Since its founding a few years ago, Fireside Magazine has been one of the best, most creative, most original, and most progressive science fiction and fantasy magazines out there. A recent example has been the staggeringly beautiful collaboration between poet Amal El-Mohtar and artist Molly Crabapple. This slightly interactive, multilingual work is a terrific example of the kind of content you can't do in a print magazine.
Which is why you may be surprised to learn that Fireside's very next move was to announce a print magazine. The print magazine, Fireside Quarterly, will feature the stories due to be published online over the following three months. It is promised - and knowing the folks of Fireside, will deliver - that it will be a high quality, full color, magazine with gorgeous illustrations.
Personally? I don't need a print magazine. I supported at the ebook level, and I'm happy with that. But many people are still not comfortable reading online, or on their phones or tablets or e-readers. For those people, and to support the phenomenal work Fireside does every month, I am happy to support the magazine. And being a founding member, a privilege saved for those who support on drip (Kickstarter's competition for Patreon) over the next 30 days, seems worth it, to me.
Why should you support it? Because a healthy short fiction market has always been essential to the growth of sff. Over the past century, most of the genres greatest leaps have happened in short fiction first, and it is innovating, visionary thinkers like the folks behind Fireside who have made that happen.
Disclaimer: I an friendly, to some degree or another, with pretty much everyone involved in the running of Fireside, despite only meeting one of them briefly irl.
All images copyright: Fireside Magazine.