Introductions to Fornax #1 & #2

Introduction to Fornax #1:

Welcome to the first issue of Fornax, my very first endeavor in sci-fi fanzines.  It is also, as far as I know, the very first pro-GamerGate fanzine.  That it comes out now is fitting now that GamerGate has emerged as the dominant faction in sci-fi fandom, at least as far as the Hugo Awards nomination process is concerned.  Only God knows how the final Hugo Awards balloting will turn out or how next year's nomination process will go. However, you can bet that it will be a pretty entertaining ride.

In a way its fitting that I'm the one who's launching the first pro-GamerGate fanzine.  While the other fanzine editors spend their pre-editorship years letterhacking and writing other kinds of stuff for fanzines, I was playing games.  Specifically, Browser-Based Games (BBG's) that back in the late 1990's/early21st Century was the cutting edge of online gaming.  As a result, there were a lot of folks willing to play these mostly free, advertiser supported  games and game creators eager to please their gaming interests.  However, the gaming magazines failed to cover this new gaming frontier presumably because it was not an area in which big companies were operating.

As they say, nature abhors a vacuum, so where the magazines feared to tread a number of plucky gamers created their own websites such as most notably MPOGD.  In early 2001, I went to work at MPOGD first as a reporter and then as News Editor.  Eventually, I left MPOGD first to do a blog and then to become the News Editor at the newly started up OMGN.  If you want to see what the original OMGN was like, just go to archive.omgn.com

Due to the lack of big money in BBG's, there was never any sort of corruption in covering them.  At no time did anyone ever offer me any sort of a bribe to favorably review a game.  On the other hand, the gaming magazines were rift with corruption with gaming companies paying off reviewers and the magazines failing to have any sorts of ethics policies.  Eventually, gamers got sick and tired of all this, circulations fell and today there are hardly any gaming magazines left.  Starting several years ago, websites launched by companies filled in the place of the magazines, but they have been beset by the same kinds of ethical and moral issues that brought about the downfall of the magazines.  Hence the consumers revolt known as GamerGate,



Save for Fornax #2:

Most folks who get into this line of work (my mother would have called it wasting time) have been sci-fi fans all their lives.  My situation is a bit more complicated.  I grew up in Platteville, WI, during the late 1970's & early 1980's when it seemed as if there was a Second Golden Age of Science Fiction.  There were a lot of sci-fi fans in Platteville even though there was never any sort of organized club nor were there any fanzines being published there.  It was in the Spring semester of 1984 when while taking a class in sci-fi at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, I first laid my eyes on an actual physical copy of a fanzine, a mid-1970's issue of Tangent. 

Then when my father retired and we moved south to Arkansas, things changed.  Where science fiction books had been plentiful in Platteville, they were downright scarce in Russellville where I lived during 1984-1987 and Fayetteville (1987-1996).