Top Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazines 2026

Since 2014, I've compiled an annual ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on prominent award nominations and "best of" placements over the previous ten years. If you're curious what magazines tend to be viewed by insiders as elite, check the top of the list. If you're curious to discover reputable magazines that aren't as widely known (or aren't as widely known specifically for their science fiction and fantasy), check the bottom of the list.

Below is my list for 2026. (For previous lists, see here.)

Method and Caveats:

(1.) Only magazines are included (online or in print), not anthologies, standalones, or series.

(2.) I give each magazine one point for each story nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, World Fantasy, Ignyte, or Eugie award in the past ten years; one point for each story appearance in the past ten years in the "best of" anthologies by Dozois, Horton, Strahan, Clarke, Adams, and Tidhar; and half a point for each story appearing in the short story or novelette category of the annual Locus Recommended list. New This Year: Since "best of" anthologies are becoming sparser, I've added the Ignyte and Eugie awards, including retrospectively to 2020 for the Ignyte and through the whole period for the Eugie.

(3.) I am not attempting to include the horror / dark fantasy genre, except as it appears incidentally on the list.

(4.) Prose only, not poetry.

(5.) I'm not attempting to correct for frequency of publication or length of table of contents. I've noticed that dividing by the number of stories generates results that fit less well with expert opinion. A magazine's reputation appears to be driven mostly by the visibility of the most visible stories, not by the visibility of the average story. (Similar remarks apply to the prestige of philosophy journals.)

(6.) I'm also not correcting for a magazine's only having published during part of the ten-year period. Reputations of defunct magazines slowly fade, and sometimes they are restarted. Reputations of new magazines take time to build.

(7.) I take the list down to 1.5 points.

(8.) I welcome corrections.

(9.) I confess some ambivalence about rankings of this sort. They reinforce the prestige hierarchy, and they compress complex differences into a single scale. However, the prestige of a magazine is a socially real phenomenon worth tracking, especially for the sake of outsiders and newcomers who might not otherwise know what magazines are well regarded by insiders when considering, for example, where to submit.

[Corrected 13:21 PDT: Fusion Fragment had been omitted due to a transcription error. Thanks to C.E. Singer for noticing the mistake.]

Results:

1. Reactor / Tor.com (193 points)

2. Clarkesworld (192.5) 

3. Uncanny (188)

4. Lightspeed (128) 

5. Asimov's (101) 

6. Fantasy & Science Fiction (95.5) 

7. Beneath Ceaseless Skies (63) 

8. Strange Horizons (incl Samovar) (55.5)

9. Analog (39.5) 

10. Apex (39) 

11. Nightmare (38.5) 

12. FIYAH (30) 

13. Slate / Future Tense (23.5) (ceased 2024) 

14. Fireside (20.5) (ceased 2022)

15. The Dark (18) 

16. Fantasy Magazine (16.5) (off and on during the period) 

17. The Sunday Morning Transport (14.5) (started 2022)

18. Interzone (13.5) 

19. Diabolical Plots (12.5)

20. The Deadlands (12) (started 2021)

21. khōréō (7.5) (started 2021)

22. Future Science Fiction Digest (7) (ran 2018-2023) 

22t. PodCastle (7)

24t. Conjunctions (6.5) 

24t. GigaNotoSaurus (6.5)

24t. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (6.5)

27. The New Yorker (6) 

28t. Omni (5.5) (classic magazine relaunched 2017-2020) 

28t. Psychopomp (5.5) (started 2023; not to be confused with Psychopomp Magazine) 

30. Kaleidotrope (5) 

31t. Anathema (4) (ran 2017-2022)

31t. Baffling (4) (started 2020)

31t. Boston Review (4) 

31t. Omenana (4)

31t. Terraform (Vice) (4) (ceased 2023)

31t. Wired (4)

37t. B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog (3.5) (ceased 2019)

37t. Paris Review (3.5) 

37t. Shimmer (3.5) (ceased 2018)

37t. Sirenia Digest (3.5) 

41t. Science Fiction World (3)

41t. Galaxy's Edge (3) (ceased 2023)

43t. Augur (2.5) (started 2018)

43t. Beloit Fiction Journal (2.5) 

43t. Bourbon Penn (2.5)

43t. Buzzfeed (2.5) 

43t. Escape Pod (2.5)

43t. Flash Fiction Online (2.5)

43t. McSweeney's (2.5) 

43t. Tin House (2.5) (ceased short fiction 2019) 

*51t. Abyss & Apex (2)

51t. Black Static (2) (ceased 2023)

51t. Fusion Fragment (2) (started 2020)

51t. Mothership Zeta (2) (ceased 2017) 

*51t. PseudoPod (2)

51t. Reckoning (2)

51t. Shortwave (2) (started 2022)

*51t. Weird Horror (2)

*59t. Constelación (1.5) (ran 2021-2022)

59t. MIT Technology Review (1.5) 

59t. New York Times (1.5) 

59t. Translunar Travelers Lounge (1.5) (started 2019)

[* indicates new to the list this year]

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Comments:

(1.) Beloit Fiction Journal, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Reckoning, and Tin House are literary magazines that sometimes publish science fiction or fantasy. Buzzfeed, Slate and Vice are popular magazines, and MIT Technology Review, Omni, and Wired are popular science magazines that publish a bit of science fiction on the side. The New York Times ran a series of "Op-Eds from the Future" from 2019-2020. The remaining magazines focus on the science fiction and fantasy (SF) genre or related categories such as horror or "weird". All publish in English, except Science Fiction World, which is the leading science fiction magazine in China, and Constelación, which was bilingual English and Spanish.

(2.) For a sense of recent momentum, it's also interesting to consider a three-year window. Here are those results, down to six points:

1. Clarkesworld (67)  

2. Uncanny (54.5) 

3. Reactor / Tor (42.5) 

4. Lightspeed (36.5)

5t. Asimov's (22.5) 

5t. Strange Horizons (22.5)  

7. Beneath Ceaseless Skies (13) 

8. The Sunday Morning Transport (9.5) 

9. Nightmare (9) 

10. FIYAH (8.5)

11t. Apex (8) 

11t. F&SF (8) 

11t. The Deadlands (8) 

14. Analog (7.5) 

15. Diabolical Plots (6.5) 

16. Fantasy Magazine (6) 

(3.) Other lists: The SFWA used to have a qualifying markets list of "pro" science fiction and fantasy venues based on pay rates and track records of strong circulation. However, that list has been discontinued. Submission Grinder is a terrific resource for authors, with detailed information on magazine pay rates, submission windows, and turnaround times.

(4.) Starting about 10-15 years ago, the classic "big three" print magazines -- Asimov's, F&SF, and Analog -- were slowly displaced in influence by the leading free online magazines, Reactor / Tor, Clarkesworld, Uncanny, and Lightspeed (all founded 2006-2014). Last year, Asimov's, F&SF, and Analog were all purchased by Must Read Books, and the transition has been bumpy, with author contract problems, delayed or skipped issues, and broken websites. It remains to be seen if the classic big three can stay viable in print format.

(5.) Standalone anthologies (traditionally in print format) have also been declining, probably for similar reasons as print magazines -- that is, the increasing consumption of free SF online. For example, in the most recent (2025) Locus recommended reading list only 8 of 99 (8%) recommendations in the novelette and short story categories are from anthologies, compared to 23/111 (21%) ten years ago (2016).

(6.) Academic philosophy readers might also be interested in the following magazines that specialize specifically in philosophical fiction and/or fiction by academic writers: AcademFic, After Dinner Conversation, and Sci Phi Journal.

AI and Consciousness

AI and Consciousness, hot off the press at Cambridge University Press and free online until Aug 26! Summary: Our most advanced AI systems might soon – within the next five to thirty years – be as richly and meaningfully conscious as ordinary humans, or even more so, capable of genuine feeling, real self-knowledge, and a wide range of sensory, emotional, and cognitive experiences. In some arguably important respects, AI architectures are beginning to resemble the architectures many consciousness scientists associate with conscious systems. Their outward behavior, especially their linguistic behavior, grows ever more humanlike. Alternatively, claims of imminent AI consciousness might be profoundly mistaken. Their seeming humanlikeness might be a shadow play of empty mimicry. Genuine conscious experience might require something no AI system could possess for the foreseeable future – intricate biological processes, for example, that silicon chips could never replicate. The thesis of this Element is that we don't know. Science lags, while engineering sprints ahead.

Here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/ai-and-consciousness/E77C92088DA3C9F89E7FE7C75CBB1896

Obfuscatory Philosophy as Intellectual Authoritarianism and Cowardice (repost)

Aloha from Kauai! Here's another snail for your enjoyment.

Since I'm still on vacation, here’s a repost with edits from 2011 and from my 2019 book A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.

[giant African land snail, seen in southern Kauai]

I've been told that Kant and Hegel were poor writers whose impenetrable prose style is incidental to their philosophy. I've also been told that their views are so profound as to defy expression in terms comprehensible even to smart, patient, well-educated people who are not specialists in the philosophy of the period. I've heard similar things about Laozi, Heidegger, Plotinus, and Derrida. (I won't name any living philosophers.) I don’t buy it.

Philosophy is not wordless profound insight. Philosophy is prose. Philosophy happens not in numinous moments of personal genius, but in the creation of mundane sentences. It happens on the page, in the pen, through the keyboard, in dialogue with students and peers, and to some extent but only secondarily in private inner speech. If what exists on the page is not clear, the philosophy is not clear. Philosophers, like all specialists, profit from a certain amount of jargon, but philosophy need not become a maze of jargon. If private jargon doesn’t regularly touch down in comprehensible public meanings, one has produced not philosophy, but only hazy words of indeterminate content. There are always gaps, confusions, indeterminacies, hidden assumptions, and failures of clarity, even in the plainest philosophical writers, like Mozi, Descartes, Hume, and David Lewis. Thus, these philosophers present ample interpretative challenges. But the gaps, confusions, indeterminacies, and hidden assumptions lie only one step behind the visible prose, available to anyone who looks conscientiously for them, not sliding away into a nebulous murk.

For a philosopher who can convince readers to take him seriously (given the exemplars, let’s say “him”), obfuscation yields three illegitimate benefits. First, he intimidates the reader, and through intimidation, dons a mantle of undeserved intellectual authority. Second, he disempowers potential critics by having a view of such indeterminate form that any criticism can be attributed to misinterpretation. Third, he exerts a fascination on the kind of reader who enjoys the puzzle-solving aspect of interpretation, thus drawing from that reader more attention than the quality of his ideas may merit (though this third benefit may be offset by alienating readers with a low tolerance for lack of clarity).

Philosophers of this type exhibit a kind of intellectual authoritarianism, with themselves as the assumed authority whose words we must spend time puzzling out. And simultaneously they lack intellectual courage: the courage to make plain claims that could be proven wrong, supported by plain arguments that could be proven fallacious. These three features synergize: If a critic thinks she has finally located a sound criticism, she can be accused of failing to solve the fascinating interpretative puzzle of the philosopher’s superior genius.

Few philosophers, I suspect, deliberately aim to be obfuscatory. But I am inclined to believe that some are attuned to its advantages as an effect of their prose style and for that reason don’t bother to write comprehensibly. Maybe they find their prose style shaped by audience responses: When they write clearly, they are dismissed or refuted; when they produce a fog of words that hint of profound meaning underneath, they earn praise. Maybe they are themselves to some extent victims — victims of a subculture, or a circle of friends, or an intended audience, that regards incomprehensibility as a sign of brilliance and so demands it in their heroes.

The Summer Illusion (repost)

Aloha from Honolulu! I have vacation brain, so I'll do a summer-themed repost.

[Photo from the Bishop Museum malacology exhibit]

*************************************

Every spring I suffer the Summer Illusion. The following three incompatible propositions all seem to me, in the spring, to be true:

(1.) When summer arrives, I'll finally get a bunch of that research done which has been crowded out by my teaching and administrative commitments during the school year.

(2.) When summer arrives, I'll finally get a chance to do all of that non-academic stuff that I've been putting off during the school year -- big home maintenance projects, vacation travel to the four new places I want to visit, my plan to catch up on the whole history of golden-age science fiction.

(3.) When summer arrives, I'll finally have a chance to spend a lot more time just relaxing.

The Summer Illusion is surprisingly robust. Every spring, I suffer the Summer Illusion, building up big plans and hopes. Then, every summer, as those hopes fall apart, I scold my springtime self for having fallen, yet again, into the Summer Illusion. The pattern is so common and predictable I've given it a memorable name, The Summer Illusion, to help convince myself that it really is an illusion -- and hopefully not fall into it again. And yet I fall into it again.

You might think that the Summer Illusion depends on entertaining only one of the three propositions at a time. You might think that the way it works is that sometimes I entertain proposition 1 (I'll get my research done!), and at other, different times I entertain proposition 2 (I'll get all my other projects done!), and at still other times I entertain proposition 3 (I'll finally have lots of time to relax!). Largely this is so. And yet the Summer Illusion also survives simultaneous consideration of the three propositions. Even looking at the propositions side by side like this, I am tempted to believe them. Some part of me thinks of course all three can't be true, as I've seen time and time again -- and yet in my heart I continue to believe. Summer days expand so magnificently to fit my fantasies!

It's almost an inversion of busyness. If a period of time has the outward appearance of being a "relaxed", low-commitment period of time, it serves as a fantasy-and-procrastination magnet. I pile my future plans and hopes into that period of time, not noticing the impossibly mounting sum of expectations.