If you point your browser to E-Fanzines you will find a wonderful world of interesting reading awaiting you. E-Fanzines is the world's foremost repository of fanzines. Basically, fanzines are amateur magazines that are published about a certain narrow aspect(s) that the editor is very interested in. In the case of E-Fanzines, these publications are gnerally done on Microsoft Word and then sent via attachment to Mr. Bill Burns who launched E-Fanzines in 2000 after seeing just how few fanzines were making full use of the Internet for instant world wide distribution.
You might be wondering just what a "fanzine" is. fanzines are amateur magazines published by folks with a strong interest in subjects that they believe are not being adequately covered by the mass media. The audience for these publications are other folks who feel the same way about those same subjects. In the case of E-Fanzines, Mr. Burns decided to limit it to science fiction. This was because when fanzines first began during the early 1930's, fanzines were of a science fictional nature. It was only later on that fanzines spread to other literary genres as well as to non-literary subjects such as movies and popular music.
Over the years, the E-Fanzines has grown to the point where it carries thousands of electronic fanzines. Some of these publications are reproductions of the paper fanzines from the pre-Inernet era. Others are fanzines that are solely Internet-based that could not possibly exuist as paper periodicals. One such fanzine is Fornax that this writer has been publishing since 2014. Fornax is a fanzine that carries a good deal of original fiction and essays by such writers as Robin Bright, David W. Landrum and Gerd Maximovic. The latter is one of the leading fans in the German-speaking world.
E-Fanzines also carrries fanzines that go against its policies. It carries, for instance, Guy H. Lillian III's long running fanzine review zine The Zine Dump (TZD). TZD routinely reviews fanzines that are not carried by E-Fanzines. When asked by this writer on why this is so, Bill Burns replied that, "The Zine Dump and eFanzines have two quite different philosophies. Guy actively pursues fanzines and reports on the ones he receives, including those which are paper-only, while I do not chase fanzine editors for submissions, but add a fanzine to the site only when requested by the editor. And if an editor has their own site, I generally add a link rather than duplicating the hosting."
There is a controversy among fanzine editors about whether or not fanzines should publish original fiction. As Mr. Burns put it in the aforementioned email, during the first few decades of fanzines, "few fanzines ran fiction, believing that there was no point in producing a pale imitation of the prozines, of which there were many at that time." However following the demise in 1980 of the long-running professional magazines Fantastic Stories, Galaxy and Galileo, and the subsequent decline of the remaining professional magazines, fanzines have become important outlets for publishing original fiction. However, with but few precious exceptions, such as Fornax, fanzine fiction is generally limited to short-short stories and generally shy away from longer works.
The world of fanzines is both fun and facinating. Whenever you have some spare time and in the mood for intellectual stimulation, it would behoove you to take a look at E-Fanzines and what it has to offer.
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