I recently had the great fortune of interviewing three of the surviving editors of the late, great OMNI magazine, a publication which, for 17 years, blew minds with its gonzo blend of science fiction and science. From 1978 to 1998 (it switched to full-time online publication in the mid-1990s) OMNI regularly featured extensive Q&A interviews with some of the top scientists of the 20th century–E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk–tales of the paranormal, speculative fantasy art by the likes of H.R. Giger, and some of the most important science fiction to ever see magazine publication: writers like Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, and even William S. Burroughs graced its pages.

Ben Bova was the editor of OMNI for five years. He’s also a six-time Hugo award winner, author of 120 books of science fiction and fantasy, and was the direct successor to John W. Campbell at the helm of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Universe: You went to OMNI after seven award-winning years editing Analog. How did the two publications differ?

Bova: Analog was published in those days by The Condé Nast Publications, Inc., a major magazine house that published Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, House & Garden, etc. They had acquired Analog when they bought out Street & Smith, around 1960. The management of Condé Nast didn’t know anything about the science fiction magazine except that it made a small profit every month, and it was regarded as the leader in its field. They just let John W. Campbell Jr. run the magazine as he saw fit. Campbell, of course was a giant in the field, and had discovered most of the major science fiction writers of the time. I was picked to take over the magazine’s editorship when Campbell unexpectedly died, and tried to continue I his tradition. My only staff was Katherine Tarrant, who had been Campbell’s assistant since he first took over the editorship in the mid-1930s. I had an art director, and one of the circulation department’s senior men handled Analog’s circulation business. I made all the decisions, with no one looking over my shoulder.

Omni, of course, was a very different affair. We had an editorial staff, an advertising staff, and a circulation staff. It was a major magazine, breaking new ground in the industry. And it was, for me, a dream come true: a big, national (even international) magazine, heavy with advertising, read by millions every month. There were always issues of one kind or another with the staff, but they were minor. We worked together quite well, actually.

Universe:  You once pitched a magazine of science fiction and nonfiction, Tomorrow Magazine, to Condé Nast: did that vision turn into your work at OMNI?

Bova: I felt that Analog, good as it was, only spoke to the relatively small science fiction community. I proposed a major national magazine that focused on the future, both with fiction and fact articles. The management heard me out, but decided that they didn’t know enough about the subject matter to invest in a major effort. They knew the women’s magazine market, so they launched instead Self magazine, which had done quite well for them.

Universe: How much freedom did you have at OMNI, and what kinds (if any) of commercial expectations did you need to meet?

Bova: I had a very wide field of operations. Kathy Keeton was the actual publisher of Omni, the idea for the magazine was hers. She was in the office every day, but she hardly ever interfered with editorial decisions. She made suggestions aplenty, and many of them were good. Those that weren’t, we discussed openly, and she almost always gave in to our editorial opinions. As long as the magazine sold well, everyone was happy. And Omni did sell spectacularly well, thanks to its editorial content, its visual quality, and a very talented circulation department.

Kathy Keeton was the de facto publisher of the magazine. Bob Guccione was the boss, but he usually stayed clear of the editorial process. He was more interested in the magazine’s visual appeal. Both Kathy and Bob were vitally interested in showing the world that Bob Guccione was more than a copycat of Hugh Hefner. Omni broke new ground and succeeded when most of the pundits said it would fail. That made both Bob and Kathy very happy.

Universe: Can you roughly characterize for me what your editorial imperatives were: what was the tone of “OMNI under Bova”?

Bova: I emphasized that Omni is not a science magazine. It is a magazine about the future. Science magazines came and went: some of our editors had worked at half a dozen different science magazines, all of which folded. I tried to get across to the editorial staff (and everyone else) that the public’s conception of science is that it’s like spinach: good for you but not terribly appetizing. Our approach was to present the future, which is like lemon meringue pie: delicious and fun. Of course most of our nonfiction pieces dealt with science in one way or another. But our approach was to talk about the future; readers swallowed the science because we made it palatable.

Universe: Did you feel that you had any predecessors, or peers?

Bova: Omni was sui generic. Although there were plenty of science magazines over the years (most of which failed eventually) Omni was the first magazine to slant all its pieces toward the future. It was fun to read and gorgeous to look at. I don’t think we had any direct competition, although our success prompted other publishers to bring out other science magazines.

Universe: How was OMNI perceived in the science fiction community?

Bova: The science fiction community was initially leery of a magazine that included science fiction in its pages but was published by the man who published Penthouse. A large part of my responsibilities was to show the science fiction community that Omni was the real thing. I also worked to convince potential advertisers and overseas publishing houses that Omni was far more than “Penthouse in space.” The fact that our payment rates for fiction were ten times the rates of ordinary science fiction magazines helped to bring the writers to us. But I had to impress on them the fact that Omni’s audience included tons of people who never read science fiction. Our writers had to be able to write for a much more general audience, and eschew the jargon that dedicated science fiction people took for granted, but was unknown to the wider audience. Some of the best-known writers in the science fiction field were not able (or perhaps willing) to do this. Most of them were personal friends. But they couldn’t write for Omni, alas.

Universe: What do you think is OMNI‘s greatest legacy?

Bova: I think Omni’s greatest legacy is that there is a tremendous audience for fiction and nonfiction about science–if it is presented in an attractive, understandable way.

Check out my piece, Omni: The Forgotten History of the Best Science Magazine That Ever Was, live today on Motherboard & browse some of its greatest hits.

Last week, I published an article on Motherboard rounding up some of my favorite fake drugs from the coffers of science fiction. The list isn’t exhaustive; rather, it tackles a representative spread of uppers, downers, psychedelics, and unclassifiables. The tradition dates back to Homerian lotus-eaters, and has been taken up by everyone from Aldous Huxley (his Soma, from Brave New World, is a canonical ‘lude) to Anthony Burgess and William Gibson, whose oeuvre abounds with snorted uppers. In the article, I argue that fake drugs serve a specific purpose in science fiction: they allow writers to make key adjustments to the human brain, just as speculative technologies alter the human world.

Consider it this way: science fiction is like chaos theory. It alters small, key variables about the world, just to see which butterflies cause thunderstorms 10, 50, or 100 years into the future. When we read even the basest genre fiction, we acknowledge that the continuum of reality can persist, in a more-or-less recognizable manner, even when an author has deliberately removed (or added) something vital. Science fiction asks us to imagine all manner of things: flying cars, interstellar travel, cosmic war, and advanced weaponry. We find ourselves in a radically altered landscape–the unchecked globalized sprawl of William Gibson, say, or the shiny planetary colonies of Robert Heinlein–and immediately set about, as in a children’s game, spotting the differences.

The fun is in examining the disconnects, and drawing our conclusions back to the present. In short, when we consider the flying car, what we’re really wrapping our heads around is the significance of their road-bound cousins. But the examples I’ve cited here are only modifications of the physical world. Humanity, despite its space-age digs, is usually the same old dog; an astronaut is just a space cowboy, after all, with a snazzy outer-space backdrop. What about when science fiction wants to be about inner space, not outer space? Never mind those astronauts’ first steps on an alien planet––what about their first thoughts? Just as we imagine leaving the solar system, we must also imagine new ways of getting outside the head.

Like an addictive street drug, the piece has been propagating across the web, thanks to some friendly promotion from The Verge and the great dismal master himself, William Gibson. Of course, many have pointed out that my list lacks many classic science fiction drugs: NZT, the brain-booster from Limitless (incidentally the only drug from this category I can imagine sampling), Nuke from Robocop, and Slo-Mo from Judge Dredd, to name a few. And that’s only the overtly SF inventions; we can’t forget Dylar, an experimental treatment for the fear of death, from Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the various heroin analogues of William Burroughs, or, you know, Hobbit pipeweed. Speculative drugs in film, literature, comics, and video games are such a widespread narrative conceit that a full list would bore readers to tears. To wit, I present to you the exhaustive (and exhausting) “List of Fictional Medicines and Drugs” section of Wikipedia. Enjoy!

And, hey, while you’re over at Motherboard, why not tune in, drop out, and check out some of my other science-fiction and technology pieces?

Image by Dream Beam.

Any regular reader of Space Canon knows my fondness for cyberpunk; Gibson, Rudy Rucker, and Bruce Sterling have all received breathless passes on these pages. Cyberpunk at its peak–before the movement was co-opted by 90s ‘netsploitation flicks and video games–was sexy, prescient, fiercely countercultural, and absolutely the medium most fit for our impending technological milieu.

Still, even an old head like me knows that cyberpunk today is associated more with rollerblades, bad computer animation and mirrored sunglasses than any intellectual subculture of note. For most people, it’s basically a joke: ha ha, let’s rent Hackers! And yet, we live in a world where crypto-anarchic hacker cabals launch decentralized attacks on megacorporations and governments, where institutional intrusion into the Internet threatens our privacy, where even the most milquetoast norm lives half their life online. Which is to say, shouldn’t the issues raised by cyberpunk fiction be more relevant than ever?

Basically, what happened? Where did cyberpunk go? Well, the question piqued me so much that I wrote a long piece on the subject for my favorite blog, Motherboard. In the process, I managed to get essentially every major cyberpunk author, ranging from the O.G. participants to those who have (for better or worse) inherited their legacy, to contribute their thoughts on the question. Rudy Rucker offered this, “If nobody’s pissed off, you’re not trying hard enough. I’ll never stop being a cyberpunk.” William Gibson, on the other hand, was less rough-and-tumble; “Cyberpunk today,” he noted, “is a standard Pantone shade in pop culture.”

Want to know what Neal Stephenson said? Or Charlie Stross? Check out all ten cyberpundits’ contributions at “It Evolved Into Birds: Ten Science-Fictional Thinkers On the Past and Future of Cyberpunk.” And don’t miss the original essay, “What Happened to Cyberpunk?” And if that’s your thing, it’s blowing up on Reddit right now.