Different people react differently to death, and the death of Realms of Fantasy has elicited several different responses. The magazine’s Assistant Editor, Douglas Cohen, gave us some historical perspective on the magazine, while one of the magazine’s readers, Hannah Strom-Martin, offers a reader’s hopeful outlook.
Cohen writes: As you might imagine, I’m pretty bummed right now. But I guess I’m supposed to be. I really enjoyed my work. As to the historical aspects of RoF, if you include the upcoming and final April 2009 issue, we would have been 11 issues away from issue 100. Our 100th issue would’ve been the February 2011 issue. I brought this up to Shawna [McCarthy] a few months ago and suggested some things we might do to mark the occasion, such as ressurecting her old editorial column and the letters page for one issue. For the letters page, we were going to solicit “fan mail” from some of the successful writers RoF has produced over the years. It would’ve been nice.
Strom-Martin writes about a new Facebook group:
Dear fellow fantasists and fantasy lovers,
As many of you know, the landmark magazine, Realms of Fantasy, has been scheduled to be shut down in April, 2009. Realms‘ website has already been closed and the world seems to be out one seriously cool and influential magazine—a place where many of our best fantasy writers and artists have found a home since the mag’s inception in 1994.
This is a group made for and by members of the speculative fiction community (writers, artists, fan girls and boys of all ages—anyone who loves fantasy or spec-fic) in order to show our support for Realms and possibly reverse the descision to shut it down.
I am working with several other people on this and we should have more information and helpful links available shortly. For now the idea is to get together en masse to show our support and to discuss ideas for how to rescue Realms from the teeth of the recession.
The fantasy/spec-fic community is a huge and formidable network of established authors, up-and-coming writers, professional and aspiring artists and fans—and we are not without resources. Let’s not let Realms go down without a fight.
More to follow.…
Hannah Strom-Martin
Realms reader since 1994
Hannah provided this link to the group.