G Ordinarily a well-behaved letter, except when people talk about its "soft
sound" (meaning J) or retain it in words where it's silent with us. But G
has been most grievously cursed with the purple poison of Ghughu, so that any
word beginning with it (or for that matter many words beginning in H or other
letters) may find itself altered to start with gh-.
GAFIA (Dick Wilson) Get Away From It All. This useful phrase was originally
an escapist slogan, meaning the intent to withdraw from the Macrocosm
to indulge in some intense fanac, but has undergone a complete reversal of
significance so that now "that flash of sanity known as Gafia" refers to a
vacation from fandom back in the world of normalcy, where nobody reads that
crazy Buck Rogers stuff. Diagnostic symptoms are sheer boredom while trying
to read proz or fanzines, allowing correspondence to pile up unanswered, and
wishing that half-finished fanzines could be forgotten for a while. Oh, and
we should mention GAFIA PRESS, Redd Boggs' publishing house, the source of
SKYHOOK and many another worthy serious publication.
GAG LINES Short, well-known sentences. Theoretically they are good for a
laugh any time, if used properly; actually their meaning and
function may vary considerably with the context. Gag lines famous in fandom
include "The Gostak Distims the Doshes", "Goshwowboyoboy", "Yngvi is a louse",
"Savage sullen defiant and contemptuous", and "Who sawed Courtney's boat?"
(They never did find out.)
GALACTIC ROAMERS The local for Jackson and Battle Creek Michigan, centering
around 3E and Skylark Smith. They had exotic names for
their officers such as Chief Pilot, Chief Communications Officer, etc. This
club led to the awakening of Michifandom. It broke up when the Slan Shackers
moved to Los Angeles. Not to be confused with the Galactic Roomers,
the inhabitants of the Ashley apartment who later founded Slan Shack itself.
GAMES Fanationalism demonstrates itself in our urge to invent in this field
and thus give a stfnal tinge even to our gafia-type activities.
Barsoomian chess ("jetan") as described by John Car -- sorry, I mean ER
Burroughs -- was obvious and is our oldest table game, many boards and pieces
having been made. SF crossword puzzles, also, appeared long ago. In the 40s
Fairy Chess was known in California; it involved, among other variations,
pieces of a fantastic nature. One could travel in time; one could split, like
an amoeba; one could make only a single move during the course of a game. Of
games involving chance John Baltadonis invented Cosmic Monopoly; Ted Tubb,
Vin¢ Clarke, Ken Bulmer and a couple other British fen invented something
called The Game, which was incredibly complicated but involved both chance and
skill; Boskone III tested Art Widner's game Interplanetary. (An effort to
commercialize Interplanetary was unsuccessful.) All of these involve trading
in an interplanetary market with hazards such as space pirates, meteors, and
like that. There are commercial Buck Rogers and other games which are beneath
our dignity to note. It should be observed that all these games are really
just adaptations of games currently popular in the Macrocosm, given a stfnal
flavor. Interplanetary, as invented by Widner and brought up to date by
Metchette, Evans, Pavlat and White, is the most original of the bunch. Speer
would like to see a board game invented which would center about fannish
references; the brainstorming sessions at the Seattle WesterCon came up with
moves and hazards such as "Join N3F, go back three spaces", and "Be chairman
of world convention; remove one year from life and take ten years off life."
GAY DECEIVER (Laney) A book with a fantastic-sounding title that is
advertised and sold by fantasy book dealers and kept on library
shelves (unread) by various fsy collectors, though not actually a fantasy at
all.
GENERAL FAN ORGANIZATION An organization to include all fans; to be
synonymous with fandom, as opposed to locals like
WSFA and select groups like FAPA. The SFL was the first important effort at
this, and it failed because of its commercial ties. TFG, ISA, and SFA had
hopes, as did less important organizations like SF International. During the
First Transition Speer began plugging a federal organization, but New Fandom,
a centralized dictatorship, was the first to revive the aim. Before it
expired, individual fans came forward with other plans, and at the suggestion
of damon knight and Art Widner the N3F was formed in late 1940. This suffered
the common trouble of cumbersome machinery and too little that the
organization as a whole could undertake, and the stress of war conditions gave
it the coup de grace despite its zombie-like later existence. However, the
Plancom did suggest more activities for it than any previous such organization
contemplated.
GEOGRAPHY Geographical considerations have influenced plans for regional
organizations and caused considerable controversy on the location
of conventions. The East Coast has usually had a larger proportion of fans
than other areas, though the Pacific Coast also shows notable concentrations.
Most fans are in the United States and, after that, in the British Isles;
there are a few dozen each in Canada and Australia/New Zealand. Of the many
fans outside the Anglo-Saxon world relatively few are in contact with our
branches of fandom. Ordinarily, more fans per capita will appear in large
cities, where contacts with other fans are easier; certainly fan activity is
on the whole more advanced in the Metropolitan areas. But all have their ups
and downs.
GERNSBACK DELUSION (Michelists) The idea that the proper function of science
fiction is to serve as a vehicle for educating the public
-- for making fans into scientists by putting accurate, tho sugarcoated,
scientific information into stf stories. Sam Moskowitz declares Uncle Hugo to
be innocent of any such folly, but the following quotation from the letter
column of Amazing for June 1926 may be advanced as the first appearance of the
idea:
"One of the great surprises since we started publishing Amazing Stories
is the tremendous amount of mail we receive from -- shall we call them
'Scientifiction fans'? [And they did] -- who seem to be pretty well
oriented in this sort of literature... Some of these fans are constantly
visiting the book stores with the express purpose of buying new or old
scientifiction tales, and they even go to the trouble of advertising for
some volumes that have long since gone out of print.
"Scientifiction, in other words, furnishes a tremendous amount of
scientific education [...] and fires the reader's imagination more
perhaps than anything else of which we know." -- Hugo Gernsback, FRS.
The failure of the ISA, said the Michelists, proved this wrong; the
purpose of SF should be to make active idealists. Some fans who were working
in or studying science replied that stf had stimulated their interest in
science a great deal, they believed; and others claimed that reading our
favorite literature puts the scientifictionist well ahead of the average man
in understanding sciences.
GHOLY GHIBLE The Ghuist scriptures, sometimes wrongly referred to as the Book
of Ghu. At least one page of this has been printed, which is
more than you can say for the Necronomicon. It was quite a short
composition, anyway.
GHOD The "h" indicates that the reference is to fannish deities. Art Rapp
reports this to be the only genuine superstitious taboo known in the
Microcosm. He points out its probable source: with intellectual maturity fans
as a rule realize the dubious nature of evidence for a deity, but they've been
so well inculcated in childhood with the various religious precepts against
direct blasphemy that rejection of theism is sublimated in burlesque rather
than manifested in militant forms. Fussiness over spelling God's name is a
characteristic of Western religions, and such points of etiquette are natural
objects for burlesque.
GHOODMINTON (Willis) The game of heroes. It is played indoors on whatever
table you have that is capable of bearing a ping-pong net across
the middle and the shock of hurtling bodies. Scoring resembles that of more
mundane tennis [Willis, the inventor, is a tennis fan too]. Only equipment
beyond table and net: a badminton bird, some sort of rectangular device (to
strike the bird with) and a lofty contempt for human life.
GHUGHUISM A foul and hideous order who worship Ghughu as their ghod.
According to the researches of FooFoo scientists, Ghughu is a
beetle-bodied monster living on the sunward side of Vulcan, who telepathically
controls a zombie named Don Wollheim -- Wollheim itself being usually regarded
as Ghughu by its followers, at least before the Great Revival of the 50s.
There are archbishops in every city where there are Ghuists except possibly
those in which the archbishop has at some time left his diocese, thus losing
his office. Other officers included the High Priest John Michel and Dick
Wilson, Ghuardian of the Gholy Ghrail (the ghrail is now held in a secret
place by FooFooists). In many cases devotees had several titles; "Saint" was
a common prefix.
Their chief intellectual effort was a Ghuist calendar, the general scheme
of which seemed to be cribbed from the World Calendar tho their year started
at the summer solstice. The months were named in dishonor of the Ghuists, the
first Dawn, for DA Wollheim; others were J'Mil for John Michel, Sterl for
Kenneth Sterling, ktp, plus some named from other fantastic words like vomb,
cthulhin, et cetera.
Thus purple religion was founded 6 August 1935, and with this long start
gained adherents in numerous places. "But a new day and deliverance dawned in
1938," exults Speer, "when Pogo proclaimed the Sacred Order of FooFoo!"
With the Second World War Ghughuism, like FooFooism, suffered from a
slackening of fan interest (and I don't care what the stories say about not
having any atheists in foxholes). When the Sacred Writings of R*o*s*c*o*e
appeared in SPACEWARP during 1948 a revival among the false faiths was
prophesied; in the case of Ghuism, this developed from the entrance of Lee
Hoffman and QUANDRY into the fanzine field. The deity evidently worshipped by
those to whom Leeh brought the word shows certain differences from the
original Ghughu, being purer and more spiritual although still unspeakably
vile. Whether GhuHoffwoman is in fact an entity different from
GhughuWollheim or is merely purified by disassociation from DAW
(who had become a vile pro by 1951) is not clear. Ghuists, tho misled, are
mostly likable people and will no doubt be saved, despite their delusions, on
account of their natural virtue.
GHUIST TERRITORY (SAPS) A nameless limbo, removed not only from the ken of
fen but also of ghods -- all of them but Ghu, anyway. To
curse one to Ghuist Territory is retaliation for offenses so grave that your
Mencken would rather not even hint at their nature.
ANTHONY GILMORE 4e Ackerman wrote the author of the Hawk Carse series for
his autograph and Gilmore replied that he couldn't send it
because AG was two authors working in collaboration. He declined to
identify themselves and the arguments over his true name -- which were the
source of a gag-line, "Who is Anthony Gilmore?" -- raged in FANTASY MAGAZINE
from 1932, when the word was spread, to 1937 when Julius Schwartz tracked the
culprits down to identify Harry Bates and Desmond Hall, Editor and Associate
Editor of Astounding when the series was appearing.
GNYSFL In the spring of 1938 the QSFL became the Greater New York branch
of the SFL. The Wollheimists were members, and in July moved that the
chapter send a delegate to the American Youth Congress (which turned out to be
a Communist Front organization.) Taurasi refused to allow the motion, since
it would have required a special contribution from the membership to defray
the delegate's expenses. Impeachment was begun, but dropped when it appeared
that the majority would support Taurasi against them. At the next meeting the
Wollheimists made a motion to cancel Will Sykora's membership for arrears of
dues; Taurasi refused to allow this because Sykora was not there to defend
himself. T was again impeached and this time removed, though by SFL rules he
must still be nominal director since his was the lowest SFL serial number.
However, rather than raise this point, he resigned and took others with him.
Sykora carried the matter to Margulies, then editor of TWS, and M dissolved
the GNYSFL. New charters were to be granted only on condition that Wollheim
and Sykora never be in the same chapter. This incident crystallized the
Triumvirate, who formed a new QSFL, while the Wollheimists became the Futurian
Society of New York.
GOLDBERG SODA Scotch terrier belonging to Dave and Pam MacInnes, mascot of
NECROMANCER and a familiar sight at the TorCon and CinVention.
He is important as the first non-human to win acclaim as Number One Fan, an
honor gained at the Cinvention.
GOLDEN GATE FUTURIANS See BAY AREA
GOLDEN TREACHERY The home brew of Charles Burbee, because you don't realize
just how potent it is till it's too late. Also Ohm Brew,
from Lee Jacobs' low resistance to it. Actually, only one particularly tasty
and potent batch was given this name by Burbee. The carryover of the monicker
to all Burbee home brew is not authorized by the creator, but it's probably
too late to stop it now.
GOOD MAN if not otherwise identified is Dean Grennell, of course.
GOON DEFECTIVE AGENCY (Berry-Thomson) A sort of parody of the BBC's Goon Show
[slapstick but intelligent comedy]. It was built up
from the name, which in turn came from a holograph letter from Ken Potter
apparently addressed to "Goon Bleary" -- i.e., John Berry. The possibilities
of this as a faname were immediately obvious. John and Art Thomson used "Goon
Bleary" to establish the GDA, as chronicled in its official organ,
RETRIBUTION. GDA Ops are located in all portions of the globe, and will
handle any conceivable problem and some you probably never heard of before in
return for an international currency. James White has written of a secret
antagonist, Antigoon, who may doubtless be saddled with responsibility for any
of the GDA's rare failures.
The term can be traced to the Popeye comic strip in the early 30s, where
Alice the Goon was a hulking monster noted for brawn, not brains. During the
labor troubles in the woods during the 30s the unions used squads of
plug-uglies to attack strikebreakers and non-union workers. These were called
goon squads. Gradually the term spread nationally, with the connotation of
shock troops used in labor struggles; afterward taking on the meaning of any
person of strong back & weak mind, and then the implication of exceptional
eccentricity that it holds in the GDA's title.
GOOSEY-BUTT GROTTO (Laney-Burbee) The rooming house at 628 S Bixel, from
Insurgent descriptions of activities there. Aka Tendril
Towers and the Bixel Fairy Palace.
GOSHWOWBOYOBOY Symbol of the type of reader who made Time magazine call us
the jitterbugs of the pulp magazine field in its article on
the NYCon I. The expression led off an allegedly typical letter they quoted,
commenting on TWS; indignant fans held it to be an invention of the reporter
who wrote up the NYCon, for a long time. Martin Alger finally tracked it down
in "The Reader Speaks", TWS' letter column, for August 1939.
GOSTAK (Ogden&Richards:Breuer) One distimmer of the doshes.
GRAHAM-ACKERMAN FEUD Roger Phillip(s) Graham, one of the few passable ZD
writers, was assigned by Ray Palmer to head a column of
fanzine reviews and club news, "The Club House", at the height of the Shaver
Mystery foofaraw (late '47-January '48). Ackerman, leading the fan ("fan"
distinguished sharply here from "reader") opposition to that piece of
crackpottery, turned his guns on Phillips as agent to an attempt to seduce the
fans by drowning them in butter. Words flew thick & fast, but all blew over
when Graham walked into a LASFS meeting one evening and fraternized. The war
went on in other parts of fandom but fizzled out when Palmer quit ZD and the
Shaver Mystery was dropped.
GRAPHOLOGY Occasionally an article or series appears in a fanzine, making a
graph-analysis of some figure/s well known in the pro or fan
world. These analyses are usually put in such general terms that they could
be true of a lot of people, and much of the time the analyst knows the person
before he starts to "figure him out" from his handwriting. Nan Gerding and
Dick Eney, however, once published the results of a hoax on a graphologist, in
which Eney had written in two different types of script which were analyzed as
the chirographies of, respectively, a sensitive intellectual poetic genius,
and a dull, priggish file-clerk type. The chief contribution of such articles
to fan lore is the Type Fifteen Fan.
GRAMMAR "Three subjects", says Warfel, "perennially provoke argument:
politics, religion and grammar. Not the least of these is grammar."
An outstanding murderer of the King's (or anybody else's) English in fandom
has been Sneary, with Max Keasler a strong second. But numerous other
targets, especially among the young fen, were found for Speer's "Little
Lessons in Grammar" and Konig's "English As She Is Wrote". Most fans protest
against the mutilations practiced by the quote fourteen-year-old mentalities
unquote. For the typical fan has done and observed enough writing to have a
good mastery of the language and its rules, as compared to the average
citizen. Whether he will obey the rules in a given case, however, depends on
functional tests; for instance, if there seems to be no discernable advantage
in setting off the name of a state with commas, he may very well write
"Cleveland Ohio", and so on. Fans have done a lot of experimenting with the
language under the banner of Ackermanese, and produced some inventions in the
case of brackets and quasi-quotemarks. In general, they pay unusual attention
to the individual elements of writing and use them in varied ways to get
across the exact meaning or impression desired.
GREAT STATIONERY DUEL Originally, a contest between Speer and Wilson in which
each was to use a different letterhead or type of
stationery in each regular letter. The first to give out was the loser.
Quite a code of rules was worked out, defining what a different type of
stationery is, and forbidding the purchase of stationery simply for duelling
purposes. They developed specialized kleptomaniac traits. Some time after
correspondence with Wilson ceased, Speer was challenged by Warner and the duel
resumed. Of late Bob Pavlat and Ron Bennett have engaged in this sort of
nonsense. It's typical of a sort of whimsy very common among fankind.
GREEN GO-DEVIL Bob Tucker's old Studebaker, which has carried, he claims,
more glamorous femmefans than any two other vehicles.
GREEN HORNET Ed Cox' 1950 Buick, which has permanently marred with Dynaflow
fluid, he claims, more fan garages than any two other vehicles.
CROTTLED GREEPS A foodstuff, probably. The term was first used by Dean
Grennell in Filler (1953). Filler #378 read:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
But if you don't like crottled greeps, what did you order them for?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Later this was used by the London O as the message on one of their quote-
cards at the SuperManCon. The derivation is (1) from the little curved lines
used in cartooning to indicate that a character is faunching backwards, which
are called "crottles"; (2) from the English spelling of the French
pronunciation of "Grippe" (:influenza). Lee Hoffman wrote a story for GRUE 27
portraying Crottled Greeps as a seductive but lethal viand and imagination
took over from there. Like Blog, many formulae have been presented; Richard E
Geis, noted writer, holds out for chocolate cake in hot tomato soup, while Dr
Andrew T Young of Harvard College Observatory has developed a combination of
Wheat Thins, cheese-and-bacon spread, and strawberry jam. Your Gaius Plinius
finds an omelette made with caviar to be a greenish horrid-looking stuff well
suited to being represented as crottled greeps. Vin¢ Clarke presents no
formula but insists that the True Crottled Greep will include Chow Yung Fan
[Chinese for French-fried potatoes]. Arthur Thomson has produced a picture
purporting to be a crottled greep sandwich on Venusian pumpernickel but it is
generally felt that the world is not yet ready for this. It is expressly
forbidden by the Geneva Convention of 1896 to transmit the true recipe for
crottled greeps verbally, in writing, or through telepathy.
GROTCH (Grennell) Acutely irritate. Usually passive. Speer suggests that
this useful word is a transitive form of grouch.
GRUE (Grennell) Probably will prove one of the fanzines of history.
Its complete genesis is worth quoting as a specimen:
"In casting about for a fanzine title, I considered several: STELLAR
STORIES, FIASCO, and GRUE, THE FAN'S MAGAZINE [quasi, True, The Man's
Magazine, published about this time], were three I kept coming back to.
I discovered that my sneaky subconscious had picked up the first from an ad in
Other [ptui!] Worlds. I asked the advice of friend-and-mentor Bob Silverberg
and he opined that either FIASCO or GRUE would act as a deadly blight on a
fanzine... in fact, why did I want to cast yet another effort into a field
already sadly overcrowded? Despite this, perhaps even because of it, I clung
to GRUE as a title. Sometime in January of 1953 I drew up a tentative cover for it, bearing
a picture of a little man in a spacesuit standing beside his rocket in a moon-crater,
about to light a fuse trailing out the bottom of it. I stuck this to the wall
for a while and later, as I finished writing a larger-than-usual letter to
someone, I put the cover picture on the front of the letter, stapled it down
the left margin, and so GRUE was born. [Trumpets off.]
"So went the first fourteen copies; all custom-made, with hand-drawn
illos, tipped-in photos, etc. Number fifteen was a four-page kind of one-shot
done on a spirit duplicator. 16&17 reverted to typed originals again and when
I got into FAPA in the fall of 1953 I decided to keep the title as a FAPAzine,
so it appeared there as #18. All issues since then have been consecutively
published -- from 20 onwards with the use of Gestetner in blue on white.
There have been a few custom issues of GRUE since then, but these are given
fractional numbers to fit them in between the published issues, as 'GRUE #25
1/2'." -- Dean Grennell.
GRULZAK (Kennedy) An unseemly creature which roams through the jungles of
all planets except Earth and Jupiter, tho the fattest and most slimy
grulzaks are found deep within the vine-choked woodlands of Venus. Grulzak
hunting is the sport of kings (and more self-made types of executives, too).
Little equipment is needed for it: a large atomic ray pistol will stun a
grulzak at a distance of three yards. Take along a first-aid kit, a copy of
the Kinsey Reports (for reading while you're waiting for the grulzak to show
up), a file of Shaver Amazings (for fire-starting) and a box of toothpicks.
Grulzaks dwell where the vegetation is densest, since they are extremely
modest and don't want the other animals watching them when they shed their
skin (which they do twice a day). When you detect an odor of H2S mingled with
Chanel #5, the Grulzak is nearby. Their mating call is similar to the sound
produced when a squeaky piece of chalk is rubbed along a blackboard, coupled
with the bellow of a bull ape.
GUEST EDITORS are invited to put out an issue of an Old Established Fanzine
by its regular eds. IMAGINATION! had Charles Hornig of WS for
Issue #6 or #7. Redd Boggs, running across records of this, revived the idea,
and one issue of his SKY HOOK and two of Art Rapp's SPACEWARP were guest-
edited by Burbee & Laney.
Updated January 8, 1999. If you have a comment or question about these Web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.