Interzone: British Sci-Fi Magazine
An Analysis of the Comparative Nationality of Interzone Contributors
A comparison of the proportion of British contributors to the leading British SF magazines in 2005 and 2006.
In a recent article for Vector Magazine on The UK Sci-Fi Scene, critic Niall Harrison compares and contrasts the four current British Sci-Fi magazines. Much of the thrust of the article is about supposed quality, and being subjective, outside the scope of this article.
However, Harrison also notes that "given that there are more and more British markets for short fiction, there are fewer and fewer British writers filling them."
Harrison’s quotation of what is now a widely held truism bears some examination, given that it is entirely measurable. Harrison selects a single issue of each magazine, which leaves him vulnerable to charges of taking too small a data-set. A more viable minimum would seem to be at least a year’s worth of issues, with a second year for comparison.
In the case of both Hub and Farthing, which have both been running for less than two years, meaningful comparisons are therefore impossible.
In the case of Postscripts, the trends are almost flat. Of the writers for whom biographical information is readily available in both 2005 and 2006, ten out of twenty-three contributors in 2005 were British, and in 2006 eleven out of twenty-three.
Interzone comes in for particular attention because as its masthead proudly proclaims, it’s ‘Britain’s longest running Science Fiction magazine.’ It’s also one the few British SF magazines to have won the Hugo Award, so in some respects it’s become a standard bearer for the genre. The issue that Harrison selects, number 206, is one of the two issues last year most dominated by overseas writers.
However, across the whole of the previous year -- 2005 – of 31 stories published in Interzone, 22.5 (one was an Anglo-American collaboration) were by American writers, 6.5 by British or Irish writers, and the other 2 by Canadians. In percentage terms, only 20% of the stories published in Interzone were by British writers.
By contrast, statistics covering the whole year show that in fact, of 32 contributors to Interzone in 2006, the number of Americans actually dropped to only 19, while the number of British contributions climbed to 10 (the other 3 stories were placed by 2 Australians and a Canadian). While it should hardly be a cause for celebration that only one-third of the stories in Britain’s longest running SF magazine are by native writers, in contrast to the two-thirds in 1992, the trends are encouraging – in the first two issues of 2007, more stories have appeared by British writers than in the whole of 2005 – and the ratio seems to be climbing still higher.
