Yeah, it's pretty evocative. Kind of can't stop staring at it.

Yeah it never went out of print, as far as I know. I was a big fan of the ones from the 60's after reading some on Archive.org, so I put in a year subscription to modern Analog.

To be honest, the quality of writing wasn't compelling enough on average to subscribe for another year. There were two or three stories I really enjoyed, a handful were pretty good, and the rest (85%?) were either very much not to my tastes or boring.

To me, it seemed like the boring stories were divided between:

Actual scientists/engineers who clumsily shoehorned long descriptions of their own specialty into a flimsy plot full of weak characters who exist just to ask questions for the protagonist to continue their science explanations.

Or,

It's not written by a scientist, but has no concept of how to craft an intriguing hook, or get a reader invested. One example I can give is a story that was about a woman who helps maintain the life support system aboard a ship, who, after a talk with her mom and looking through family photos, decides not to marry her fiance after struggling with it in her head for a few days. That's it. Nothing else happens. There was no conflict, nothing interesting going on in the ship, just a person whom the reader will struggle to care about or relate to due to there not being enough pages making a personal decision, and everything is fine. Was really surprised the editor published it.

One of the stories I really enjoyed was The Last Days of Good People, by A.T Sayre (who spun it out into a standalone novel). It was a proper sci-fi adventure, with a very interesting focus on interactions with a well written and fleshed out alien race that really tugged at me and even got me to cry.

From what I've read, Asimov's might have slightly higher quality stories, but I couldn't justify the price to try a year of that too, especially when the competition, such as ClarkesWorld, is free to read online, and supposedly has higher quality stories than either.

But that's just my two cents based on my personal fiction tastes (I can be a bit picky). I believe both Asimov's and Analog have one full issue available to read for free on their site, which can give you an idea if you'd like them or not (if they no longer do that, there's some fairly recent issues of both on Archive.org)

EDIT: I will say though, that it was really cool to actually receive a real printed sci-fi mag in the mail regularly. I really wished I enjoyed the stories more to justify keeping that, as I do really like that aspect.

Oh my God, Analog is so good right now. I just finished reading the "January/February 2026" issue and it's full of such great stories! Some real emotions and intrigue. Totally blown away.

I've prepaid for a 2 year subscription, I'm all in.