Omni Magazine was one of my favourite reads in my younger years. The magazine covered exploratory science and science fiction of the day.
I read and collected the magazines for a number of years, but my collection has long since gone. Occasionally there have been certain articles and Sci Fi stories that I have wished to re-read in respect of the world as it is today and I have regretted the loss of my magazines….
A recent post from the ‘Daily Grail‘ alerted me to the fact that all the magazines are now all available for download.
Originally published in late 1978, running through till 1995, Omni covered a lot of the same ground that we do here on TDG – interesting new science, science on the fringe, and even science ‘beyond’ the fringe through its wonderful science fiction shorts (authored by SFF giants such as Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, Robert Heinlein, Stanislaw Lem, George R.R. Martin, Orson Scott Card, Harlan Ellison, and Ben Bova, along with art by the likes of H.R.Giger and other wonderful artists).
I wonder how many of the predictions have come true…
I was never keen on Omni myself. Too much of what I regarded as pseudoscience for my liking. The fiction described as fiction was fine, indeed great at times, but it was the fiction pretending to be fact that got me annoyed. But I’m a bit more wacky in the head now so perhaps I should investigate again.
I found it a mixture of science, pseudo science and science fiction. It is mostly the science fiction that I want to go back and explore and it was specifically those I meant when I said I wonder how many of the predictions have come true.
I can’t remember which author it was, but one of the science fiction authors commented along the lines that science fiction is your worst nightmare of the future. Looking back at science fiction novels/short stories of the past shows that some authors had quite a good vision of the future.
I read the magazine in its early years but I found that after a while it became a bit repetitive and stopped reading after a while.