No, I am not floating around in zero-G, though that might be fun. Today I’d like to talk about Weightless Books. This is the portal I’ve used for subscribing to genre magazines for years now, in preference to Amazon or any other venue, expect perhaps Patreon.
I should have written this sooner, because, as I said, been a fan for years. But it was a Discord discussion about Amazon ending its subscription service that prompted this. No doubt, many of my fellow lovers of short genre fiction subscribed to their favorite zines or stumbled upon new ones on Amazon. I suspect that Fantasy Magazine won’t be the last to fall, at least in some small part, due to this change.
But Weightless is still there, not flashy, but solid and dependable. It’s a small operation. It doesn’t have a slick and shiny UI, and is, I feel obliged to admit, a little painful to surf on mobile. What it does have is books and magazines. It may not have all the zines, but its selection is extensive enough that it’s beyond the limits of my time to list them all. So here is a very short selection of what you can subscribe to there.
- Apex Magazine: Subscribe | Homepage
- Beneath Ceaseless Skies: Subscribe | Homepage
- Clarkesworld: Subscribe | Homepage
- Flash Fiction Online: Subscribe | Homepage
- Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet: Subscribe | Homepage
- Lightspeed: Subscribe | Homepage
- Locus (non-fiction): Subscribe | Homepage
- The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Subscribe | Homepage
- Uncanny Magazine: Subscribe | Homepage
If you like to read on Kindle, they can save you a step by sending the EPUB directly to your device, rather than emailing it to you.
I discovered one of my favorite books by browsing Weightless, Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer, translated from the Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a remarkable, magical book that I probably would never have heard of had I not been browsing Weightless. This site has brought me great joy over the last few years, and I hope it will do the same for you.