UPDATED! Celebrating the arrival of a new fiction magazine, from SFX book guru Jonathan Wright
Adventure Rocketship! , a "magazine in book form", launched yesterday with a first issue entitled Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco – all about "the intersection between music, SF and the counterculture".
Edited by SFX 's own Jonathan Wright , it's a collection of interviews, essays and fiction with contributions from the likes of China Miéville, Jon Courtenay Grimwood and The Orb. There are even some words from SFX reviews editor Ian Berriman . Some 205 pages in length, it's the first of a series Wright plans to produce. Several themed issues are expected each year. Above is a photo from Saturday's launch in Bristol. The Forbidden Planet store played host to friends of SFX Jonathon Wright (who edited the project, you can see him on the far left) and - left to right - Rob Williams, Tim Maughan and Liz Williams. Williams read from her short story about seeing David Bowie perform Starman on TV for the first time, and then the three of them signed copies of the book.
So what motivated such a venture for Wright? "I was very inspired by Tom Hodgkinson's The Idler , which seems to me as much as anything to be about an aesthetic, a way of looking at the world.
"At the considerable risk of sounding pompous," he continues, "we live in a science-fictional world (or maybe a spec-fic world), which is both a marvellous and scary thing, and I want to encourage people to write about and think about what that means .
"Plus punk was a big influence on me and it taught me you shouldn't rely on The Man to sell you your kicks, if you want to do it, do it yourself."
The cover has been designed by none other than Stanley Donwood, famous for his Radiohead sleeve artwork, "He was interested in the project, he agreed to do the cover, simple as that," says Wright, "What else can I say? Even his emails are brilliant."
Although there may be an eBook version coming in future, for now it will only be available from bookshops, "without apologies": "I'm not anti-digital, but I like the idea of the book as object. Adventure Rocketship! has a slightly retro feel and that's important to me."
Following from Thursday's launch event at London's Forbidden Planet Megastore (which featured guests Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Lavie Tidhar), Wright did it all over again at the Bristol branch yesterday with the three guests pictured above. For more information about the book and to order your copy, check out Tangents website .
