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Fandom Harvest

Terry Carr

ISBN 978-1-913451-28-8

A generous helping of Terry Carr’s fine fanwriting selected by Terry Carr himself, with an introduction by Bob Silverberg, illustrations throughout by Grant Canfield, and an afterword by John-Henri Holmberg, who first published Fandom Harvest through his Laissez Faire Press in 1986. Reissued as an Ansible Editions ebook for the TAFF site on 1 May 2019. Cover art by Grant Canfield. 82,000 words.

With thanks to Carol Carr, Bob Silverberg, Grant Canfield and John-Henri Holmberg for permission and encouragement to produce this ebook reissue. See also the new collection Fandom Harvest II (2019).

From the 1986 Introduction

And fandom is fun for him, today as it was thirty years ago, which is why he can move serenely from a panel on contemporary trends in the science fiction novel to one on contemporary trends in mimeograph technology and be perfectly at home – charming, informative, amusing – at either one. The present fat volume of his contribution to fannish literature (which must be less than one percent of his entire fannish corpus) demonstrates that. You can open the book anywhere and find a vital, engaging record of a lively mind’s activities. Whether reading of the old Berkeley fan crowd – a fannish Doonesbury populated by quasi-real characters, “Ron” and “Boob” and “Miri” and “Carl” and the rest – or hearing tales of his surrealistic conversations with the implausible but quite real Sidney Coleman, or stumbling with astonishment into the audacious piece that offers Sergeant Saturn speaking in the voice of T. O’Conor Sloane, you will not find a paragraph that is less than delightful. There is a fine but useful distinction, now sadly neglected, between the amateur and the amateurish. The pieces in this book show a magnificent amateur at work who is never at all amateurish. It is an amazing performance. In its fifty-odd years of existence fandom has produced a good many masters of fannish prose, but only a handful of titans, and Terry Carr is one of them.

Bob Silverberg