By Sandra Bond: Faanfiction! (Not to be confused with fanfiction.)

Stories written by sf fans, published for sf fans, and with fans as characters and fandom as a setting. Those are pretty much the only parameters; apart from that, anything else goes. And over the seventy years from 1939 to 2009, in the heyday of science fiction fanzines, anything else did.

Charles Burbee shows that fandom could — after a fashion – survive even a nuclear holocaust; Jim Barker and Kevin Smith depict a fan forever trapped in the prison of an unending convention; Chris Hughes and Terry Carr (writing as Carl Brandon) give us fandom’s take on Lewis Carroll and on J. G. Ballard.

This anthology, fully illustrated throughout, collects fifteen tales and a comic strip with fans and fandom as their theme, all originally published in fanzines — many of them among the most notable of their day, such as Quandry, Orion, Quip and This Never Happens. They go to show the countless entertaining changes that can be rung on the old adage: “The proper study of fankind is fan”.

This year’s Corflu fanthology (as usual with Corflu) is free to all members, including supporting members. Supporting membership just £15 UK or $20 US. See corflu.org for details.