Many moons ago now I remember having lunch in Bristol with Jonathan Wright, a senior book reviewer for SFX. He was planning on launching a science fiction magazine, and wanted my advice. I’m not sure that my experiences with Salon Futura were at all helpful to him, but I didn’t manage to put him off, and the fruits of his labors will shortly be available to the public. My ARC arrived yesterday, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

I should note at this point that whatever advice I gave did not extend to titles. The snootier parts of fandom are going to get no further than Adventure Rocketship. Or, if they are brave enough to look further, they will bale when they find that issue #1 is titled “Let’s All Go To The Science Fiction Disco”. Doing so, however, would cause them to miss out on some very interesting material.

Let’s start with that title. The theme of the issue is the intersection between science fiction and music. That’s a challenging subject, because right now there is a very fine line dividing history and nostalgia. A number of recent BBC documentaries have fallen squarely on the wrong side of that divide, and while I’m happy to wallow in fond memories of David Bowie, Mott the Hoople and Roxy Music, I suspect that the jury is still considering their legacy.

The benefits of doing this sort of thing in a magazine are that you have time and space to consider issues properly, that you can’t be tempted to use lots of video clips, and that you can’t afford lengthy interviews with aging rock stars. You can, of course, have interviews with science fiction writers, which I suspect is more interesting.

Jonathan’s contributions to the issue include interviews with Michael Moorcock and China Miéville (the latter about his music-themed debut novel, King Rat). Sam Jordison interviews Mick Farren, who genuinely does bestraddle both music and SF. There are serious essays too, including Anne C. Perry making a bid to rescue the reputation of Alan Parsons’ soundtrack for the Ladyhawke movie (which I’m now going to have to watch again), and N.K. Jemisin asking “How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?”. There’s fiction, with new, music-themed stories from writers such as Liz Williams, Lavie Tidhar and Tim Maughan. And there’s a big list of SF-influenced albums in the back, by no means all of which I own. Yet.

There’s a lot of material to sift through. Heck, it has been produced as a paperback book, it is so long (200 pages). I haven’t mentioned the contributions by Jason Heller or Jon Courtenay Grimwood yet. I’m not in there, though if I had any idea how to get an interview with Natasha Khan I might have been. There are plenty of things you could buy the magazine for. As far as I’m concerned, I’d happily shell out to read Minister Faust writing about the Mothership Connection. The rest is just a bonus.

I’ve just got email from Danie Ware announcing launch events for the magazine at the London Forbidden Planet on May 16th, and at the Bristol store on May 18th. I hope to see some of you at the latter.

Update: Jonathan’s job title at SFX corrected, with apologies to all concerned.