At the start of the 1980s only two of the pioneer US science-fiction magazines still survived, Amazing Stories and Analog, which had started in 1926 and 1929 respectively. Analog was under the editorship of Stanley Schmidt who, although less restrictive than the magazine's legendary editor, John W. Campbell, Jr, nevertheless kept Analog firmly on a straight track, remaining true to the magazine's reputation for hard sf.

Another comparative old-timer was The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), which had begun in 1949. Galaxy, the other giant of the 1950s and 1960s had apparently breathed its last in 1980 but had already been replaced as one of the ‘Big Three’ by Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (hereinafter Asimov's), a mere infant at only four years old, but an equal in terms of sales and impact.

These four were the core traditional professional sf magazines to which we should add Omni. This was not a traditional sf magazine, but rather a popular-science magazine with the emphasis on the fringe sciences and new technology, but it did run two or three sf stories per issue. Although it had only appeared as recently as October 1978, its mixture of pop technology and alternate sciences had proved an instant hit. It had a circulation greater than the other four magazines combined, and a budget to match.

Between these five magazines was a significant range, with Analog at one end of the spectrum, representing the traditional form of hard science fiction, and F&SF at the other extreme as the more literary and occasionally eccentric magazine running an individualistic type of sf and fantasy. In the middle were the new kids on the block, Asimov's and Omni. These were the two that were going to initiate change and shift science fiction on to the next stage. Because, what soon became evident in the science-fiction scene in the 1980s was that it was again time for change. But whereas the New Wave of the period 1965–75 had been for a change in literary style and presentation, often a case of style over substance, the revolution of the 1980s was in utilizing the possibilities arising from the new technologies and developing a new literary style to promote those possibilities to a new generation.