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The Compact Ella Parker
Ella Parker
ISBN 978-1-913451-89-9
Ella Parker was a prominent, London-based British fan of the 1950s and 1960s who published the highly regarded fanzine Orion from 1958 to 1962 and the later Compact in 1963-1964. Which should explain the ebook title The Compact Ella Parker. She was a founder member of the Science Fiction Club of London and of the British Science Fiction Association, and chaired the 1965 London Worldcon.
As a follow-up to his presentation of her 1961 North American trip report with third-party fannish commentary as The Harpy Stateside (2021), Rob Hansen has compiled this selection of Ella Parker’s other fan writing both before and after the famous excursion. As he writes in his Foreword, “I wasn’t sure that Ella – never the most prolific of fanwriters – had written enough to warrant such a volume but, happily, I was wrong. Taken together, the pieces she produced are the best account that we have of London fandom as it was in the first half of the 1960s. They also offer an interesting look into the larger fannish politics and convention issues of that period.” As a bonus there’s a long report, crammed with sense of wonder, of her attendance at the launch of Apollo 16 in 1972.
In February 2025, new revelations about Ella’s past necessitated the addition of an Afterword to this volume.
Ebook added to the TAFF site on 2 August 2022; updated February 2025. Roughly 67,000 words, with cover and interior artwork by Atom (Arthur Thomson) plus a few photographs.
