InterGalactic Medicine Show

» see intergalacticmedicineshow.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The name is a joke from inside a novel. In Ender's Game there is a passing reference to a show called the Intergalactic Medicine Show, and in 2005 Orson Scott Card took the phrase and hung it on a website that paid money for short science fiction. The first issue went up on 15 October 2005. Card edited two issues himself and then handed the chair to Edmund R. Schubert in June 2006, which is the part most magazine founders never manage.

It started twice a year, went quarterly in 2008, then bimonthly in 2009. That schedule is a lot of words to buy when the magazine is not attached to a publishing house or a cable network, and IGMS bought them at professional rates the whole way. Stories from it won small-press awards and landed on the Locus recommended reading list. Every issue was illustrated and most of them carried audio, and Card serialized longer work of his own through it.

Scott Roberts took the editorship in July 2016. Three years later, in an announcement made early in 2019, the magazine said it was pulling up stakes in June. Issue 69 went out that month carrying six stories and the usual back matter. Subscribers got refunds for the unused part of their subscriptions.

An English-language webzine selling novelettes to readers who paid by the year was never going to have a Turkish edition, and I was not its reader. Card reached Turkey the way he reached everywhere, through Ender's Game on a bookshop shelf, and the magazine he founded off the back of that book stayed inside the English-speaking short fiction world that bought it.

~ the case file ~

~ who it printed ~

Peter S. Beagle, Mary Robinette Kowal, Tim Pratt, Eugie Foster, Sharon Shinn, David Farland. Some of those names were already large when IGMS ran them and some of them got larger afterward. Greg Siewert won the WSFA Small Press Award in 2009 for a story that ran there, Alex Shvartzman won the same award in 2014, and Nick Greenwood took a Chesley for a cover in 2011.

The magazine also ran columns and interviews and reviews between the fiction, which is the shape of a genre magazine rather than an anthology site. Tor published a print anthology of its early stories in August 2008 and two more collections came out as e-books.

~ the editor's exit ~

Schubert edited for ten years to the month, June 2006 through June 2016, which is a long time to sit in a chair that pays what small-press editing pays. His departure landed in the middle of the years when Card's politics were a live argument in science fiction, and the magazine lived with that the entire time it existed. Scott Roberts took over the following month and stayed until the last issue.

~ issue 69 ~

The final issue's contents page reads like any other one: Jared Oliver Adams, Jeremy A. TeGrotenhuis, Aimee Ogden, Alethea Kontis, Sarah Grey, Stefan Slater. There is a letter from the editor at the top and a bonus piece at the bottom about how one of the stories got written. Nothing in the layout says last.

The closing was decided months earlier. The announcement went out in the first quarter of 2019 and the schedule was allowed to run its remaining issues to the stop. It did not run out of stories. It ran out of the arithmetic that lets a small magazine pay for them.

~ the archive that stayed up ~

In the autumn of 2019 the paywall came off and every issue became free. The homepage shrank to a redirect stub in April 2020 and has stayed that size since, but the CGI script behind it never stopped. Today the issues index still loads all sixty-nine and the story pages still open behind it. The footer prints a copyright line that auto-updates to the current year.

A dead magazine whose entire run is one click from its original domain is rarer than it should be. Most of the webzines that closed in the same decade left a parked lander and a Wayback trail.

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