A few weeks back as I was working on my collection of SF pulp magazines (I’m on a quest to collect the first issues of SF & F print magazines) I was once again prompted to ask – why weren’t there any magazines published in South Africa?
The focus of my collection includes restricting it to “English Language” ‘zines. Without that and a few other restrictions (has to have been a print mag, has to be professional in nature) the total number of publications would well exceed 1,000. As it stands there are still 496 “targets” (of which I have currently acquired 215).
However, even that restriction encompasses a good portion of the world since it includes the British Empire, which itself encompasses the UK, Canada, parts of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and, back during the pre-WWII era, India, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Egypt, and more nations, territories, dominions and protectorates than the sun could shake a stick at.
Although the first such magazine was Amazing Stories, published right here in the US in 1926 (which itself was at one time part of that empire), the UK quickly followed suit in 1934 with a “Boy’s Newspaper” – Scoops, which was soon followed by more “adult” fare beginning with 1937’s Tales of Wonder, and several others, Science Fantasy and New Worlds probably being the most familiar.
There were also numerous “foreign” editions of various magazines published in the US that would be distributed in their own editions in other countries. For example, New Worlds had editions published in New Zealand, Canada and a US Forces European Edition; Nebula Science Fiction (UK) had reprint editions published in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US, while the US-based Planet Stories had editions distributed in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
But…where was South Africa? It seemed to me that if a UK magazine had an edition published in Scotland (Nebula, the only known title from there), surely one or another of the magazines would look to expand to another highly populous region of the empire.
So I turned to that font of nearly all wisdom – Facebook – and asked. (Truth to tell, I should have turned to Fanzines, because as we know, all knowledge is contained therein and doing so would have shortened my search. A link to where I should have gone in the FANAC Fan History website is included below.)
A short time thereafter, I was pointed to Probe, a Fanzine that began publishing in 1969 and produced (until recently) by the Science Fiction and Fantasy South Africa (SFFSA) organization, a club that has also been going, and is still going, to this day.
Now, while Fanzines certainly contain all wisdom, they are also not – deliberately so – “professional” publications, so the revelation of Probe (which, as previously promised, you can find many issues of here) and, in point of fact, there were no home grown pulps, or even reprint editions, of science fiction magazines during the period in question (1926 to the present).
This, according to various discussions, was largely owing to at least two factors: the apartheid government’s suppression and a perceived lack of audience.
But that’s enough of that.
The real gem of this little rabbit hole dive was the happy discovery that there IS a science fiction club in South Africa, one that’s been active since 1969. While others may have been aware of it, a number of folks I discussed the magazine topic with were not.
Of course, Fandom is all about getting together with those of similar interests, regardless of where they come from, so I reached out to the SFFSA and met the current editor of the club fanzine – Gail Jamieson.
She sent along an “about” document that I now share (with permission) and urge everyone to at least get in touch and say “hi” to our Fannish friends in the “other” down under…:
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Way back in 1969 Tex and Rita Cooper sent a letter (snail mail) to “The Sunday Times”, asking the
newspaper to print it in the letters column. They had been in contact with the N3F, the National Fan
Fiction Federation in America, and they were in search of fellow South Africans who were keen to share their love of Science Fiction.On the 29 th of June 1969 nine hardy souls made the trek to the Pretoria home of Tex and Rita and the South African Science Fiction club was born. It started out by producing a monthly newsletter, which
included meeting minutes, book reviews, stories, news of other SF clubs and various other items of SF
interest.After a year or so it was decided to create a Club Zine and members voted on a name which came from
such as Beep, Xenon, Stargaze, War of the Words, Nucleus, and Utopia to name a few. PROBE was
chosen and the June/July of 1970 newsletter, which was Volume 1 number 8, was printed on a Roneo
machine and sent out to members. By March 1974 Probe had been become issue 25 and it has more or
less been published 4 times a year (“a quarterly magazine printed 3 times a year” for a while) and now,
March 2022, issue 191, a fully electronic as well as a hard copy, has just gone to the printer.The club decided, as one of its aims was to promote the writing of Science Fiction by South African
authors, to start up a short story competition. I can’t find out the exact date that this first occurred but by
May 1978 in issue 36 stories from the competition were being printed in PROBE.And as PROBE progressed, the stories from the competition, which at some point became the “Nova”,
began to be the backbone of each issue. Over each year the winning stories from the previous year were
published as well as some that took the fancy of the Editor.The Nova has always been pre-judged anonymously by at least four or five members of the club. The top
ten stories then went to a final judge who would rank them. We’ve had a very respectable selection of
final judges, including Dave Freer, Lauren Beukes, Jennie Ridyard, Deirdre Byrne, Arthur Goldstuck,
Gerald Gaylard, James Sey, David Levey, Digby Ricci, and Allyson Kreuiter; and in the very early days,
noted South African astronomer Professor Arthur Bleksley. All are noted academics and many are
professors of English departments in many of our noted Universities. There are even a number of
internationally published authors among them.I first came into contact with the club in 1973 when I saw an advert for the short story competition in the
newspaper. I’d just completed my Matric and already an avid SF reader. So I entered a story. I was
delighted to get into the top 20 stories and joined the club. Through the years I tried my hand at writing
and am proud to have two of my stories published in this Anthology, one SF and one Fantasy.Among our club members we have been delighted to have had Claude Nunes who was the first published
South African author. He even had a couple of Ace doubles printed. Also the now well published Dave
Freer and Yvonne Walus, who has changed to crime writing. A regular contributor to Nova and PROBE
was the late Liz Simmonds, who I consider one of the most talented South African authors I have come
across. One of the fillers that are found in PROBE are the 99-word “Wormholes” that were written at our
annual MiniCons and many of them were co-authored by Liz. We miss her.Up until 1994 we had published “The Best of South African Science Fiction”, volumes 1, 2 and 3. Then
there was a long hiatus but as the club, now Science Fiction and Fantasy South Africa approached its 50th
anniversary, long time member Gary Kuyper suggested that we do a Best of 50 Years of the Nova
Competition.I’d been threatening, for some time to look at doing a Volume 4 once I finally retired and it seemed to be a
good idea to add it to the list of things I would need to keep me busy once I was no longer working.
The SFFSA committee deliberated and agreed that it would be a very good idea.So Gary and I started reading all of the stories from the Nova competition that had been published in
PROBE from 1969 to 2019. We read all the winners, and then the second and third placed stories and
then finally all the rest. As we read slowly to be sure of evaluating the stories properly it took us about
nine months to do this. Gary felt strongly that the stories should be Science Fiction, but there were some
Fantasy stories that we felt we couldn’t leave out so there is a small addition of these as a bonus
appendix.The earliest of these stories was written almost fifty years ago and the most recent from 2019. The
authors come from all ages, two of them having been in their teens when their stories were chosen as
winners and I know of one or two that were written by authors in their late 70’s. There are a couple of
authors who have more than one story in the anthology and around twenty of them are from women
writers.Then came the tough job of scanning and converting all of the published stories that came from PROBE
before it was produced electronically. And the earliest issues were done on a Roneo machine, which
most people will not even have heard of. Text was typed on a wax sheet which was then each page was
rolled off manually. When I first edited PROBE number 38 in 1978 I used a normal type writer and
corrected with Typex or cut and glued corrections on top of errors. Bits of PROBE would be spread all
over my lounge before it could finally be judged acceptable and sent to be printed by a printer. Years later
when I took on the mantle of Editor again it was such a pleasure to be able to use a PC to produce a
much more professional looking magazine.Scanning gave me .pdf’s which then had to reconverted back to word documents for correcting, and as
there were some very peculiar looking scans some parts of the stories had to be retyped. Once I was
done with all of the stories, they went to Gary who began the huge task of finalisation into a book form,
along with editing and checking for any typo’s I might have missed. Thanks must also go to Janis Benvie
and Gavin Kreuiter for proofreading all of the stories in the collection.The stories we have chosen are not necessarily the winners from each year and sometimes not even the
second or third placed story, but they are the stories that both Gary and I felt deserved to be included.
They include space travel, time travel, aliens and alien invasion, post apocalyptic, South African,
humorous stories and some that defy classification.I have tried to contact all the authors to ask for permission to publish their stories a second time, but in
some cases I know that they have passed on. I was able to contact a family member in a couple of these
cases. We have full records from about 2011 onwards but even some of those email addresses have
been returned to me. I have searched on social media but there have been a number of people for whom
I am unable to find any record. We have decided to publish these stories anyway assuming that the
authors would be glad to see their work in print. We do apologise for not being able to ask. Fifty years of
publication is a long time so we would be delighted to hear from you if you happen to see your story.Please contact me on gailjamieson@gmail.com and I’ll print a note in PROBE acknowledging your
permission..So at long last you have in your hands, or on your electronic device, fifty stories from fifty years of what
we consider the best of Science Fiction and Fantasy that has been published in 186 issues of PROBE.We’re about to publish issue 191 so perhaps in 2041 some brave member of SFFSA will publish a
collection of the next 20 years – Long live Science Fiction and Fantasy in South Africa!
