Novacon took place in the UK over the weekend, and one of the things that happened there is that Steve Green and Martyn Tudor re-launched their famous fanzine, Critical Wave. This being v2.0, it is available online at efanzines.com. At a panel on “electronic fan writing, threat or menace?” (or whatever it was called – helpfully live-blogged here by Feòrag) Steve explained that those icky bloggy things don’t do proper con reports, so he wanted to create a fanzine to carry them. So far so good, in that issue #1 contains reports on FantasyCon 2008, James Bacon’s ZombieCon and NewCon 4. Here’s looking forward to more.
By the way, I see from the Novacon web site that, after years of being paper only, the Novas are now open to electronic fanzines. I wonder why that could be?
Unless I’ve missed something, the Novas are still paper-only. It’s just that, for several years, they’ve taken the most liberal interpretation possible of ‘paper fanzine.’ Which amounts to ‘a number of paper copies of the fanzine must be known to exist somewhere.’ If the number is 1, and the somewhere is the Nova administrator’s mailbox, that’s fine.
It says right there on the Novacon home page: “The awards are now open to both Irish fandom and electronic fanzines. ”
However, Kevin, being an uber-geek, went and read the actual award rules and apparently that’s a fib, at least about the electronic bit. I’m not sure if you have to mail your Irish fans to Steve in order to prove that they exist.
And no, the existence of paper copies was not enough, because Emerald City was barred despite everyone knowing that paper copies existed. You could have a print run of 10,000, but if that all-important copy in the Nova administrator’s mailbox didn’t appear then you were not eligible.