As November 1978 approached, it was a time of changes in my new-found...well, year-old...passion for fiction magazines. I started branching out, picking up my first issues of The Atlantic (with the mendacious Claire Sterling cover essay but two fine short storieswithin in that first, November, issue for me)and Omni (its first issues, as well) and starting to look around at other sorts of magazine beyond the all-fiction titles I had been doting on...and the comics and Mad and National Lampoon, all of which I no longer read (and NatLamp' s new comics offshoot, Heavy Metal, which also seemed less than enthralling)...and the intermittently interesting likes of Scientific American and National Geographic around the house...it was not long after this I started reading Dissent, and moved onto other political magazines, and discovered music magazines, jazz-oriented DownBeat, like Rolling Stone, a fortnightly in the late '70s (and RS even ran a little fiction)...meanwhile,
all unknown to me, several of my staples were about to fold or undergo serious transition, as Ben Bova left Analog for Omni, Ted White walked away from Fantastic and Amazing and sat down at Heavy Metal for a while, Galaxy would soon fold as would Fantastic and UnEarth and Galileo and Asimov's SF Adventure and thus some of the magic was going away...little had I realized that I had jumped onto the fiction magazine bandwagon during a 1970s boomlet...Tolkien and Star Wars had left fantastic-fiction publishers optimistic...and some, such as James Baen and his new Destinies, had some reason for optimism, at least for a while...and while not too many new titles were popping up in crime fiction magazines, at least the American trio of monthlies were able to keep that frequency...even though Cylvia Kleinman Margulies was soon to sell Mike Shayne, having lost her husband over the previous year+, and Hitchcock's had recently been sold to Davis Publications, which had been founded with the purchase of EQMM two decades before...And even the two most popular skin magazines, for issues dated November, had remarkably awkward covers, but impressive fiction within...William Kotzwinkle and his fantasy story, soon expanded slightly for publication as an illustrated novella, Herr Nightingale and the Satin Woman, in Penthouse (which in its previous issue had carried "overflow" of sfnal materials from the newly-launched stablemate Omni) and William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel serialized in Playboy, some years before the film adaptation, Angel Heart, would appear...![]() |
| This issue reviewed here |
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| This issue, the Whispers and the Ariel reviewed here. |
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| James Sallis's name misspelled. |
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| Above and below, periodical books/"bookazines" |
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| Editor Ben Bova's last issue. |
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| Editor J. J. Pierce's penultimate issue. |
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| Last issue of this rather hardy romance fiction title...backed by the biggest romance publisher.... | |
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| The second issue. |
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| Occasional fiction...more poetry in this special City Lights/post-Beat issue. |
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Playboy[v25 #11, November 1978] ($2.00, 314pp+, quarto)
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Penthouse Magazine [November 1978] ed. Robert Guccione
