What is a magazine for?

A magazine subscription is a dead-tree form of a subscription to a web aggregation feed using technology such as RSS or Atom. The purpose of a magazine was to give the reader what they wanted to read, and weed out things they either didn't want to read, or got from another magazine.

We do this much, much better in the twenty-first century. But almost no editors get it. A human editor is good at understanding the tastes of a limited scope of reader, the reader who is subscribed to a specific magazine. But computers can understand a million people in detail.

Many of us do not care enough about books to read the glut of quality fiction, so we ask magazine editors to narrow down the field for us to those that match our individual tastes. Instead, Mike Resnick tells us that as editor of Jim Baen's Universe he'll give us any fiction he thinks possesses generic goodness. In today's information overload, we wish for more specific literary filters in the torrent of work that has already passed through the "is it generically good?" filter.

Feeds, magazines, and other aggregator subscriptions exist to solve the problem that there are too many good books to read. Unfortunately, editors from the traditional, pre-web model are overwhelmed in the attempt to satisfy everyone, and so are telling us they don't want to filter any more narrowly than "good". This is because before the web, it was impossible to reach the Long Tail. To be financially sustainable, every issue had to satisfy a huge number of people.

"Good vs. bad" is far too broad a criteria given that different works of fiction provide different mental experiences for which we might have a hankering at various times. Examples include:

A murder and a detective are just a setting, but the puzzle is the reading experience you have in your head. Fantasy and science fiction are also just settings, and can provide any of those experiences, although there are good reasons that they tend to specialize. I think mental experiences make more useful categories than settings. When fans complain to Escape Pod that Mike Resnick's well-written tear-jerkers are "not Science Fiction", they are complaining wrong. They really were dissatisfied because they were expecting something else which is either on the above list, or belongs there and is missing due to my oversight. (Given that they named SF, good odds are that it's the intellectual one.) Hence Mr. Resnick hears them wrong and doesn't know what they want. People don't need one magazine full of detectives and murders, another full of outer space, and another full of swords and sorcery. Those are settings. Readers need a filter based on the mental experiences they find rewarding. How much does a work trigger fear, humor, tears, romance, intellectual stimulation, or let us work out whodunit? Those are happening in the reader's head independent of props like wands and rayguns.

What if we do for fiction what the Music Genome Project did for music? MGP culminated in Pandora.com, an internet music station with automatic DJ that customizes itself to your tastes and introduces you to music you might like. What if we identify hundreds of attributes of a reader's emotional experience and apply these tags to a large enough collection of samples? In the internet age, what if we can do better than just filtering the generically good from the bad?

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