Fanzines received at Worldcon

[randy_byers]

I don't think of Worldcon as a fanzine convention, but I may have come away from Interaction with more fanzines than from Corflu Titanium. Chunga 10, which we distributed in June, already seemed stale.



Ansible 217 - Winner of the Hugo for Best Semiprozine. Next year it will be competing for Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form (as some wag commented, although it wasn't Wag).

Arimonitti 2 - It was a pleasure to meet Finnish fan Jukka Halme at the convention, if only briefly. This is his FAPA zine, and it immediately rewards the reader with a funny haiku. What is it about SF fans and haiku?

Banana Wings 23 - The Hugo-nominated fishlifters have been publishing like mad lately and also put a lot of work into the Worldcon. Here's hoping they don't suffer a post-con meltdown! In this issue, the high-heeled fishlifter helpfully explains about twats.

Bento 17 - The pocket-sized zine from David Levine and Kate Yule, with a useful recipe for Nerve Gas Chicken. Like Plokta, they create their own whimsical universe.

The Best of MOZ issues one to six - A collection of pieces from Corflu Titanium GOH Murray Moore's ANZAPA zine. I think I have the originals, too, or at least some of them.

Can't Get Off the Island - This collection of Interaction Fan Guest of Honor Greg Pickersgill's fan writing was not handed out, but sold for something like three pounds sterling. It looks to be very thorough, covering his whole career. It's difficult to find copies of his old fanzines, so this is a real treasure. Contact the fishlifters if you want to acquire your own.

Convertible Bus ? - Dad blast it! I've ended up with two copies of Gimmickry, which means that Sharee must have both of our copies of this zine from swisstone. Another one-sheet on white A4 paper, so it's easy to see how that happened. Guess I'll have to go to Australia to swap zines with her.

Gimmickry - A one-sheet from hawkida in which the gimmick is that all contributions must be no more than 50 words. Good gimmick: we approve of concision. I have an under-50-word LOC that I'm refining.

Meta 2 - The house organ of Third Row Fandom, which is taking British fandom by strategy (or is that vice versa?). All I've read so far is the advertisement for the Journal of Recursive Studies, which definitely tickled my Internalist heart.

Of Physicists and Fen: a fanzine - from Swedish fan Anna Davour, whom I hadn't heard of before. mrhedgehog vouched for her, so she must be good. This zine has already been posted to efanzines.com.

Plokta 34 - The Plokta Who issue of the (at last!) Hugo-award winning fanzine, with another wonderful cover by bohemiancoast and a shit-stirring response by hawkida to Peter Weston's critique of the recent Eastercon. The fact that it took Plokta 33 issues to win a Hugo makes me feel tired.

Zoo Nation 6 - flyingsauce has won the last two Novas with this excellent zine, and he barely missed taking the fifth spot on the Hugo ballot this year. That would be the spot Chunga took, so I feel his hot breath on our collective neck.

A couple of zines that Sharee got and I didn't:

Floss 5 - surliminal swears this is her last paper zine, no really, she means it this time. I'll be handling the North American distribution, because it has a brilliant piece by yours truly. Presumably I'll mail myself a copy at that point.

Shiny 2 - Possibly actually known as Shiny Shiny, this is flickgc's second under-distributed zine. Amusing stories with copious footnotes, and very nicely designed. It has a hand-crafted feel, and perhaps that makes it too expensive to distribute properly?

Something from a Bristol fan -- a friend of estimate_lad, I think -- but I didn't note the title.

So that's fifteen new zines. I also came away with a small boatload (a skiffload?) of old zines from the freebie table in the fan room, thanks to suggestions (as in, "Here take this one" as a zine was thrust into my nerveless hands) from the long-haired fishlifter and the_maenad. The biggest score was a copy of the eighth issue of Wrinkled Shrew (which I found myself), but I also came away with copies of John Foyster's Chunder (in which title several readers have found a resonance with Chunga), Rob Jackson's Maya, Malcolm Edwards' Tappen (got to meet Malcolm, too), D. West's Daisnaid, and many, many more. The freebie table (with donation cans benefitting the fan funds, IIRC) is a brilliant way to redistribute old fanzines, and jerrykaufman and I had a discussion about how we might be able to do something similar at the Seattle Nasfic or elsewhere.



Once again, it appears that paper fanzines aren't quite dead yet. Maybe next year!

Comments

[dougs.livejournal.com]

> All I've read so far is the advertisement for the Journal of Recursive Studies, which definitely tickled my Internalist heart.

That looks suspiciously like an advert for an advert.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

If that's the case, the only thing that can save us — a comment on a comment!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

A curse on the curse of recursion!

Curses! Cursed again!

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

And again!


And again!

[i-ate-my-crusts.livejournal.com]

Chunder is terribly different from Chunga. The contents, for example, are far more likely to contain carrot.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Carrot chunder sounds pretty nasty!

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

OK. I think *I* have your copy of Tony's zine - oops!! I'll mail you Floss on Monday. And the Bristol zine is by cpt_buggernuts, aka the man in the dress, i think (or his/her partner) -- any way something like that!!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Send Floss by e-mail, too, so I can see if I'm able to reformat it for US letter-size paper.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

I got similarly confused for some time, but I'm now sure that the man in the dress is Ken, and he INOLJ - [Unknown site tag] is his partner.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Ken is definitely the partner of the woman I thought was passing out the mysterious Bristol zine. Hm, guess I could ask Sharee what the title is. But shouldn't I be able to find it on Google?

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

Owl Soup #1.

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

Oh, cpt_buggernuts is most definitely female. (Quite a fun zine, too, even if it is burdened by that idiot Green being one of the contributors.)

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I've got Even More Balls, and you haven't!

PS it's Convertible Bus 15

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Right! Sharee said she'd seen Ang handing a zine out, but we never got a chance to pester her for a copy.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

There was also Yafazine, of course.

Re taking 33 issues to win a Hugo -- it might have been tiring for us too if we'd realised we were climbing a mountain. In fact we were just having occasional boozy weekends in which we sometimes produced a fanzine.

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is YAFA?

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

YAFA = Young Adults Fun Activities, which was the program(me) put together by James Bacon and Stef to keep younger folks entertained. From the Interaction website: "Please remember though that YAFA is not a child minding service; we are a place where people aged between 10 and 19 can come, find refuge, and get involved with (un)conventional events."

One of the things they apparently did to entertain themselves was produce a fanzine. I believe I heard bits of it read aloud at the Dead Dog party, but then the real ale reasserted control, to the detriment of memory.

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

What a terrific idea, though I was already hanging around the convention bar by the time I was 16. I'll have to chase James and see if he ran any extra copies off. Twenty years from now, one of these newbies could be famous and I'll be able to finance my retirement via eBay.

[numbat.livejournal.com]

Fanzines are to be expected at least some British conventions because that's what British fans do. It's something of a tradition though normally confined to Novacon and the Eastercon. I suppose a worldcon is close enough to in feel to encourage the same response.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Producing a fanzine used to be what U.S. fans do, too. Somehow/where/time we took the wrong path. *sigh* I suppose it had to do with more fans living in cities where there were more than two or three others of our ilk, with there being more than two or three Conventions a year in the world, and with more of us being able to afford to attend more Cons. But there's potential for a renaissance -- electronic fanzines are even less expensive to distribute than paper ones were fifty years ago, and Conventions are becoming too expensive for many of us to attend promiscuously. (No, I don't think I want to reconsider that word-choice, TYVM.) I don't want to try to evaluate the comparative merits of The Great Old Fanzines and The Best Modern Fanzines, but I'm sure the average quality is much higher now than it was 40+ years ago when I discovered the microcosm.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

The US seems to balkanise its fandom much more than we do. It's clear that lots of people who run cons and would probably quite like doing fanzines have got the impression that fanzine fandom is insular and unwelcoming. (To be fair, this happens in the UK as well, but I think not to the same extent.) One of the things I *like* about fanzines is the ability to use fanzines to forge new connections.

[profundo-rosso.livejournal.com]

The first two conventions I attended were the 1977 Fantasycon and (seven months later) Novacon 7. It was noticeable that there were just two or three small press publications at the first (including the debut issue of Fantasy Tales), which all carried a cover price, but people were freely handing out copies of fanzines at the latter, albeit usually in trade. Luckily, I had copies of the first Astron with me, so I could join in, even if it was dreadfully sercon (read: up its own arse). Even though Novacon isn't a fanzine-oriented convention in the way that Caption is a small press-themed event, it wouldn't still be Novacon without them.

[Insert quick plug for the Nova Awards]

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

One of the things I felt good about at the end of Interaction was when David Cake said that his experience at the con was changing his mind about fanzine fans. For those who haven't met him (as I hadn't before Interaction), David is an Aussie fan from the Perth area who seems to be quite involved in running conventions. I suspect that his reasons for wariness about fanzine fans was different than US-type balkanization, since it seemed to be mostly a reaction to the Australian zine scene, which doesn't seem big enough to be balkanized. Geographical separation might have more to do with it.

It's also worth pointing out that in the US, the balkanization isn't just con-running vs. fanzines, but even within the fanzine world there are regional divisions, e.g. Coastal vs. Midwest vs. Southern, and also "cultural" divisions, e.g. Sercon vs. Fannish. So yes, we are experts in balkanization and feuding. Of course, doesn't the rest of UK fandom resent you decadent Babylonians Londoners?

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I suspect the problem in the US is more one of focus. To excel in any of the major subsets seems (for most US fans, anyhow) to practically _require_ concentrationg fanac time, energy, and attention on that aspect, to the almost-complete exclusion of all others. I suspect that UK fans tend to be better at multi-tasking, but am at a loss to figure out why this might be so, if it is.

[numbat.livejournal.com]

I should explain perhaps that when I mentioned 'that's what British fans do' I meant the practise of publishing their fanzines just before certain conventions so they can hand copies directly to a significant portion of their mailing list. It's a viable option in the UK because there's a good chance that most of the British fans an editor might want on their mailing list will be at Novacon or the Eastercon. The situation in the US is too diffuse for it to work there I suspect. You could hand out a fanzine at Corflu of course but I suspect most of the likely recipiets wouldn't be there.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

That was common usage here, and worked well up until about thirty years ago -- i.e., during my first ten years in fandom. I suspect that British Fandom is especially blessed by its much smaller geographical area (even if there's still some element of "a hundred miles is a long distance").

[numbat.livejournal.com]

That's exactly it, despite their grumbling most of British fandom can get to a con if it sounds tempting enough. This is a luxury you simply don't have in the US.

[jerrykaufman.livejournal.com]

I got pretty much the same batch of zines as you, except I did get More Balls and did not get Shiny.

Meta was the best new-to-me zine, with two wonderful articles on life at Oxford University by Dave Langford and Niall Harrison (aka coalescent.