 First issue (January 1993); illustration byAlex Schomburg | |
| Editor | Algis Budrys |
|---|---|
| First issue | January 1993 |
| Final issue | February 1997 |
| Company | Pulphouse, Unifont |
| Website | Archived home page |
Tomorrow Speculative Fiction was ascience fiction magazine edited byAlgis Budrys, published in print and online in the United States from 1993 to 1999. It was launched byPulphouse Publishing as part of its attempt to move away from book publishing to magazines, but cash flow problems led Budrys to buy the magazine after the first issue and publish it himself. There were 24 issues as a print magazine from 1992 to 1997, mostly on a bimonthly schedule. The magazine was losing money, and in 1997 Budrys moved to online publishing, rebranding the magazine astomorrowsf. Readership grew while the magazine was free to read on the web, but plummeted when Budrys began charging for subscriptions. In 1998 Budrys stopped acquiring new fiction, only publishing reprints of his own stories, and in 1999 he shut the magazine down.
Tomorrow published many new writers, though few of them went on to successful careers. Well-known authors who appeared in the magazine includedGene Wolfe,Ursula K. Le Guin, andHarlan Ellison.The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction listsThe Mines of Behemoth, a novel byMichael Shea, and "Another Story", by Le Guin, as among the best work published in the magazine, but comments thatTomorrow was "rather less satisfying than one might have expected from Budrys: an uneven mix of the superior with the sufficient".[1] Mark R. Kelly, a reviewer forLocus, described the stories as "workmanlike".[2]Tomorrow was a finalist for theHugo Award for Best Semiprozine in 1994 and 1995.
In the late 1980s,Dean Wesley Smith andKristine Kathryn Rusch startedPulphouse Publishing in order to issue a hardback anthology series,Pulphouse, which they described as a hardback magazine.[3] The publishing operation grew, absorbingAxolotl Press in 1989, and using the imprint to reissue stories fromIsaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine as well as new stories.[4] In 1991Pulphouse: A Weekly Magazine was launched, though it was unable to keep to a weekly schedule and appeared irregularly over the next four years.[5] Pulphouse was having cash flow problems and was in debt: Smith believed the book publishing business was collapsing and was trying to move his publishing operations into magazines, and away from books.[6] In 1992 he launchedPulphouse Fiction Spotlight, and in 1992 he startedTomorrow Speculative Fiction, withAlgis Budrys as editor.[7] Pulphouse announced the magazine shortly before theWorld Science Fiction Convention (known as Worldcon) in September 1992, quoting payment rates of three to seven cents per word, with higher rates for well-known writers and for shorter fiction.[note 1] The first issue was dated January 1993, but it was printed early enough to be distributed at the Worldcon.[7][9][10]
Pulphouse's financial problems persuaded Budrys to safeguard the magazine by buying it after only one issue. The deal was completed in December 1992, and Budrys and his wife incorporated the Unifont Company as the publisher. Budrys honored the subscriptions that had been sold, but decided not to continue with national distribution, instead supplying specialist stores and selling subscriptions.[11] At the end of 1993 circulation stood at 3,000,[11] and it remained at about that number for the life of the print magazine.[12]
The first issue was priced at $3.95 ($9.00 in 2024); the price was increased to $4 with the second issue.[13] Budrys increased the page count from 64 to 80 pages with the fourth issue, in order to make room for longer stories.[14][13] Production costs increased over the next four years, and although Budrys raised the price twice more, to $4.50 in June 1995 and to $5 the following April, he was unable to make the magazine profitable.[15][16] Some retailers failed to pay him for issues, and he commented in 1997 that "all of my distributors lied to me ... You put out a magazine with a retail price of $5 and if you're lucky, you get back a buck. That just does not compute. So I decided to try the Web."[16]
Initially Budrys gave the web version ofTomorrow, rebranded astomorrowsf, issue dates on the same schedule as the print version, with issue 25 dated April 1997 and the next two issues following at bimonthly intervals. However, material was added to the website as early as January 1997, and Budrys soon switched to a weekly release schedule, with version numbers, so that, for example, the final edition of the August 1997 issue became version 3.9.[17] The first three issues were free, and readership was substantially greater than for the print version, but when Budrys switched to requiring subscriptions, at $10 for six issues, the readership fell precipitously.[18][19] With little revenue from advertising Budrys stopped including new fiction after June 1998, instead reprinting old stories of his. He returned stories he had bought and not yet published to their authors later that year. The seventeenth and last issue was dated December 1999.[20] The website is no longer active, though some of its material is preserved in theInternet Archive.[1]
The first issue of the magazine includedGene Wolfe's "Useful Phrases", and stories byRob Chilson andCharles L. Grant.[21] The lead story wasM. Shayne Bell's "Night Games", described by a reviewer as "impressively taut".[22] Under the pseudonym "Paul Janvier", Budrys contributed "Starlight", a short story written to suit the cover artwork, byAlex Schomburg.[21] Under his own name Budrys printed the first in a series of nine articles about writing.[23] The second issue included stories byRobert Reed andGeoffrey Landis, and another pseudonymous story by Budrys, again written for the cover art, which was byPaul Lehr.[11] Other well-known writers who appeared inTomorrow includedNorman Spinrad,Avram Davidson,Harlan Ellison, andSarah Zettel.[24][13]The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes the fiction as "very uneven" but lists among the better storiesThe Mines of Behemoth, a novel in theNifft the Lean series, byMichael Shea; "Another Story" byUrsula K. Le Guin (a reprint from Le Guin's collectionA Fisherman of the Inland Sea); and work byWilliam Barton,Élisabeth Vonarburg,R. Gárcia y Robertson, and William Esrac.[1]Locus' reviewer, Mark R. Kelly, also singled out "Another Story", describing it as "a moving, beautiful work, certain to be one of the best stories of 1994".[25]
Budrys had been an instructor at theClarion Writers' Workshop and a coordinator at theWriters of the Future competition, and had enjoyed the work he had done with new writers as a result.[11][26] In his editorial in the first issue, Budrys said that the magazine would have "a bit of a bias toward newer writers",[10] and over the magazine's 24 print issues about a third of the 164 authors who appeared made either their first or second sale toTomorrow.[11] Many of the newer writers failed to establish themselves in the field; exceptions includedEliot Fintushel, described by the science fiction historianMike Ashley as "perhaps the real discovery ofTomorrow", andMichael H. Payne. Ashley comments that the work of the many new writers often appeared mechanical, "as if they were following Budrys's guidelines and learning as they went ... few could sustain it, which is why so few ofTomorrow's discoveries sold beyond the magazine".[27] Halfway through the magazine's run, Kelly describedTomorrow as valuing "workmanlike tales of traditional story values" more than "originality of ideas or personality of style".[2] Kelly considered thatTomorrow often printed stories that "conform to editor Budrys's ... guideline for story structure, but at the same time exhibit no trace of concern for general conceptual plausibility".[28]
WhenTomorrow became an online magazine, Budrys added a column byThomas Easton, book reviews, interviews, and a letter column.[1] Writers who contributed to the web version of the magazine included Rob Chilson andSheila Finch.[29] Kelly reviewed an early version of the website, describing it as a "handsome, still-growing site [that] features stories, articles, editorials, art, and even little snippets of music that play as you pass your mouse over the story titles on the table of contents".[30]Richard Chwedyk's "The Measure of All Things" was one of the manuscripts that Budrys had acquired but returned to the author in 1998, when he stopped printing new material; in revised form Chwedyk sold it toThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It won aNebula Award, and was a finalist for theHugo Award.[20][31]
Tomorrow was a finalist for theHugo Award for Best Semiprozine in both 1994 and 1995, losing toScience Fiction Chronicle in 1994 and toInterzone the following year.[32][33]TheEncyclopedia of Science Fiction summarizes the magazine as "rather less satisfying than one might have expected from Budrys: an uneven mix of the superior with the sufficient".[1]
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1993 | 1/1 | 1/2 | 1/3 | 1/4 | 1/5 | 1/6 | ||||||
| 1994 | 2/1 | 2/2 | 2/3 | 2/4 | 2/5 | 2/6 | ||||||
| 1995 | 3/1 | 3/2 | 3/3 | 3/4 | 3/5 | 3/6 | ||||||
| 1996 | 4/1 | 4/2 | 4/3 | 4/4 | 4/5 | |||||||
| 1997 | 4/6 | |||||||||||
| Print issues ofTomorrow showing volume and issue number. Algis Budrys was editor throughout.[34][35] | ||||||||||||
Budrys wasTomorrow's editor throughout the magazine's run. The publisher was Pulphouse Publishing for the first issue, and Budrys's Unifont Company thereafter.[13][15] There were four volumes of six issues each: the schedule was bimonthly, with some exceptions—for example, the second issue was delayed a month as Budrys completed the purchase of the magazine from Pulphouse.[13][15][7] The schedule returned to bimonthly after the fourth issue, and this lasted until the final two print issues, which were on a quarterly schedule.[13][15]
Budrys' essays on writing which had appeared in nine of the first ten issues were assembled along with other material intoWriting to the Point: A Complete Guide to Selling Fiction in 1994.TheEncyclopedia of Science Fiction describes the book as demonstrating Budrys' "shrewd sense of genre".[23]