Sunday, May 11, 2008

Fanzines Beget Blogs

That's Roger Ebert's theory, at any rate. He says so on his blog. Link via Test Pattern.

Roger Ebert's Journal: Fanzines beget blogs: "Fanzines were mimeographed magazines that were circulated by mail among science fiction fans in the days before the internet. They still are, for all I know, although now they're generated by computer printers. I first learned about them in a 1950s issue of Amazing Stories and eagerly sent away 10 or 20 cents to Buck and Juanita Coulson in Indiana, whose Yandro was one of the best and longest-running of them all. Overnight, I was a fan, although not yet a BNF (big name fan). It was a thrill for me to have a LOC (letter of comment) published on such issues as the demise of BEMs (bug-eyed monsters), and soon I was publishing my own fanzine, named Stymie."

2 comments:

Todd Mason said...

Not exactly the first to suggest that, y'know.

I'm reminded of Homer Simpson, back in the first decade of the cartoon: "Oh, the Internet is on COMPUTERS now..." Between fanzines and other personal/underground/club press, government publications and directories, and other odd and/or useful publications, he was less wrong than he was meant to be...

Brent McKee said...

I know I started out publishing a small Diplomacy zine (called Making Love In A Canoe). I liked the writing part, but wasn't exactly crazy about adjudicating the Diplomacy games (maybe because I was so bad at it). Then along came Blogger and suddenly I don't have to adjudicate games (and incidentally, thanks to online ads I'm making more money than I ever made doing a zine).