New Yorker] Thanks Wilson!