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Best Fanzine

  • Feb. 24th, 2008 at 3:46 PM
Spain
What the hell is a fanzine, you ask? It's an amateur magazine, produced by and for fans, and once upon a time fanzines were the center of science fiction fandom. In those days they were produced on mimeographs, xerox machines, or (shudder) ditto, obtainable for "sticky quarters" or "the usual," which usually meant you sent your own fanzine in trade or wrote a LOC. (That's "letter of comment," folks). The "Best Fanzine" award is one of the oldest and most traditional of the Hugos.

The category is still around, of course, and some traditional fanzines still survive, but they are no longer quite as central to the subculture as they once were, and the Best Fanzine category doesn't seem to draw many nominations these days. It seems to me, though, that there is a new center springing up right before our eyes here on the internet. Webzines, blogs, and online journals and review sites are proliferating right and left, and there are probably as many of them around as there were mimeo and ditto'd zines in their heydey.

These are the fanzines of the 21st century, and I think it is time we recognized the best of them in the Best Fanzine category of the Hugos. It doesn't have to be done on a mimeo to be a fanzine, boys and girls.

Last year I suggested that I HOPE I DIDN'T JUST GIVE AWAY THE ENDING and PAT'S FANTASY HOTLIST were both worthy of Hugo consideration. Stego didn't publish enough new material in 2007 to warrant a nomination this time around... but Pat St. Denis certainly did. PAT'S FANTASY HOTLIST is a must-read site, I think, a constant stream of reviews, commentary, interviews, contests, giveaways, and discussion, updated at least weekly and often daily. True, true, this guy Pat is a Dallas Cowboys fan, but his site is good enough that I'll even give him a pass on that.

If you haven't seen the Hotlist, check it out at http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/ Scroll back through the Archives, and you'll be reading for days.

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist will be first on my list of Best Fanzine nominations this year.

Comments

( 9 comments — Leave a comment )
[info]webmaven wrote:
Feb. 24th, 2008 11:32 pm (UTC)
There are also quite a few fanzines being published as PDFs:

http://efanzines.com/
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[info]xwho wrote:
Feb. 25th, 2008 12:35 am (UTC)
webzines
once upon a time at the end of the 20th century i felt the urge to read the fanzines i liked in the 80's. since i had access to internet i thought: hey, all of these zines must be in/on the web! after all, the scifi fans are first to embrace the future. ya would at least tend to think so...alas, to my astonishment i wasn't able to find any fanzine on/in the web. i tried anvil, ansible, file770, texas sf inquirer, holier than thou etc nope, nada!
i wrote a bitter commentary to some zine i found after extensive surfing, and complained how hypocritical we all are. we read/write about the future but when the future knocks on our doorway we don't open the door. apart from file770 there is no zine i remember on/in the web. reading your blog about this subject the wrath i felt at the time resurfaced again. and nobody tell me time is a factor/problem. producing a fanzine is much more time consuming (i am talking from my own experience) than producing a homepage. registering a domain name seems also a insurmountable obstacle to most.
talking about spaceships but not being able to produce a html page...duh!
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[info]fishlifter wrote:
Feb. 25th, 2008 10:27 am (UTC)
Re: webzines
I've no idea why you wouldn't have been able to find Ansible online. If you still want to, try here: http://news.ansible.co.uk/ (Although for Hugo purposes it's now eligible as a semi-prozine rather than a fanzine.)

Also, as [info]webmaven has commented above, anyone who's interested in what [info]grrm describes as 'traditional' fanzines will be able to find a lot of them at www.efanzines.com -- which has been up for a number of years, hosted by Bill Burns. It includes archives of some older material as well as frequent issues of a fair few new titles.

A pretty small number of us still choose for various reasons to produce fanzines only on paper; others put them out on paper initially, followed by electronic distribution. But many people do now publish their fanzines solely or primarily on the web, as well of course as those people who fulfil the same impulse by blogging etc. Most weren't doing it ten years ago when you went looking, I suspect, but they are now. If you read some of the newer titles like Vegas Fandom Weekly or Askance you'll see there's been a lot of discussion about new forms of fanzine publication; I hope you enjoy them.
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[info]cedunkley wrote:
Feb. 26th, 2008 07:11 am (UTC)
Pat's Fantast Hotlist is a daily stop on my Internet rounds. And yes, even this lifelong NY Giants fan can forgive his main character flaw: Dallas Cowboy Fan. It is nice to see someone so lost in terms of sports teams present such an outstanding Fantasy blog.

For those who haven't ventured into Pat's musings online, you are missing out.

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[info]danniebrown wrote:
Feb. 26th, 2008 01:32 pm (UTC)
Pat Rocks - Deep Magic
I totally agree with what George said about Pat's Fantasy Blog, and the guy is also a really nice one too. He deserves my vote (and yours) at 100%.

There was a really great webzine a few years back, can't recall the name now, but it really was of great quality, I think it had to be stopped though because of a lack of enough subscriptions. Oh yes, the name was Deep Magic, I remember it now.

I wish I could be as talented as the deep magic team or even Pat to have one E-zine myself.

Nadine
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[info]sleigh wrote:
Feb. 26th, 2008 09:36 pm (UTC)
Pat's Fantasy Hotlist certainly is deserving of a Hugo look, I'd agree!
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[info]bookswede wrote:
Feb. 27th, 2008 04:32 pm (UTC)
bookswede
Congrats to Pat for getting your vote! As the first, and, for a long time, only blog I visited he gets mine, too ;) Special thanks to La Gringa for naming me as one she also thinks is just as worthy! Wow, that's a very cool moment, particularly since the blog has been around less than a year! :) Chuffed. Now I have more mundane, less thrilling things to do! (When someone asks you to do something, and the words "refreshingly unoriginal" are mentioned, it's not a good sign!) Cool post. ~Chris The Book Swede
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[info]kryss_labryn wrote:
Apr. 2nd, 2008 11:46 pm (UTC)
Speaking of Fans...
Hello George!

I'm actually a big fan of some work you did quite some time ago now, the "Beauty and the Beast" television series (amongst other of your works, notably the Fire & Ice series), and over on one of our regular lists, the question has arisen (after a recent sharing of your forum discussions in around 1994 of some of the behind-the-scenes things-- fascinating insights, btw!) as to whether or not you might still pop into the fandom every now and then.

So I thought I'd ask you *grin*. I assume no one involved at the time would ever have thought that fans would be celebrating the 20th anniversary of a series that barely lasted 2 1/2 seasons, so I'm not going to ask you the standard "Did you ever think..?" questions. But do you ever recall those years (without prompting from geeks such as myself *grin*)? And do you ever still pop into the fandom and see what we're up to?

Just wondering, because here we are, 20 years later, trying to spot you in the cafe in "When The Bluebird Sings", lol.

Thanks for some great writing, man!
~Kryss
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