It’s a brave move to launch a print magazine devoted to short genre fiction in a climate where everyone seems to be trumpeting the decline of the scene, and that is exactly what the producers of Hub magazine have decided to do – a paying market for both fiction and non-fiction, in glossy (if small-format) magazine quality (as opposed to small-press chapbook). I’ll leave the debate as to whether they can last the course without trimming back on writer’s fees or magazine quality for those who know the industry better than I, and report from the reader’s perspective.

As mentioned above, the first thing to strike the reader is the glossy paper and colour printing that runs throughout the magazine’s 80 pages. It’s not unheard of – Interzone now comes out in full colour, but they have the advantage of a long international reputation and a decent subscriber base. This format allows a level of layout design that most fiction mags cannot aspire to, and the Hub team have revelled in that freedom – sometimes to the detriment of actual readability, especially in some of the fiction pages.

But this is a first issue from a new team of producers, and it is only to be expected that they will need to find their feet. Ambition is certainly preferable to its opposite, but it is to be hoped that a magazine that uses the tagline “it’s all about the story” will let the fiction speak for itself as time goes by – especially on the front cover, which here focusses on the non-fiction articles and only mentions the stories in passing.

So, to the stories. Again, it must be borne in mind that as a new launch from unknown producers, they probably didn’t have a huge pile of great work ready to choose from, which to some extent excuses the patchy quality here. The quality seems to strengthen toward the end of the magazine, and it may have made more sense to put some of the better pieces nearer the front to avoid the initial sense of disillusionment that came with reading from front to back.

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First up is Bubba Pritchert and the Space Aliens by Bud Webster, which is a naked pitch for the spoof seats. The titular Bubba witnesses a pair of aliens park up their out-of-action flying saucer in a local parking lot, and offers his mechanic skills to get them back on the road. After introducing the two occupants to the joys of beer and cable, he calls for the assistance of a computer technician buddy from the same UFOlogy club. The pair of them fix the ship with the assistance of the ship’s sentient computer, and somehow get given clean-fusion technology as a parting gift.

The premise, hokey as it is, could have gone somewhere with a different focus. Regrettably Webster’s writing is light on ideas and heavy on dialogue – that dialogue being couched in cheery sit-com Deep South good-ol’-boy banter doesn’t help at all. There’s little suspense or excitement; all the potential routes out of such a knowingly clich