Retrospectives: An Editor Looks Back on 15 Years of Realms of Fantasy

I started writing these retrospectives on my personal blog, back in August of 2007.  At the time, my position at RoF was Assistant Editor. Back then (and today), most of the readers on my blog were interested in my work at RoF. During the late spring of ‘07, I had decided it was past time to assemble a complete collection of the magazine. Once I did (minus a few issues that have since been acquired), I stated on my blog my intention to read all of the stories in these back issues I had so diligently collected. And halfway though the first issue, I decided that blogging about my reading experiences would make for good content, not to mention a good reference source.

Well, some 2+ years later the brain-trust here at RoF Central has decided that these musings of mine would make for some nice additional content on the website as well.  So while they’re still on my blog–and while I’ll continue to post new ones there–they can now also be found here on the site.  So if something occasionally fails to make sense, oh reader, rest assured that I have not taken leave of my senses.  What it means is that I posted retrospectives 1-71 on my blog first, and over there it did make sense (I hope).

So for example, if you’re wondering why in the world I am describing the covers when you can plainly see them for yourselves, it’s because I wasn’t posting the covers of each issue on my blog–no color scanner at the time, and I wasn’t about to go hunting down covers all over the internet!  I’m meticulous about these retrospectives, but only to a point.  So please forgive anything that doesn’t seem to jive 100% (and please forgive the typos).  Some of these retrospectives remain works-in-progress, with me going back to edit them as time allows.  But you should be able to follow 99% of what I’m writing about just fine.

The retrospective series as a whole is incomplete, though I do intend to finish it at some point …and I suppose when I finally reach the present issue, I shall continue writing retrospectives for new issues.  If nothing else, these retrospectives prove that I am thorough!  I hope you enjoy them.

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NOTE: In true blog-like fashion, scroll to the bottom of the page to see the first issue, chronologically, for the time period indicated in the nav menu. Please note there are some exceptions early on to the chronology while the collection was being assembled.