Stanley Albert Schmidt (born March 7, 1944) is an American science fiction author and editor. Between 1978 and 2012 he served as editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. (wikipedia)
intricately and intriguingly woven, lots of fun, and extremely thought provoking.
I think the rising and falling popularity of areas like hard SF and far-future SF is, to a considerable extent, the same as any other fashion.
Its limitations are those of the physical universe: it won't let you play with some really wild ideas that aren't possible, but are fun to speculate about.
Usually if nobody hates a piece, nobody loves it, either; and a magazine which sets itself the goal of provoking thought is not doing its job if everybody agrees with what it does.
There may be something to the suggestion about the pace of technological change intimidating writers, though - it's been awfully hard to keep ahead of real developments.
There are a significant number of people who appreciate what we do, and most of them gravitate to Analog because this is where they can find it. The other magazines tend to share their audiences, which may result in each of them having a smaller market share.
When something hasn't been around much for a while, and one example of it turns up and catches people's eyes, they go looking for more like it - until they get tired of it again.
This means I must pay close attention to the writing, but equally so to the scientific background - which sometimes means doing fairly involved calculations.
I think the international appeal of SF is quite understandable since the kinds of people who like to read it, are, by the nature of the beast, interested in other cultures, of which other nations on Earth are the closest available example.
Ideally, I'd like every issue to include a diverse group of stories that meet the qualifications sketched above, but covering a wide range of specific matter and flavour.
