Paul Di Filippo notes that it's the twentieth anniversary of the first issue of SCIENCE FICTION EYE, one of my favorite zines.
SFE was born in the heady cyberpunk years, in the wake of the folding of Bruce Sterling's CHEAP TRUTH, when he bade his disciples to go forth and found a million zines to carry on the good and noble fight for better speculative fiction. SFE was the ideological and graphical brainchild of the multi-talented and passionate Steve Brown (or as the masthead invariably listed him, "Stephen P. Brown"). It was not a unique kind of forum, following in the footsteps of many earlier "sercon" zines such as RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY, QUANTUM/THRUST, SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW, ALIEN CRITIC, et al. But it certainly captured the zeitgeist. Here's what Mark Frauenfelder had to say about it in an issue of WIRED:
"Science fiction fans consist mainly of hobbit-huggers, calculator-wielders, tree nymphs, and trekkies. Each group has its own sci-fi subgenre 'zine to read while waiting for the next WorldCon costume contest, but what about the tiny gang of folks that view science fiction as a supercharged way to think about the present? That gang reads (and writes) SCIENCE FICTION EYE, a fat nonfiction quarterly with great graphics and regular columns by Bruce Sterling, Paul DiFilippo, and Richard Kadrey. It's like going to a party where all your favorite writers are discussing the real-life issues that inspire their fiction – morphogenic field theory, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the history of Bohemianism. These and a dozen other subjects are dished out with passion every issue. The best part of SF EYE is the letters column, where everybody pulls off their gloves and goes at each other on issues ranging from abortion to the possibilities of cloning a cow from a packet of Jell-O. If science fiction means more to you than zapgun-blasting elves astride cyborg unicorns, you'll like EYE."
