SQUIRMING MAGS: Social and Political Issues

AFKAR INQUIRY, 55 Banner Street, London EC1Y 8PX. Single issues US$2.50, UK80p. Perhaps the first order of business is to destroy our preconceptions and few magazines could be better fitted for that than AFKAR. Imagine an English-language magazine by radical fundamentalist Islamic FUTURISTS. Essays on Koranic epistemology alternate with analyses of Alvin Toffler and solar-age, small-is-beautiful manifestos. The upshot is little short of staggering: defiant, militant, self-contradictory, blazing with dangerous energies. Those who think of the Muslim Resurgence as a vaguely comic medieval anomaly should read this post-haste. AFKAR is a mix of mosques and monorails, AK-47s and Arab satellites, a propaganda organ for a new intelligentsia, who fancy themselves the avant-garde for an OPEC-financed global Islamic rebirth. Their writers are smart, fluent, furiously angry, and fanatically determined to build a future "neither East nor West." They mean business.

SOUTH, The Magazine of the Third World, Suite 319, 230 Park Avenue, NYNY 10169, US$28/yr.; also 13th Floor, New Zealand House, 80 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4TS. The US media ignore Third Worlders unless they're either starving, or shooting Americans. Yet the curves of demographics and economic growth prove that the developing nations will wield an ever-growing influence in years to come. This is an excellent magazine, authoritative, well-written, with superior graphics. It covers Third World politics, finance, technology, and the arts, always with mind-opening perspectives. It is neither militant nor Marxist, yet doesn't cater to comfortable Yankee prejudice. Highly recommended.

WORLD PRESS REVIEW, Box 915, Farmingdale, NY 11737, $19.95/yr. WPR is a summary of "news and views from the foreign press," most of them devoted to nervous assessments of what the rest of the world thinks of the US. "Moscow Beat" and "Asia/Pacific Beat" are especially intriguing. Its interest in economic issues gives it a forecaster's outlook useful to investors, speculators -- and extrapolators.

WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, CA 94965, US$18/yr. This periodical, formerly COEVOLUTION QUARTERLY, has gone through a marvelous sea-change. From tired old '60's tech hippies they have now become shiny new '80's hip techies, a much more palatable breed. They have published THE WHOLE EARTH SOFTWARE CATALOG, possibly the best book ever written for the layman about the promise and peril of personal computers. Even the earnest, dirt-stained, denim CQ was always good for a shot of uplift and optimism; now, equipped with red-hot com technology, they are like hardened jungle guerillas suddenly armed with Stealth bombers. These Green, eco-decentralist cadres may have underestimated the opposition in their struggle to create a sustainable, humanized society. But they suddenly have a big new chunk of loose change and a new constituency revolted by recent callous excesses against the environment. Exciting things are going to come from this magazine, and though their utopian schemes will almost certainly fail they will have a strong role in shaping the future.

THE PLANETARY REPORT (journal of The Planetary Society) 110 S. Euclid Avenue, Pasadena CA 91101 (available with membership). A very interesting ideological struggle is taking shape within this slim little propaganda mag. The Planetary Society is Carl Sagan's pressure group for space exploration. The civilian scientific intelligentsia behind this publication are apparently nauseated by military ambitions in space. They have opened their membership to Soviet space scientists, thereby gaining in their last issue an incredible coup of previously unreleased Venusian surface photos. With the recent "nuclear winter" flap, Sagan and his ideological allies have gone to the barricades against what they perceive as crypto-Christian jingoistic Neanderthals in high office. Rarely do scientists speak out with this kind of media savvy, and they appear to have struck a chord. These people are not to be underestimated, despite their painful habit of talking down to their audience and their occasional excesses in mystic scientism (of the "Our DNA Must Reach The Stars" variety). And if their privately financed radiotelescope Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, by some cosmic mischance, should happen to deliver, well, all bets are off.