Editor Liza Groen Trombi Year founded 1968 Based in Oakland, California | Frequency Monthly Country United States Language English | |
Locus, subtitled The Magazine of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field, is an American magazine published monthly in Oakland, California. It is considered the news organ and trade journal for the English language science fiction and fantasy field. It also publishes comprehensive listings of all new books published in the genre. The magazine also presents the annual Locus Awards. Locus Online was launched in April 1997, as a semi-autonomous web version of Locus Magazine.
History
Charles N. Brown, Ed Meskys, and Dave Vanderwerf founded Locus in 1968 as a news fanzine to promote the (ultimately successful) bid to host the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, Massachusetts. Originally intended to run only until the site-selection vote was taken at St. Louiscon, the 1969 Worldcon in St. Louis, Missouri, Brown decided to continue publishing Locus as a mimeographed general science fiction and fantasy newszine. Locus became the immediate successor to the decades-old monthly newszine Science Fiction Times (formerly Fantasy Times, founded 1941), when SFT ceased publication in 1970. Brown directed Locus as publisher and editor-in-chief for more than 40 years, from 1968 until his death at age 72 in July 2009.
Locus announced that the magazine would continue operations, with executive editor Liza Groen Trombi succeeding Brown as editor-in-chief. The magazine and the Charles N. Brown Collection are now owned by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation.
Locus publishes:
Locus has won many Hugo Awards, first the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine, and then in 1984 when the new category "Best Semiprozine" was established. As of 2012, Locus won the award for "Best Fanzine" eight times and for "Best Semiprozine" 22 times during the category's first 29 years. In 2012 "Best Semiprozine" was redefined to exclude all small, independent genre magazines as "professional publications" if they had significant paid staff; this included Locus. There is no longer a "Professional Magazine" Hugo Award; that original category was replaced in 1973 by the current "Best Editor."
Authors Arthur C. Clarke, Connie Willis, Robert A. Heinlein, and Terry Pratchett, and The New York Times, have all cited the value of Locus to the field.
Locus Press has published several books, including Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005 and Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005.