Lapine Closing Fantastic Stories of the Imagination

Warren Lapine, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, has announced he will stop publishing Fantastic Stories of the Imagination. The January issue will be the magazine’s final regular issue, and the “People of Color Take Over” issue will be its last issue.

Lapine revived the title in 2014 and according to Internet SF Database has produced nine issues in three years. He said in his statement:

I’m really proud of the body of work that we produced at Fantastic. There are a number of reasons that now is the timefor me to close the webzine. According to my projection, it’ll take more than five years for Fantastic to become self sustaining, and I simply don’t feel that that is a reasonable time frame.

I had planned to stick it out another year, but my personal life has made that much more difficult. Last month my daughter’s house burned down and she and her family are staying with us while we try to sort everything out with an insurance company that doesn’t want to pay; and this month my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. Right now, I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.  In addition to Fantastic Stories, I also run Wilder Publications, which turns a profit and has a number of employees and contract workers. I’m faced with the reality that I need to trim something out of my life, and Fantastic Stories makes the most sense.

[Thanks to DMS for the story.]