Another Question - Academic Journals

No answer to my Readercon question, so here's another one.

I'm thinking about subscribing to an academic sf journal. Wikipedia has told me the main contenders are:

Femspec - 40$/year (? issues)
Extrapolation - 26$/year (3 issues)
Science-Fiction Studies - 26$/year (3 issues)
Foundation - ????/year (??? issues)
New York Review of Science Fiction - 40$/year (12 issues)

I was going to say that all of the websites uniformly SUCK, but NYRSF isn't that bad. And since I couldn't even find subscription information on the Foundation site, that wins the award for suckiest of the sucky websites. Suck.

I'm less interested in reading the reviews, so if there's one that's heavier on other interesting bits and lighter on reviews, that's a plus. If it covers fantasy as well as science fiction, also a plus.

So do any of you have any thoughts on any of the above? Is there one that's likely accessible via library databases or ILL? Alas, I'm not near a university likely to have a standing subscription to any of these.

Reading to Write

I'm reading "The Wave in the Mind", a collection of talks and essays by Ursula K. Le Guin. In "The Question I Get Asked Most Often", she talks about ideas and the idea of 'idea' and influences or lack of influences and lots of stuff to chew on.

I came up with what my answer would be to 'Where Do You Get Your Ideas?' I figured I'd answer 'Books.' and leave it at that. And then the next time I was asked, I would answer 'Television.' And so on and so on.

Of course this also turned out to be one of her answers:

Where do you get your ideas from? From books, of course, from other people's books, what are books for? If I didn't read how could I write?

We writers all stand on each other's shoulders, we all use each other's ideas and skills and plots and secrets.

Naturally this also comes on the heels of me reading a bunch of other essays, including "Unquestioned Assumptions" wherein she discussed writers and works that assume the reader is white, male, straight, Christian. And also on the heels of Wiscon, where all this sort of stuff is on the tops of everyone's minds and the tips of most people's tongues.

So it occurred to me, or at least it occurred to the conscious part of my brain, that the only way to write non-white, non-male, non-straight characters is to read more of them. And I'm pretty good about reading the last two, but not so good on the first one. I'm getting better.

So I'm going to read more, but not stop trying to write non-white characters in the meanwhile.

I know a lot of you are going to reply, or at least think, 'duh'. So I'm not saying this is anything profound. Just thought I should write it down. Maybe others will get some use out of it. At the least, it'll be here to remind myself if I need reminding.

(Also need to read more good female characters so I can write more female characters that interest me. Which is not the same thing as non-male.)