The temporary resurrection of Omni Magazine

Years ago, I met a friend in a parking lot to take possession of some stories. They filled the trunk of his car, battered cardboard boxes filled to the brim with some familiar titles — yellowed issues of Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog Science Fact and Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Omni.

I'd spent many hours in high school reading copies copies of Asimov's until their covers were smudged and crinkled, and I knew that the magazine was one of the places where I could find exciting new stories in the genre that I loved. I hadn't come across Omni before, however, and those copies stood out.

Unlike the cheap digest-sized issues that I'd leafed through for years, these were something altogether different. they were chunky, loaded down not only with short stories, but stories about science and technologies, weird fashions and pop culture. They were alluring, hip, and vibrant in ways that the traditional SF magazines weren't, and I can see why they had such an influence during their heyday.

Omni was an enormously influential publication over the course of its run in the 1980s and 1990s, and since it shut down more than a quarter-century ago, its presence has lingered. Its pages influenced the next generation of science fiction writers and journalists, and it's DNA can be seen in any number of publications and outlets that cover that weird intersection of science fiction, technology, and pop culture.

In 2021, Omni — in its magazine form — returned. Sort of. Athletic sportswear and design multinational Adidas produced out a limited, special edition of the magazine as a publicity item, and distributed for free in November and December.

Omni Magazine came at an pivotal moment in the history of science fiction literature. By the late 1970s, speculative fiction as a genre and community were well-established: there were a variety of publications regularly putting out new material, authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frank Herbert were becoming mainstream figures in the literary world, and thanks to things like Planet of the Apes, Star Trek and Star Wars, science fiction was reaching new audiences.

It was in this mix that Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione decided to launch a new publication: Omni. In his introductory editorial, he positioned the publication as one that would "see the future... a future of growing intellectual vitality, of expanding dreams and infinite hope." Citing Albert Einstein's musings about the power of the human mind, and his own calling as an artist, he explained that Omni would be a compromise: "my way of bridging both levels of interest and inquiry." It would contain science fiction, articles about astronomy and robotics, and quite a bit more.

Omni looked nothing like the traditional, digest-sized genre magazines: it was filled with vibrant articles, photography, advertisements, and short stories on slick paper. Guccione provided the magazine with a big budget that allowed its editors to fill its pages with stories from a range of authors: from well-known figures such as Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, to newcomers like Pat Cadigan, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, George R.R. Martin, and others. The magazine pushed against some of the genre's long-standing traditions, giving those space to innovate and experiment with their storytelling: it was a key incubator for the cyberpunk movement. Ellen Datlow, one of the magazine's editors, ultimately published seven anthologies collecting the magazine's short fiction.

Omni's run didn't last: as the news industry experienced downturns, its owners eventually transformed it into an online-only publication in the 1990s, which they eventually shut down in 1998.

It left behind an impressive legacy: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction writes that it was "one of the most successful publishing ventures of its time," and that it "revolutionized the general readership's perception and understanding of science and, thanks to its fiction editors, published some of the most memorable fiction of the period."

It influenced writers and journalists Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, who went on to found io9, a futurism blog that covered everything from science fiction to comic books to weird history to science and technology. "What drew me to the blog is the chance to talk about how our fantasies about the future affect what we do to build that future," Newitz told Wired in January 2008. "Science fiction is really mainstream right now and has truly reached a mainstream audience. It's silly to talk about it as being marginal or geeky."

These are ideas that echo Guccione's intentions with his own publication, and which have since spread out to plenty of other sites around the internet. io9 wasn't alone: sites that blend the likes of Omni's science, pop culture, and technology like Ars Technica or The Verge inherited some of their DNA from the likes of Omni and how it covered the present day. Omni was a demonstration that science fiction didn't need to stay confined to an existence boxed off from the rest of culture; it had tendrils that extended into all other parts of culture, something that's more apparent now than ever.

Fast-forward to 2021. In the interceding years, Omni has endured a somewhat volatile existence. In 2013, a businessman named Jeremy Frommer accidentally acquired Guccione's personal archive. Penthouse's creator and publisher died in 2010, and according to Claire Evans at Vice, Frommer had bought the contents of a storage locker on a whim, and ended up with the production assets from the magazine: original pictures, covers, paperwork, the ultimate collection of Omni memorabilia. "He has but one goal," Evans wrote, "to own the most complete collection in the world of ephemera relating to this largely forgotten magazine."

Frommer, through his company Jerrick Ventures, had plans to bring Omni back to the rest of the world: he put together a book of the magazine's art with Powerhouse Books in 2014, and announced a new initiative: an online site called Omni Reboot, which would do exactly as its title suggested: reboot the fabled magazine with a blend of science fiction, science writing, and everything in between. (I actually contributed a piece to the site six years ago).

The original magazine wasn't entirely impossible to find: Archive.org had scanned and uploaded most of the issues, and Jerrick had also put together plans to sell archival issues of the magazine on Amazon. The company also announced a deal with Jared Leto to produce a slate of original content for the web in 2017. It seemed as though Omni would indeed be coming back in a big way.

It didn't: Penthouse, under new its new publisher Kelly Holland, filed a lawsuit against Jerrick in the summer of 2017, claiming that Penthouse still retained the intellectual property that was Omni. Jerrick's discovery of Guccione's archive in New Jersey was "as if I went to a garage sale and bought a DC Comic for a dime and thought I can make Wonder Woman,” Holland said at the time, and indicated that they were planning to launch their own version of the magazine at some point. At the time, Jerrick said that it "believes the lawsuit is without merit and intends to vigorously defend against it."

Penthouse eventually relaunched a print edition of Omni later that year (branding it as "RealOmni" online), and brought on Pamela Weintraub as editor-in-chief and Ellen Datlow as the new version's fiction editor. Datlow explained at the time that it was a "quarterly continuation of the original." That debut issue featured an interview with William Gibson, short fiction by Nancy Kress, Maureen McHugh, and Rich Larson and a handful of essays. It appeared to be a triumphant return for the magazine, while Jerrick quietly rebranded Omni Reboot as Futurism.

It wasn't. That 2017 edition was the only physical edition that Penthouse produced, with a single story hitting the web (a reprint from Robert Silverberg), and a brief resurrection in April and May 2020 with podcast called Omnipod, which ran for only two episodes. The site still says that Omni will return at some point.

"Our agency is a little bit more traditional in the way that we handle our accounts," Sarah Bassett, the design director for the Johannes Leonardo advertising agency told me. She was in the midst of a photoshoot when our interview came up, and I could hear the wind through the phone as she stepped outside to take my call. Her company typically did projects for traditional media like television and magazine campaigns, and handles clients like Volkswagen, Instagram, GAP, Amazon, and Adidas. "What's been super cool about [Adidas'] Originals movies in a design perspective is we have a bit more freedom to do some creative projects [which are] outside of the box."

Some of that out-side-the-box advertising? A 12-hour long ad released in October 2020 to promote the return of Adidas's ZX shoe. It's weird commercial, one that sees someone cut a cake shaped like the shoe, a model paint their face up like one of the shoes, someone sculpting a shoe out of clay, some segments were animated with wild colors... you get the idea. It's an ad that looks a bit like something you'd stumble on flicking through cable channels late at night.

Bassett explains that she and her team opted to go with a science and technology-themed campaign to promote the shoe, because it "is very technical and has all these really interesting, quite nerdy – if you're a sneaker head — cool functions." Their marketing campaigns drifted into nostalgia: the long ad was something that they imagined they might see running on MTV late at night, and as they wanted to break away from their traditional formulas, they wanted to bring something out that was tactile and which fit with that mashup of things: weird science, technical obsession, and strange visuals. "The OMNI narrative came about because obviously it's a cult Sci-fi fan fiction magazine, [and] it very much fit with the aesthetic of the campaign," she explained. "We didn't have any idea if it would actually be possible when we pitched the idea, just that it would be hilarious and amazing if it worked, and we were very lucky to be able to get in contact with them.

OMNI has been long out of print, which made the pitch go a little more easily, Bassett explained. Adidas licensed the brand name from Penthouse, which provided access to their archives and collaborated with them on the look and feel of the magazine.

When is an homage just an homage, and when is it a resurrection that carries with it some of the same thinking that informed the original? That can sometimes be a hard line to define, especially when the creators involved in the resurrection are fans of what their predecessor represented. Guccione, ever the salesman, noted that his magazine was designs to be intellectual and interesting, with authors and writers pushing boundaries to explore the state of the modern world.

"In terms of how we approached the design," Bassett noted," it was really important to us that it didn't become a brand trying to rip off the OMNI idea: we really wanted to reference — we matched the type styles, all the upfront formatting, on the stories at the beginning of the magazine, like they look exactly how the original magazine was laid out. It was important for us to honor the original aesthetic and not have it feel like a branded, gimmicky thing that doesn't have any correlation to the original.

The result is a magazine that looks quite a bit like one of those original magazines. Its cover features the bold, iconic OMNI logo, a bit of surrealist art on the cover, and a whole host of articles about the types of things that the original publication likely would have featured had it been around today: there are articles about NFTs, UFOs, and digital music, as well as short fiction and plenty of pictures.

We live in a media age where companies are increasingly reluctant to go out on a limb and create something new, opting instead to fall back on existing IP. Sometimes it's a winning strategy: SCI FI's reimagining of Battlestar Galactica proved to be an excellent project. Lucasfilm's The Book of Boba Fett? Not so much.

This isn't a new phenomenon. In his recent book, The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, Chris Nashawaty makes the argument that that summer's slate of blockbusters (and duds) was the moment that Hollywood realized how to really do science fiction and it's been trying to recreate that moment ever since. "Four-plus decades ago," he writes, "we were entertained, enthralled, and enlightened. Today, we're merely cudgeled into numb submission over and over again and treated like children being spoon-fed the same sound-and-fury pap."

How do you resurrect a magazine like Omni? You can't. You can recreate the look and feel of its covers and contents, but capturing the direction, intention, and thinking behind those early issues is an exercise in futility. Stuck in a pile of its predecessors, this new version of Omni (and even the 2017 attempted reboot) wouldn't stand out: Bassett and her team were able to provide that design continuity to ape the vibe that defined the originals.

But while the intentions and design were drawn from the same source, they're still drawing from the same well, and the result is a publication that feels less like a throwback and more a weird transplant from another dimension. That's hardly the thing that will spark the same curiosity and intrigue decades later, as my box of magazines did.

What's frustrating about this is that it's an exercise that feels empty from the beginning: effort that could have been put into something new and vibrant and interesting. You don't have to look hard to see that it isn't same magazine: it's a 100+ page ad for a shoe.