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Ascience-fiction fanzine is an amateur or semi-professionalmagazine published by members ofscience-fiction fandom, from the 1930s to the present day. They were one of the earliest forms offanzine, within one of which the term "fanzine" was coined, and at one time constituted the primary type of science-fictional fannish activity ("fanac").
The first science-fiction fanzine,The Comet, was published in 1930 by the Science Correspondence Club inChicago. The term "fanzine" wascoined byRuss Chauvenet in the October 1940 issue of his fanzineDetours.[1] "Fanzines" were distinguished from "prozines", that is, all professionalmagazines. Prior to that, the fan publications were known as "fanmags" or "letterzines".
Traditionally, science-fiction fanzines were (and many still are) available for "the usual", meaning that a sample issue will be mailed on request; to receive further issues, a reader sends a "letter of comment" (LoC) about the fanzine to the editor. The LoC might be published in the next issue: some fanzines consisted almost exclusively of letter columns, where discussions were conducted in much the same way as they are in internetnewsgroups andmailing lists, though at a relatively slow pace.
Since 1955, the annualWorldcon has awardedHugo Awards forBest Fanzine; awards forBest Fan Writer andBest Fan Artist were added in 1967 and have continued since then.
During the 1970s and 1980s, some fanzines—especiallysercon (serious and constructive) zines devoted to science fiction andfantasy criticism, and newszines such asLocus—became more professional journals, produced bydesktop publishing programs andoffset printing. These new magazines were labeled "semiprozines", and were eventually sold rather than traded, and paid their contributors. Some semiprozines publish original fiction. The Hugo Awards recognized semiprozines as a separate category from fanzines in 1984 afterLocus won the award for best fanzine several years running (SeeHugo Award for Best Semiprozine). Well-known semiprozines includeLocus,Ansible,The New York Review of Science Fiction, andInterzone.
Amateur press associations (APAs) publish fanzines made up of the contributions of the individual members collected into an assemblage or bundle called anapazine.
The first science-fiction APA was theFantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA) formed by a group of science-fiction fans in 1937. Some APAs are still active as hardcopy publications, and some are published as virtual "e-zines", distributed on theinternet.
The term "fanzine" is also used to refer to fan-created magazines concerning other topics: the earliestrock-and-roll fanzines were edited by science-fiction fans. A significant part of modern computer/Web/Internet slang, abbreviations, etc. is derived from the jargon of the fanzine fans. Seefanzine,fanspeak.
The fanzine movement is now well represented on the Web; seewebzine.
Fanzine readers and producers naturally gather atscience fiction conventions, but there are also small conventions dedicated to fanzines. The first fanzine-only annual convention was Autoclave, held by a Detroit-based fan group for several years in the 1970s. In 1984, the firstCorflu was held inBerkeley, California. A second convention,Ditto, started in Toronto in 1988. Both of these conventions continue to take place each year.
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