I’ve read in a couple different places this morning that the venerable magazine Starlog — which is for sci-fi fans something like Rolling Stone is to music lovers — has ceased publication. The official announcement calls it a “temporary” cessation while the publishers re-evaluate and revamp, and they apparently intend to continue producing digital content for their website, but I think we know what this move really means. For all intents and purposes, after 33 years and 374 issues, Starlog is finished. It may live on in a diminished form as some kind of blog or genre-centric website, but there are thousands, if not millions, of those already, and Starlog.com is going to have a hard time differentiating itself from, say, io9. The most public and respectable face of science-fiction film and television fandom — our only honest-to-god, widely distributed, often-seen-on-regular-newsstands magazine — is dead.

Starlog began roughly a year before the debut of Star Wars, and while it was apparently doing all right reporting on the early Star Trek conventions and what went wrong with Space: 1999, there’s little doubt in my mind that George Lucas’ unstoppable movie juggernaut is what really made the magazine. Spurred on by Star Wars mania, all kinds of start-up sci-fi publications began appearing on the wire racks at my hometown drugstore — I remember one called Space Wars, for example — but Starlog had a major advantage over any of those other fly-by-night and soon-forgotten rags: experience. Its publishers had had a year’s shakedown time to figure out what worked and what didn’t, to hone their journalistic and editorial skills, and it showed. Starlog endured beyond that crazy hop-on-the-bandwagon phase because it was a more professional and classy product than any of the opportunistic knock-offs.

I was actually a bit too young to notice the magazine at that time. The first issue I remember owning probably dates to the fall of ’78, as it had a big story about the special effects in Superman: The Movie, which came along the summer following Star Wars. By the last year of the 1970s, though, I was picking up the occasional issue, and once we reached what I consider to be the “golden age” of sci-fi cinema — the early to mid-80s — I was a monthly reader.

There was a lot of genre activity going on in those years — a quick count on Wikipedia shows no less than 17 science fiction, fantasy, and horror films released in 1982 alone — and Starlog covered pretty much all of it, no matter how big or small. The articles ranged from interviews with movie stars, writers, and directors, to in-depth stories on how the (then) amazing special effects in the blockbusters of the day were being achieved. My continuing fascination for good old-fashioned miniature work and matte paintings probably began — or at least deepened — as a result of all those articles in Starlog, as did my love of pre-production art, which was often used to illustrate preview stories when there weren’t yet any stills available from the finished product. The tone of those behind-the-scenes articles was perfect for a general (or, in my case, younger) audience: not as technical as American Cinematographer or Cinefex, but not dumbed down either. You learned how things were done; you just didn’t need to be a professional camera operator to understand the terminology.

And the magazine didn’t just cover current movies and TV, either. Many features were dedicated to the classics of the genre, everything from a forerunner of Star Trek called Space Patrol (which I’d never heard of prior to the Starlog article) to one of my favorite old movies, George Pal’s The Time Machine. (I remember laughing out loud when I learned that the lava flows seen during the nuclear destruction of London were actually made of oatmeal… which had gone rancid, so the set was unbearably stinky during the shooting.) Starlog even offered the occasional piece of criticism. David Gerrold‘s columns on Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn were deeply influential on my own thoughts about both films. (In fact, I’d love to have those collected in an anthology, if any small-press publisher types happen to be reading this…)

That kind of thing is pretty easy to come by these days, but you have to remember, this was before the Internet or DVD bonus features… even before VHS-based home video, really. I’m sure you could probably find books on these subjects in larger cities, but out in the sticks where I was living, there just wasn’t any other source for this specialized information. Finding Starlog at a small-town drugstore in 1978 was like stumbling across an ancient tome of forgotten knowledge, an invitation into a secret world. For a budding young geek eager to learn everything that was knowable about the media events that had moved him like nothing else before or since, that magazine was heaven-sent.

During my heaviest phase of Starlog patronage, I read and re-read issues until I had the articles memorized. For example, I’ve got a very strong memory of the issue pictured above: in my mind, I’m lying on my stomach in front of our old console TV (which is incongruously showing an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati) while a fire crackles in the fireplace on the other end of the room, unable to tear my eyes away from Syd Mead‘s concept sketches for a flying car — imagine that, a flying car! — in Harrison Ford’s new movie with the mind-bendingly provocative title. (As much as I love Blade Runner, I never have figured out what the title has to do with anything.)

My initial interest in Starlog waned toward the end of the ’80s, concurrent with the decline of new genre product around that same time. (The last issue I bought for a while had a cover story on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was about the only noteworthy genre entry until the mid-90s.) I picked up the habit again a few years later when sci-fi and fantasy experienced another boom, but the magazine seemed to have changed by that point — a fluffier tone, no more Gerrold or F/X articles, almost exclusively interviews — and honestly, the genre itself was different, too. The newer SF cinema and TV, as fun as some of it was, just wasn’t as captivating. Or maybe it was me, having grown up and lost some of my receptiveness to this stuff, or at least the luxury of having the time to obsess over it. In any event, I probably contributed to the death of Starlog, because I haven’t bought a copy in at least a decade. I haven’t missed it. But I think I am going to miss the idea of it. It was a big part of my childhood, a big part of being a geek in a time and a place when geeks were underground and shy about their interests. In a weird way, it was a lot more fun to be a geek back then. It was kind of like Fight Club, something you experienced but didn’t talk about. The pleasure derived, in part, from keeping the secret. Now it’s mainstream; geeks rule the world, and we don’t have to be uncomfortable about people mocking us for liking the weird stuff we like, and in fact it seems like more people like that weird stuff than ever before. Maybe our culture has outgrown the need for magazines like Starlog. And isn’t that a sad thought? Because with mainstream acceptance comes a certain loss of specialness.