by Garth Spencer
From “Across the Fandomension" website, last updated February 28, 2026
NOTE: I am always looking for corrections, additions and updates; if you spot errors and omissions below, please contact me at [email protected] so that I can update this page. – G.S.
Some fans in different countries have taken the trouble to compile fanhistories, recording some of the funnier (or far from funny) stories about fans in action, their clubs and conventions, publications and small-group politics. For example:
Rob Hansen’s website of British fanhistory, titled Then; see https://ansible.uk/Then/
Damon Knight’s published book, The Futurians;
Frederik Pohl’s semi-autobiographical book, The Way the Future Was
Harry Warner’s histories, All Our Yesterdays and A Wealth of Fable (look up NESFA Press for this, and other publications)
Taral Wayne’s Canadian fanhistory The Great White Zine; see https://efanzines.com/Taral/TheGreatWhiteZine.pdf
Garth Spencer’s “I Guess You Had to Be There", by Garth Spencer, at https://fanac.org/Fan_Histories/Canada/
(Garth Spencer is slowly working on a more complete Canadian fanhistory, provisionally titled The Propellor Toque.)
SF fandom went through several stages after science fiction first emerged as a genre of entertainment in the 1920s; in different decades or generations, fans had different predominant interests. For a time, fans talked about First Fandom, Second Fandom, etc., but in correspondence with the late Harry Warner Jr. (who wrote two published volumes of fanhistory), he suggested that we simply talk about the changing dominant interests that fans displayed.
There was a stage when fans were talking about Serious and Constructive efforts, such as listing all the themes or plot devices were used in which SF works, or making up lists of SF clubs and publications and conventions.
Later attention shifted to fandom itself, and to having fun and doing neat stuff together. That was fannish fandom, prevailing roughly from the 1940s to the 1980s. Perhaps their attitude was "born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world is mad." Clubs and fanzines and conventions acquired many of their common features in this period, before media franchises and other SF-adjacent fandoms emerged.
(a previous version of the following appeared in the clubzine BCSFAzine, January 2021, in the column “It Is What It Is")
Is fanhistory a waste of time, a useful record, or practicing sociology without a license?
Along with fanpublishing, APAs, amateur fiction, ghoodminton and feghoots, Classic Fandom came up with fanhistories – stories about fans and clubs and conventions – some of which have been published professionally.
This may sound a bit self-important. History? About a juvenile hobby group? Only a few decades old?
When you realize that fandom in some form is almost a century old – and how the similarities and the differences between fandoms past and present can be important to you, and maybe your finances – then you might begin to realize why you might have a stake in fanhistory.
Of course the first works of fanhistory were a bit partisan, and maybe a bit juvenile. Some of the first works of fanhistory – Sam Moskowitz’ The Immortal Storm, and Francis Towner Laney’s Ah! Sweet Idiocy! – could be taken as overheated partisan accounts by young men who took their adolescent disputes much too seriously. Moskowitz was one of the earliest members of New York fandom in the 1930s, and made much of the political dispute by which some fans sought to exclude other fans from the Worldcon in 1939. (Bear in mind, this was a convention with only maybe 100 people attending.) Laney was an early member of the Los Angeles SF Society, and projected a lot of his preoccupations onto LASFS, which seems to have been a pretty average SF group of the time.
Maybe this isn’t so surprising. There is a saying that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 13 – an age when we may imprint on our first impressions of everything, from fantastic adventures onscreen, to fandom itself. I parodied this by commenting that the Golden Age of Fandom is 23 or so, when we may have a minimum of disposable income but a maximum of time and energy for new enthusiasms, ranging from dizzying new ideas ranging from libertarianism to socialism, to popular media, or to fandom, in whatever form we encounter it.
Possibly a first lesson to draw from fanhistory is that those who write it are those who have a stake in it … or who have an axe to grind. Or, maybe, the first lesson is that the earliest fans of science fiction and fantasy were very few and far between, young, broke, socially marginalized, and strongly driven to find like-minded people they could finally talk to.
More even-handed early fanhistories were written by Harry Warner, Jr., a newspaper editor who published All Our Yesterdays and A Wealth of Fable through NESFA Press; Damon Knight, who wrote The Futurians, largely about early New York fandom; and Frederik Pohl, whose biography, The Way the Future Was, revolved to a large extent around his participation in American fandom. Rob Hansen, in Britain, posted his fanhistories online under the title Then.
Another lesson seems to be that fan activity depends on amateur enthusiasm, or volunteer initiative. It seemed fairly clear, after reading some of these works, that what fans were and what they did rested very much on where individuals were ready to invest their time and attention. If individuals showed up to form a club, carry on activities ranging from costuming to fanzines to conventions, to write Serious and Constructive analyses of stories and the genre and even to index the frequency of SF tropes, to host talks by writers, or try to write themselves … everything that actually got done depended on the individuals involved. Sometimes the enthusiasm was there, but little competence. Sometimes there were highly competent people, but their enthusiasm was lacking.
The curious things about fandom in Canada were that fans were even more sparse than elsewhere, due to the country’s low population and its uneven settlement; and yet fans appeared in Canada as early as they appeared anywhere. Nils Helmer Frome in B.C. in the 1930s, for example; in the 1950s, Lesley Croutch in Ontario, Norm Clarke and Gina Ellis in Quebec, Harry Calnek in the Maritimes, and Norman G. Browne and the Hibited Men in Vancouver, among others.
Understandably the demographic distribution meant that as late as the 1950s, Canadian fans were largely relating to fandom by mail, or by meeting the nearest American fan groups.
The next lesson seemed to be that the bigger the population centres, the more people you could expect to develop an enthusiasm for SF, and thereby for fandom … but still as a fringe, a minority population.
The fannish sense of being a minority receded a lot, when fans could assemble in any numbers. Eventually some correspondents told me how the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Art Society, at the University of Alberta in the 1970s, became a hotbed of club activities, fanpublishing, and conrunning … precisely because a lot of male students met a lot of female students with SFnal interests.
By the 1970s and the 1980s, I thought, the level of correspondence and meetings between fans and clubs around the world – by fanzines and APAs and by private letters, as well as by convention attendance – had led to an impression of fandom as a community, almost a town or city, if a globally-distributed one.
I was told otherwise by the late Taral Wayne: he perceived that the division of one fandom into many began well before the 1970s. By his account, fandom had already shown the signs of a big city, including the emergence of local communities, to which people related more than they did to the whole municipality. But I get ahead of myself.
Taral was a member of Toronto fandom in the 1960s and 1970s, and a well-known fanartist for decades. His fanzines and his correspondence circulated around the world, he attended many eastern and Midwest conventions [at the least], and he wrote several fanhistorical articles, now posted as one volume online under the title The Great White Zine.
Many fundamental conditions changed in the 1960s. Mass media, such as films and radio serials, had always made token gestures toward science fiction and fantasy. When television arose, of course some broadcasting companies launched SF shows, but their popularity had unexpected effects. There are rumours of something called “Dalek fever" as a result of the long-running Dr. Who show. Then came Star Trek in 1966.
Bjo Trimble published a chronicle of what happened next, in her book The Good Ship Enterprise. The story as I know it may be shown by Worldcon attendance figures, from 1970 onwards. Where the attendance levels at Worldcons had grown to over 2,000 by the time of the second Torcon (Worldcon 1972), attendance levels began to skyrocket to over 8,000 in the 1980s.
Frederik Pohl had remarked that everything gets bigger over time. This certainly seemed to be the case for convention attendances, for fanzine copies and distributions, and for SF clubs. What could not be predicted was the great increase in fandom – or, at least, SF-adjacent fans – after Star Trek began to show up. Older fans found themselves quite outnumbered.
Another historical lesson: numbers count.
Older models of fan activity were also eclipsed. General-interest clubs became outnumbered by Star Trek clubs – and later, by clubs dedicated to one media franchise, or to one SF-adjacent interest such as comics, costuming, gaming, or filking. Conventions by and for “fannish" fans, conceived in substance as extended-family gatherings, were outnumbered by “media" conventions. Fanzines by and for “fannish" fans also found themselves outnumbered, by “fanzines" featuring amateur Trek fiction, which were offered for sale. (In a way, this recapitulated 1930s fanzines; at first they emulated newsstand pulp fiction magazines, as well as broke young fans could do so with spirit duplicators and mimeographs.)
Let me expand on this media convention model. Today we have a separate word for them, “gateshows", but it took surprisingly long to distinguish them.
To define how differently media conventions were conceived, let me refer to an early mimeographed edition of File 770 (which used to be a fanzine dedicated to fan news, and is now a website). Here I found an article about the conventions run in southern California by an alleged person called Doug Wright. This entity would come across a naïve SF club, and sell them on participating in a prepackaged, for-profit convention. It would make all the decisions about guests and venue and events, the fans would do all the work, and Wright would take all the profits.
The point is that Paramount – and other studios - appear to have adopted the Doug Wright model for their conventions, such as Creation Cons. (It took some time, but eventually someone filed a complaint that Creation Cons were not paying some fees required by the Canada Revenue Agency, so that Creation Cons withdrew from operations.)
There is a story, which I cannot substantiate, that some studios would deliberately schedule their conventions against fan-run conventions – in the same city at the same time, that is – and if the fans were attempting media conventions, require the advertised actors to show up at the studio-run convention. At least one convention in British Columbia may have ceased to function for this reason.
There are other stories like this, but you get the lesson: money talks.
The most Canadian things to happen in fandom began to happen in the mid-1970s.
One of the outcomes of the 1972 Worldcon in Toronto (Torcon II) is that a number of French-speaking fans met each other and thought it was time to organize. The result was a community of SF, fantasy and horror writers, editors, and small publishers, conducted entirely in French, mainly but not entirely in Quebec. Naturally they formed their own models of fanzines, semiprozines (such as Solaris), and small-press publishing. They set up their own congress (“Boréal"). They developed their own SF awards (such as the Prix Boréal). They conducted a good deal of communication and cross-pollination with like minds in Europe.
Of course all this went on in the 1970s, and (unsurprisingly) out of sight of English-Canadians.
The next stage was when Canadian-identity-fever hit fandom, specifically English-speaking SF fandom. The first I knew of it was when a correspondent in 1983 mentioned offhand a voting ballot for the “Canadian SF and Fantasy Awards" ... some time after the voting deadline. It took about five years of backing and filling to uncover and publish the story.
Canadian-identity-fever has to be explained, if you live in Britain or the United States. It is one thing for an individual not to know quite who he or she is; apparently, feeling we don’t know who we are was a recurring public issue in Canada in the 20th century, and it recurred again in the mid- to late 1970s. Some of the same people concerned with Canadian identity (not coincidentally, students at Canadian universities) were also science fiction fans.
Maybe you can compare this concern with the concern to represent black, or African, or gender-diverse identities in science fiction.
First, there was Linda Ross-Mansfield’s attempt at a cross-Canada APA. Then, Robert Runté from the University of Alberta started New Canadian Fandom, a Canadian newszine (a fanzine dedicated to news about fandom). And
Then, in 1979, some English teachers in the Maritimes decided there should be a Canadian award for science fiction. The first five years of the award were marked by some repeated failures of communication. This is ancient history now. Today, the Aurora Awards (renamed in 1987) are a well-run and diverse set of fan-voted awards, presented each August with an online ceremony. A national committee (the Canadian SF and Fantasy Association) administers the award, and there is a website ( https://www.csffa.ca/).
The foregoing superficial history sketches out what many of us are alluding to, when we talk about current issues in fandom. The lessons may be of use to you, and you may find more lessons when you go deeper.
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