Long, long ago in a fandom far, far away, our small social group did not exist by conventions alone. In fact, it barely existed by conventions at all. There weren't any. Well, maybe one a year, if you had the means to cross infinite space to get to it, but it was hardly the glue that was going to bind any nascent body together. It was fanzines that acted as the glue.

At least, that is the myth. I'm not sure it's the whole story. Remember, in those days many fans first emerged through the letter columns of the professional magazines, or, a little later, through reading the occasional fan columns that appeared in those magazines (in Trapdoor 18, Robert Lichtman remarks: 'To my thinking, the top three prozine fan columns of all time are Bloch's "Fandora's Box", Rog Phillips' "Clubhouse" and Walt [Willis's "The Electric Fan"] in Nebula'). A magazine would hence appear a natural and familiar forum for communication. Particularly as fandom, then as now, was a haunt for shy, spotty adolescent boys who probably found it much easier to communicate in print than face to face - human nature doesn't change all that much. Not only that, but a lot of what those shy adolescent males wrote (much more then than now) was fiction, and whether it was meant seriously or not a magazine, even an amateur magazine, legitimised their efforts.

Be that as it may, the first fanzines did serve to bring together groups of fans and provide a sense of shared experience even though the members of the group were geographically scattered. Fans wrote about fans, those they saw on a regular basis and those encountered in a rare meeting, and what they wrote introduced those same people, those same distinctive characteristics or amusing traits or irritating habits or catch phrases, to the rest of the world of fandom. People who might never meet physically were not strangers to each other.

This is still clearly a part of the picture today. Jae Leslie Adams says as much in Zighn 1 when she comments about receiving an issue of Arthur Hlavaty's Derogatory Reference:

I wondered briefly where he got my name, sat down to read, and realised I had received a long newsy personal letter from someone I haven't met. Well. This gave me the first sense of having some possible engagement to a wider world out there.

And this sense, that the personality of a fan, the constituents of friendship, are found as much in the writing as in the person, is confirmed in Tom Sadler's remarks on the death of Bill Rotsler. Writing in his zine The Reluctant Famulus 51, Tom says:

My reaction is hard to describe. I wrote elsewhere that it felt as if I had been punched in the stomach but that isn't quite accurate. After all, to the best of my recollection, I had never met Bill Rotsler in person and really only knew him mostly through all his artwork in fanzines and occasional articles which mentioned him.

I'll come back to Bill Rotsler's death later in this article, it was, perhaps inevitably, one of the overwhelming themes that recurred in the fanzines under review here, and the response to his death is interesting in what it says about the dissemination of fannish personality and the role of the fanzine. But for now, as I ramble back towards my quasi-historical comments, I'll simply say that the concentration on the written personality could not last for long, because it didn't need to last for long. Fan groups began to congregate and grow in various big cities. Conventions proliferated and grew larger. Fans even co-operated on fan funds - TAFF, GUFF, DUFF - to emphasise the transnational nature of fandom. The face-to-face meeting, the actual physical contact between fans, became the norm not the exception. Surely in such an atmosphere fanzines could not continue to provide the social glue? Well, to an extent, they could: those participating in the fan funds, for instance, did so almost entirely on the basis of a written persona. But the impetus behind fanzines had changed somewhat. They had become a part of the landscape of fandom: a fan either wrote for or published fanzines, it was what one did. New faneds 'pubbed' their first 'ish' not just for communication, not just to spread the glue, but to pay dues. If you partook of fandom you should contribute to it also.

That was a social pressure that continued well into the 1970s, at least, but already more changes were occurring in fandom. Media fandom emerged, and then diverged from its parent so rapidly that light from some of its further-flung satellites may not reach the rest of us for several millennia yet. Not that most of us are even looking. Convention organisation became an end in itself, the more baroque the better ('if it ain't baroque, fix it'), and as long as a spell of gophering serves to pay dues to fandom there is no need for fanzines. Fanzines have lost their centrality in fan culture, and over the last twenty years they have collapsed and risen from the ashes more times than I care to count.

But if fanzines are no longer that mythical glue that binds us all together, if we no longer need to pay our dues by rushing out a few scrappy twiltone pages, why on earth do people continue to produce the damned things? I ask that question as I look at the rather startling yellow and black cover of Outworlds 69, which proudly proclaims itself 'The 28th Annish!' Twenty eight years! By the time I entered fandom it was already older than Attitude when it folded. When it first hit the streets, Star Trek was just a failed TV series and conventions were something fanzine fans went to once or maybe twice a year (except they weren't 'fanzine fans' then, just 'fans'). What keeps a fanzine like this going for 28 years?

In the case of Bill Bowers it looks like enthusiasm, pure and simple. This whole issue gushes with it. We witness a life shaped around the fanzine: when Bowers talks about temping and (lack of) job security and health cover, even about marriage and separation, it is in terms of providing the cash to publish another issue. But the enthusiasm that fuels this issue cannot be the same one that kept the fanzine going for all those years. This issue is filled with Bowers's discovery of the Internet. He talks about it at length in his introduction, even introducing a symbol to distinguish those articles which came to him via email. He sounds at times like an addict drawn only reluctantly away from his screen, and a note from Skel gently chides him: 'No point in doing something for pleasure when you really want to be doing something else'. Still he persists with the fanzine, though two of the articles seem to have been lifted directly from the Web. One, Stephen Leigh talking about creating the world of his novel Dark Water's Embrace, has been set out as if it is his Web Page (and may actually be, I haven't tried to check). The other, by Chris Sherman, is based on a familiar exercise once you're on the Web, searching for a name. In this case the name is 'Bill Bowers', and Sherman rather cleverly attempts to build one person out of all the different Bowers thrown up by the search. Nevertheless, the best article, at least in the sense of being the most deeply felt and therefore the one that most communicates feeling, is the most traditional in format, structure and language: Wm Breiding's 'Out Into the Woods', which is effectively a rediscovery of his father.

Mimosa may actually be around half the age of Outworlds, but it feels older. In part this goes back to a couple of years before Mimosa was even thought of when, as the Lynchs reveal in this issue (22), Dave Kyle was complaining about the lack of fan history in fanzines. Well, there's enough in the way of dodgy memories or interesting reprints in an average issue of Mimosa (which this is) to satisfy anyone. But it's not just the fan history that makes Mimosa feel old; it's that all their terms of reference are to the age of Forry Ackerman and Walt Willis. An article this time by the comics writer who created Men in Black is the sort of behind-the-scenes, this-is-how-it-really-is glimpse of Hollywood that would have been a pleasure wherever it was published, but here it feels out of place, an intrusion from a different time. Don't get me wrong; this concentration on the past is not a cause for criticism, though it is not always a cause for delight either. Walt Willis is a good writer, but the gleanings from his old correspondence files give him little opportunity to write and anyway demand of the reader far more awareness of context than most of them are likely to have. How many of us who weren't there at the time know anything about Lee Hoffman's horse? As for Forry Ackerman, 'Mr Science Fiction', this may be no more than blind irrational prejudice, but I've always found him tiresome and self-inflated. I must admit that Dave Kyle's description of him turning up to the first Worldcon, in New York in 1939, wearing a green cloak when all around were in sober suits and homburgs, delighted me, though not I suspect for exactly the same reason that this ludicrous sight delighted Dave Kyle. (As an aside I must say that I have no great brief for Dave Kyle either, but I have enjoyed his personal histories of fandom from before most of us were born, they have the right mixture of anecdote and context to make them stand out if everything around them didn't so resolutely belong to the same era also.)

The concentration on fan history that appears to be Mimosa's entire raison d'etre is worthy, and one senses that what prompts Nicki and Richard Lynch to keep producing their fanzine is a variant on paying dues. The past is important to fandom, and the bigger we grow the more it does become another country where they do things differently. Dave Kyle's world is one where fandom was small enough for most people to know (even if only in the sense of knowing the written persona) most other people; everyone was and had to be directly involved in what was going on. The more we grow, the easier it is for people to be uninvolved, to partake in fandom merely as consumers, as audience, so it is worth remembering when things did matter. The problem is that if all you have is backward-looking there is no sense of the immediacy of fandom, that it is on-going, that despite the inactive masses screaming 'feed me' there is still an active centre to fandom that is dynamic and involving.

Two other fanzines of long standing feature reprints from those long-ago days. There's a typically fine article by Susan Wood in Outworlds 69, while Trapdoor 18 has 'The Baxter Street Irregular', a portrait of Elmer Perdue by Charles Burbee (my god, they don't make names like that any more). Now the names of Perdue and Burbee have floated across my ken from time to time, but in truth I know little of them. They were significant fans of their time but why, I could not say. In this article, however, they live, there is an immediacy that wouldn't be there if someone now was reminiscing about the incident recounted here.

There are no such reprints in The Reluctant Famulus 51, and Tom Sadler's introduction (the longest article in the fanzine) is as up to date as a discussion of TAFF in the light of his losing the race. It's a good piece, too, as imbued with the spirit of TAFF as any I have seen recently: 'Which brings me to the other reason I wish I had won TAFF: I would really like to have seen what sort of report I would have written'. That sort of fannish curiosity, the value of the word as the mediator of experience, is something that seems to spring directly from earlier days of fan writing. Sadler, like Lichtman and Bowers and the Lynchs, likes to feature older fans among his contributors (in this case most notably Terry Jeeves), probably out of continuity with their own youth in fandom (a fan editor of a later generation, Geri Sullivan, similarly features contributors of her own fannish generation in her fanzine, Idea), and probably also because the spirit brought to the fanwriting chimes most closely with the editor's own sense of what makes a good fanzine. But what ties The Reluctant Famulus 51 together with Trapdoor 18 and Outworlds 69 is the death of Bill Rotsler. It's not the obituaries alone that give these fanzines an air of mournfully looking back (Trapdoor also has obituaries of Dan Curran by Bill Donaho and of Ted Pauls by Steve Stiles, but these don't dominate the issue the way Rotsler does, generating eight pieces the best of which is a very moving article by Carol Carr on 'How to Disappoint a Sick Friend: An Instruction Manual'). It's more the sense that Rotsler was perhaps the last fan to be defined as a person so comprehensively through his involvement with fanzines (everyone remembers his generosity in donating fanart, everyone has a fund of Rotsler drawings to illustrate their pieces), and also the last fanzine fan who so easily crossed the generations, whose involvement never flagged (he was as active, as ready with his contributions, up to the time of his death as he had been in the days of his youth). The passing of Rotsler, therefore, marks the passing of a fannish era. Though it is not just the faneds of that era who mourn; Idea 11 concludes 'In Memory of Bill Rotsler', and one gets a distinct impression that more might have been done in his memory if the fanzine had not been going to press at the time of his death.

Idea is very much in the tradition of these older, longer-established fanzines. For a start it is big, 74 pages in issue 11, with a emphasis on long, carefully thought-out and developed articles, the longest and best of which, 'Ashes, Dust, 9 Electric Razors' by Geri herself also, coincidentally, is built around a funeral and its ramifications. Even without Rotsler, there is an air of looking back that flows through all the fanzines I've considered so far. It's even there in Dave Langford's 1997 Eastercon GoH speech, which is reprinted here and which is largely culled from some 30 years of fanzines.

(As an aside, I note that Langford quotes from a Greg Pickersgill review of Dave Womack's fanzine, Viridiana, written in 1970:

Jesus Christ I'm reading this bloody thing now and I can't believe it. It's worthless. It gets Brit fandom a bad name it hardly deserves, bad as it is. Every copy ought to be sought out and burned, with Womack securely roped down in the middle. My fury knows no bounds.

Or, as Dorothy Parker nearly said, 'This fanzine shouldn't be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force.' I read that and I think: Jesus Christ I'm doing this all wrong. I'm being too soft, too gentle, I allow my sweet nature to flow through these fanzine reviews far too much. A little more iron is what is needed.)

It is, I think, no coincidence that all the fanzines I've looked at so far are American. There simply aren't any British fanzines that compare in age. We have Dave Langford's Ansible, of course, which has now reached an incredibly high issue number (and a respectably high number of Hugo wins) largely due to its monthly schedule, but the total page count to date would hardly match a single issue of, say, Idea. And we have the granddaddy of them all, Erg, whose issue 141 is also the '39th Anniversary Issue', which knocks Outworlds into a cocked hat. But where I have commented that the American fan editors are looking back into the past, Erg is still there. In look and feel, in typeface and content, Erg today must be pretty much the same as when Terry Jeeves rolled the first stencil into the typewriter back in 1960. I was going to describe this as a fannish Heritage Centre, The 1950s Fandom Experience, but that would be wrong. This isn't a recreation of the past, but rather the 1950s is still Terry Jeeves's present. He found what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it back in 1960, and he has carried on doing exactly that regardless of how the world around him has changed. So he writes about model making and pulp magazines, while Ken Slater chunters away in the background, and all is right with the world. Still, one does wonder why he still does it since the world of the pulps that he still inhabits seems so inimical to him: no story or magazine escapes without some scathing remark. In a piece on the first issue of Infinity Science Fiction, for example, he concludes: 'An entertaining and easy-reading selection, but nothing really outstanding to stick in the memory cells'. This despite the fact that that issue of that magazine included Arthur C. Clarke's 'The Star', a story now generally recognised as one of the great classics of the genre and surely one of the most memorable short sf stories ever written. What were the fans of those days really looking for in the fiction they adored?

I suppose in the longevity stakes we do have the '20th Anniversary Edition' of Gross Encounters from Alan Dorey, but it hardly seems to count. This, after all, is the first issue in some five years, and it had grown somewhat sporadic by that time anyway. More than that, Gross Encounters 20 is not the Gross Encounters that won Nova Awards back when it were all fields round here. To say this is a shadow of its former self would be to imply that shadows have rather less substance than they normally do. This is no more than a feeble cry of 'Remember me?' from someone who has grown away from fandom, and it totally lacks the engagement, acidic or bumptious as it might have been, with fandom or, come to that, with anything else.

To stand beside these behemoths, I have a selection of newer writers, and where most of the long-established fanzines come from American writers, most of the newer ones to hand are from British fans. The first thing to be said about them all is that, whereas the heavyweight American fanzines are bursting at the seams with long, carefully crafted articles, it is difficult to find any article in the newer zines that manages to stretch more than about a page and most editors and contributors seem happiest with a hurried soundbite before rushing on. The main exception to this rule is Charmed Lives from Meredith MacArdle, now up to its second issue, and the reason is that it is the only one of these fanzines with a clear agenda. This is an outpouring of pleasure at the work of Diana Wynne Jones - though I have to say, all personal prejudice to one side, that the best piece in the zine is an examination of Lucy Boston's Green Knowe books by Maureen Speller. The point is that the contributors are writing about an enthusiasm - and enthusiasm is the one common factor in all the American fanzines I've examined so far - and they have something of substance to say about it. This in itself is an encouragement to write at some length, and while length alone is no guarantee of quality the thought needed to sustain a longer piece tends to suggest that if the article works at all you are likely to get something from it. Where writing is of the blink-and-you-miss-it school, you are just as likely to miss the point or the memorability of it.

I know why Meredith MacArdle has published her fanzine: to celebrate the work of Diana Wynne Jones. I suspect I know why people like Geri Sullivan and Terry Jeeves and Robert Lichtman and Bill Bowers and Tom Sadler publish their fanzines: it is something they enjoy doing in and of itself, an engagement through the typewriter or the word processor, the duplicator or the photocopier, with the fandom to which they are committed. The fanzine is an expression of enthusiasm, and the old heavyweights have survived as long as they have because producing the fanzine has become a way of sustaining that enthusiasm. But can the same be said of some of the newer fanzines? What sort of enthusiasm could have led to Tobes Valois's The Strange Delusions of a Drunken Fuckwit or Debbi Kerr's Did I Say That Out Loud?

The Strange Delusions of a Drunken Fuckwit 3.5 is the archetypal example of the soundbite fanzine: nothing in it longer than a paragraph. It is also a perfect written representation of Tobes Valois himself: rolling, slurred, half-incoherent and often very funny. I've never known anyone who appears as drunk as Tobes does, even when he's stone-cold sober. Which makes this a clear example of the way fanzines have traditionally captured in words the personality of fans. But I can't imagine such an idea would ever penetrate the fog of Tobes's mind, or, if it did, that he would want to pursue such an action. No, I think what makes him produce a fanzine - despite the dismissive way he talks of them as 'just handed out to people that I think may get a laugh out of reading them' - is altogether stranger and more unexpected. In one of the most sustained pieces of writing in this issue (140 words) he begins: 'Fandom, I thought it was a nice place to visit and I realised the other day that I've been living there for four years' and he concludes: 'I will be loccing and sending fanzines in trade any day now, honestly'. I think the astonishing truth is that Tobes is paying dues.

Debbi Kerr might also be paying dues. After all, she has been in and around fandom for something like 10 years, as she admits, and has apparently never felt moved to commit a fanzine before. And it is not as if she has anything special to say. Despite an introductory piece that talks about wanting to write and attending Creative Writing classes, this was an ambition that was never pursued and here, where she does give herself the chance to write, most of what is in the fanzine takes the form of inconsequential anecdote that really doesn't build towards any sustained point. Even the longest passage in the fanzine, an account of an accident-prone trip to London that turns out to have been 24 hours too early for the meeting she was supposed to attend, is friendly and chatty but still leaves you at the end saying; 'Yes? So?' But then, she was involved with organising the British Corflu, a fanzine-centred convention that seems to have pushed both her and Valois into print.

The other two new British fanzines I have before me both seem to have ambitions to be more structured than Fuckwit or Loud, though they do fall a little short in achievement. When Chris Hill begins The Ubiquitous They with 'special thanks to Maureen Kincaid Speller for … not laughing when I told her I was doing a fanzine, 3 days after telling her I was unlikely ever to do a fanzine', it does raise the question: what changed his mind? Unfortunately, the question is never answered. My copy is further marred (and I don't know if this is common to the entire print run or some peculiarity, like a misprinted stamp, that might eventually make this copy worth a fortune) by a strange deformity of the first two articles. In each case, you read to the end of the first page and reach what seems like the midway point of the article, turn the page and find yourself inexplicably reading the same article from the beginning again - except that this time (the second page lacks the inch or so of space given over to the title) the whole thing reaches a sort of conclusion that seems overly rushed and short given the build-up that has gone before. Neither of these are particularly earth-shattering articles, though the second about Chris's childhood home was shaping up to be quite interesting; but both would have been much better if they had had the full two pages that seemed to have been set aside for them. The most interesting piece - which seems like a companion to that second truncated article (and again it feels abbreviated, as if it should have been expanded, given more detail) - introduces the convoluted relationships within Hill's extended family. This goes back to the idea of creating a written persona and I suspect that it was this piece that he really wanted to write, that finally tipped the balance to make him want to produce a fanzine: this is the fan editor not paying dues but making introductions.

Which may be something of what lies behind Andrew Butler's debut effort, Dramatic Obscurity, also. Butler is no stranger to print, though his work is generally to be found in Vector or in more academic journals. This first fanzine, therefore, has a feel of being made up of casual jottings (including a couple of poems which, frankly, have not been common fare in fanzine for a lot longer than I can remember) which wouldn't really have a home in any of his more usual outlets. There's a piece about the irritation of having a telephone answering machine, another about a mystery involving his office phone, yet another about buying a bicycle, and still one more about being a houseguest, all of which are light and readable but they are too short to really call them articles as if they ran out of steam after a page, or maybe as if they were overblown fillers. Unfortunately, unless you are Tobes, you can't really make a fanzine out of fillers alone. But the only real honest-to-god article in Dramatic Obscurity is 'Payment in Kind' by Stephen Reeve (a guest slot that means that Butler alone of all these debutants has not settled for a perzine); yet Reeve's article, an extended moan about the perversity of university contracts and the problems of converting work into pay, says nothing that Butler has not said himself. Which leaves one wondering whether Reeve is actually a pseudonym and this is a perzine after all or, if not, why Butler felt the need to get someone else to say the one thing that might have given his fanzine real purpose.

Now, Butler mentions a couple of fans and includes a book review, Hill mentions a couple of fans and write about book reviewing, Kerr mentions a couple of fans and a fanzine or two, Tobes mentions a couple of fans and the odd convention, but the one thing none of them write about is fandom. In fact, despite Kerr's ten years in fandom, there is no real sense that any of them are really comfortable within or even aware of the traditions and practices and personalities of fanzines. Which is in startling contrast to the lone American debut I have here, Jae Leslie Adams's Zighn. As she puts it:

Basic axioms of 'fan writing' - (1) The subject of fannish discourse is not SF but the community of fans, 'fandom' (2) The social network must be reinforced by the naming of individual fans.

It is the way of Corflu that the Guest of Honour is chosen by lot from those who attend, and at her first Corflu which was also her first convention Adams was so chosen. It was a sudden and total immersion in things fannish that is replicated in this fanzine. Okay, she has some years of apa writing behind her (but so has Butler, and Kerr was in TWP for a while at least), but this is her first fanzine and it knowingly fits right in with the same community that has been producing, say, Outworlds for the last 28 years. As she puts it:

[Fan writers] know people are reading them, and their friends write back to them and help create this sense of living within a web of meaningful social interaction - communication.

Assuming Zighn is typical of new American zines (and it seems to be, from what I've seen), and assuming The Strange Delusions of a Drunken Fuckwit and Did I Say That Out Loud? and The Ubiquitous They and Dramatic Obscurity are typical of new British zines (which, again, they seem to be) there seems a fundamental difference of intent here. American fan writers seem happy to join a community whose manners and mores they familiarise themselves with, which may be why some longstanding members of that community have survived so long, and why reprinted articles from long ago and the very latest efforts of new writers have equal currency and validity. British fan writers seem to reinvent the community each time so there is little sense of the past, and that may be why longevity is such a rare thing over here.

Even so, whether it is established or reinvented, at the core of all these fanzines, new or old, is that idea of community. A myth, I said at the beginning of this article. But we invent the myths we need.