After 33 years and 374 issues, Starlog magazine has ceased to exist as a print publication. “Official word of Starlog's demise came in a posting last week on the Starlog.com site, buried five paragraphs deep in an update informing readers that Starlog.com had relaunched in beta as part of a ‘massive digital initiative’ and touting the fact that a ‘Digital store,’ to launch next month, will feature digital editions of the entire Starlog catalog,” SciFi Wire reports. “The last print issue available for the time being is #374,while issue #375 will be available exclusively as a digital edition on the network in the very near future.”

I’m not going to claim that I’ve kept up with Starlog lately – I’m guessing the last issue I read had some hot scoop on the secrets of Return of the Jedi – but this announcement still bums me out a bit. I remember purchasing the very first issue of Starlog in 1976 (or, more likely, hounding my mother into buying it for me), the one you see pictured here. At the time I didn’t care anything about “David Bowie’s new sci-fi movie” or whether “The Changes” would help Space:1999; I was all about that Star Trek episode guide. Decades before the existence of Television Without Pity, I nearly grinded that issue into dust, checking off the episodes I’d seen and giving them my own special star ratings. With no IMDb, Ain’t it Cool News or Morning Deal Report to be found, it was only through each new issue of Starlog that I learned of such tantalizing upcoming fare as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and the first Superman movie. The magazine was probably my first introduction to film criticism, through reviews by David Gerrold (who dared to find fault in The Empire Strikes Back, as I recall) and Harlan Ellison (whose Starlog reviews are collected in Harlan Ellison’s Watching.)

Anyway, the Twitter generation has no use for icky print and paper, so another long-running publication bites the dust. Still, there is some good news – once they put the entire digital archive online, we’ll all be able to have a good laugh at young Andrew Osborne’s letter decrying the sexual content of Saturn 3. See, there’s always a silver lining.