Must Read Magazines Rewrote Its Contracts Twice. The Artist Boycott Is Overkill
Must Read Magazines, the company that owns Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF, has rewritten its contracts twice in nine months. Two award-winning artists, John Picacio and Donato Giancola, still tell creators to stay away. Their October 8 statements, posted by File 770, accused the publisher of offering cover artists a work-for-hire deal with an NDA that carries a fee clawback. Must Read answered within a day, and again on October 16. Giancola says the answer is a promise and not a contract.
What These Magazines Are
Analog began in 1930 as Astounding Stories. John W. Campbell edited it from 1937 to 1971, the stretch historians call the Golden Age of science fiction, and it introduced readers to Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. The title changed to Analog in 1960.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, known to readers as F&SF, launched in 1949 with a literary slant and no interior illustrations. It ran Flowers for Algernon and the first Dark Tower stories by Stephen King. Asimov wrote a monthly science column for it from 1958 until his death in 1992, 399 essays in all.
Asimov’s was founded in 1977 by publisher Joel Davis and Isaac Asimov himself. Barry Longyear’s “Enemy Mine” ran there in 1979, won both the Hugo and the Nebula, and became a film with Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. Its stories have won dozens of Hugos and Nebulas.
Writers sell short fiction to these magazines before they sell novels, and the stories compete for the genre’s biggest awards every year. The parent company also took over sponsorship of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and the Dell Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the two crime titles in the same stable, carry the same contracts.
How They Changed Hands
