> Ps. Detta sagt som allmän förklaring till div postningar som intressant nog > *inte nämner fanfondsskandalen alls*. Det intressanta kan dock noteras att > skulden i skandalen det i skyldigas sinnen är så uppenbar att om något > skrivs som inte alls handlar om saken kommer skulden ändå till ytan och det > antas att man måste "försvara" sig! (Vad nu påhopp och och lögnaktigt trams > och bludder är för "försvar" iofs.) > Detta var bra konstigt. För att väga upp Arhvid Engholms många, många postningar om Jätteskandalen från 1987 har jag sex gånger lagt ut John Henri Holmbergs text om SEFF på Skrivalistan där Ahrvid är administratör men varje gång jag har gjort det så har han censurerat bort densama texten ur arkivet. Nu klagar han i stället att det görs inlägg som *inte nämner fanfondskandalen alls*. Men då ska jag hjälpa till med att få ut det inlägget igen som tar upp den och då får vi be att Ahrvid Engholm INTE tar bort det ur arkivet på Skriva den här gången för jag skickar dit också liksom till Sverifandomlistan. Hälsar gör Göran Här är den texten jag pratar om. Om den innehåller lögner så får vi be Ahrvid Engholm ÄNTLIGEN talar om VAD SOM HÄNDE I STÄLLET DÅ för det har han aldrig gjort, han bara säger att det är lögner men motiverar aldrig det på något sätt alls. Notes on the Career and Accusations of Ahrvid Engholm When reading the following, it is important to remember that Swedish sf fandom is both comparatively young and quite small. The first Swedish fan club was formed in 1950, but not until four years later was the sf prozine Häpna! started; since it began already in its first issue to publish information about British and American fandom, its launch is normally considered to herald the beginnings of an active Swedish fandom. The first Swedish fanzine was published in June, 1954; the first convention was held in 1956, attended by less than 40 fans. Not until 1970 did a Swedish con manage to gather as many as 100, and the largest convention held in Sweden remains the 1976 ScanCon, with slightly over 450 attendants. For the major part of its existence, even if it might be possible that more potential fans existed in the country (though it should be remembered that the Swedish population during the last half of the 20th century averaged only around 7.5 million, or roughly one twenty-fifth of the US population ? which means that 450 attendants at a Swedish convention is the percentual equivalent of over 11.000 at an American), Swedish fandom also had huge outreach problems. Häpna! existed from 1954 through 1965 and did carry a fan column, although seldom very invinting; from 1972 another prozine, Jules Verne-magasinet, also carried fan news, but was generally available at newsstands only during 1972 and 1973; again during the 1982-1986 period a third prozine, Nova science fiction, was generally available and published fan information. But apart from these roughly seven years, fandom had little opportunity of being discovered by new fans after the mid-1960s. That this was important, and that the new magazines of the 1970s and 1980s made a difference, is more or less obvious from the fact that after theappearance of the two new magazines, Swedish fandom was at its most active, and larger than ever; this was the period from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s. During this period, Swedish fandom could boast perhaps as many as thirty or forty simultaneously active fanzine publishers; the actual number of individuals receiving one or more fanzines is hard to compute, but may well at this time have been as large as a thousand ? at lest one fanzine was printed in more than 700 copies. Still, the majority of these readers did not consider themselves active fans, as the largest circulation fanzines were oriented entirely towards science fiction news and criticism, and theprint run of the average Swedish fanzine has never been more than around 100 copies. (That the Scandinavian SF Society during the late 1970s had close to a thousand members was due not to any huge increase of the number of active fans, but to the organization having bought the previously commercially run Swedish Science Fiction Book Club; book club members wanting to keep buying books cheaply had to become members of the SSFS.) Due to these factors, Swedish fandom has always been dominated by small numbers of highly active fans, and the impact of single individuals has often been enormous. It is not difficult to name 25 or 30 fans as the main shapers of the entire fifty year span of Swedish fandom. Among these most influential Swedish fans, Ahrvid Engholm is for many reasons the one most difficult both to portray and to give a balanced account of; he, to a larger extent than anyone else, is the Janus figure of Swedish fandom. Born in 1959 and since more than three decades an active fan, he was for many years been both the possibly most active and innovative all-round fan in Sweden, and Swedish fandom?s most controversial, aggressive and uncompromising fanatic. Engholm?s first contacts with fandom occurred in the mid-1970s, when he attended the 1975, 1976 and 1977 sf conventions in Stockholm. In early 1978, he began attending club meetings, published his first fanzines and became and indefatigable contributor to others. Engholm is multi-talented: an accomplished writer, a quite decent artist, with a good sense of layout and a good ear for the Swedish language. He immediately came to occupy a dominant position among newer fans and in late 1978 became the first recipient of the Alvar Appeltofft Memorial Award, instigated in 1977 to commemorate the recently deceased most famous Swedish actifan of the1950s. Among Engholm?s earliest fanzines were the personal Fanarkistisk skrivelse, the genzine Fanskap, and the newszine BFF-news; in 1978 he also started an apa called Multipel, which however folded after two mailings. In December, 1978, together with Anders Bellis, he launched the (almost) weekly newszine Vheckans ävfentyr, for two years the undisputed focal point of Swedish fandom. Already during this period, however, a parallel streak co-existing with Engholm?s boundless energy and creativity became obvious: his tendency to garrulousness far beyond thebounds of reason. Vheckans ävfentyr ran constant campaigns in order to force its editors? will upon other fans. The fanzine campaigned to impeach theboard of the Stockholm-based Scandinavian Science Fiction Society, which Engholm and Bellis viewed as too directed towards sf rather than fandom itself (during this period, the SSFS averaged in excess of 700 members, ran an sf book store in Stockholm, and arranged various member activities in its clubhouse several times weekly; one charge made by the Vheckans ävfentyr editors was that the club ?discriminated? male members by allowing the all-female subgroup Feminac exclusive access to the club premises one evening per week; all members had access most other evenings). They also disliked the editor appointed to publish the SSFS member fanzine, and so campaigned to have him replaced by Engholm?s and Bellis? editor of choice. Virtually all the fans active on the SSFS board during 1979 and 1980 resigned in disgust at theconstant squabble, which was by no means limited to fanzines but also went on vocally and daily at the club?s premises. In December, 1980, John-Henri Holmberg (a board member and previous chairman of the SSFS) invited Anders Bellis to a private party at his apartment onnew year?s eve, along with a large number of other friends both fans and non-fans. Engholm,however, viewed this invitation as part of a previously undisclosed plot on Holmberg?s part, intended to split the united front of the Vheckans ävfentyr editors against the SSFS. Thus, Engholm demanded that either he as well should be invited to the party, or that Bellis should refrain from going. Neither happened, and consequently Engholm single-handedly dismissed Bellis from their co-published fanzine. As a consequence, in early January, 1981, Vheckans ävfentyr #89 was published in two entirely different versions, one by Engholm, the other by Bellis. Bellis went on to publish a further ten issues of Vheckans ävfentyr, while Engholm retitled his newszine first Fanytt, later Science fiction-journalen, although both times retaining its consecutive numbering from the earlier Vheckans ävfentyr. He has kept publishing the fanzine, although lately sporadically, until now. This first break with Anders Bellis was not final, and no drawn out feud followed. Engholm?s first really serious bout with other fans instead occurred in late 1984, when he noted that the very active Tony Eriksson had started to discuss comics in his fanzine. Since Engholm disliked comics, and considered them neither fannish nor sf, it was obviously unfannish to write about them in fanzines; when Eriksson despite having this pointed out to him refused to stop writing about comics, Engholm launched a campaign to drive Eriksson out of Swedish fandom. The feud against Tony Eriksson continued unabated for three years and included such highly dramatic moments as when Engholm in front of an audience of close to a hundred fans tried physically to prevent Eriksson from completing the talk he was giving at the 1985 Swecon convention in Stockholm, a talk explicitly okayed by the convention chairman Kaj Harju ? the latter a fact which not surprisingly led Engholm to begin making Kaj Harju as well as numerous other fans secondary targets of his attacks. That the Eriksson feud petered out in 1987 was not due to Engholm tiring of his efforts, but rather to the fact that he found even more pressing targets. What now occurred is what Engholm has ever since called the ?SEFF Scandal?. SEFF was the acronym for the Scandinavian-European Fan Fund, instigated to send Scandinavian fans to conventions in Britain or on the European mainland, and vice versa. In the 1987 race, Engholm supported Norwegian candidate Johan Schimanski, while probably most Stockholm fans, including John-Henri Holmberg, supported Anders Bellis; Jan Risheden was a third candidate but ran no active campaign. Bellis gained a close victory, due largely to a number of votes solicited and given via telephone. Engholm considered this to be cheating, claiming that the votes so garnered were ?forgeries?. His stand was that a vote must be given in writing by the fan voting, and that consequently votes given by proxy should not be accepted. Maths Claesson, previous SEFF winner and the fund?s at the time current administrator and single board member, ruled that the bylaws of the fund contained no stipulation to support Engholm?s views, and that consequently Bellis had won the race. After Claesson?s ruling, Engholm used his newszine as well as other venues (such as handing out leaflets at the Brighton Worldcon) to accuse Bellis, Claesson, and Holmberg of fraud, cheating, theft (of the SEFF funds, which were used to send Bellis to England for the 1987 Worldcon) and forgery (since he claimed that the individuals voting by proxy had actually not been contacted, a claim never substantiated and later seldom repeated). The feud gradually grew as Engholm placed a growing number of fans not sharing his views in ?fanzine blockade?, while demanding that Bellis, Claesson, and Holmberg should be thrown out of fandom and dismissed from such fannish institutions as the board of directors of the Alvar Appeltofft Memorial Foundation, to which all three at this time belonged. When this did not happen, Engholm additionally began accusing the board itself of shady dealings and demanded the resignation of the Foundation chairman, Lars-Olov Strandberg (note1); simultaneously, Engholm also intensified his feud against Kaj Harju, who had supported Engholm?s ?enemies? and in order to create a non-feuding fannish meeting place in Stockholm had taken theinitiative to form ?Fhaan 21?, a series of weekly fan meetings held in different private homes and to which basically all fans except Engholm were invited. In general due to the escalating feud between Engholm and large parts of the rest of Swedish fandom, but also in particular due to the fact that Engholm during the 1987 NasaCon, while drunk, had used a bench to smash in the door to a room in the rented convention facilities, where he believed more liquor to be stored, sf-club Sigma TC chairman Mats Lignell banned Engholm from the committee formed to arrange future NasaCons. (NasaCon was an informal convention arranged annually by Sigma TC in a Stockholm suburb since 1980.) Engholm, however, refused to accept being banished from the convention committee, struck Mats Lignell with a baseball bat and decided that, as thesole remaining legitimately appointed committee member, he would arrange all future NasaCons. In accordance with this view, he registered the name ?NasaCon? as a trademark with the Swedish patent office and set out to arrange NasaCon 10 in 1989. Sigma TC as usual also arranged NasaCon 10 and the year after NasaCon 11, both as previously held in the Saltsjöbaden suburb. Engholm called these conventions ?Nazicon 1 and 2?; as he was banned from attending, he spent six hours demonstrating and handing out leaflets outside the doors to NasaCon 11, and now also threatened legal proceedings should further encroachments on his patented convention name occur. During this period, Engholm also broke with Sam J. Lundwall. For a number of years, Engholm had edited and largely written the very impressive fan column in Lundwall?s prozine Jules Verne-magasinet, the independent Swedish edition of F&SF. However, by early 1989, the 1990 Worldcon committee in The Hague had learned of the feuding in Swedish fandom, and decided to replace Engholm as their Swedish representative. They instead chose the popular and non-controversial active fan couple Andreas and Carina Björklind. Engholm, however, did not recognize the right of the Worldcon committee to dismiss him as its representative. When Lundwall despite Engholms views did not publish the unpaid Worldcon advertisement given him by Engholm, but chose instead to publish the ad prepared by the Björklinds and listing them as Swedish representatives of the convention, Engholm accused Lundwall of accepting bribes from the Dutch convention committee and resigned as Jules Verne-magasinet?s fan columnist. Before this, however, occurred also that part of the feud concerning Engholm?s previous place of employment, LFP, Inc. LFP was a company set up and incorporated in 1978 by Stockholm-based fans John-Henri Holmberg, Per Insulander, and John Ågren (note2); their aim was initially to perform sf-related and other freelance professional assignments through the company, but from 1982 on, LFP also became a publishing house and as such published a nationally distributed sf magazine, Nova science fiction, as well as two lines of original paperback sf novels and occasional other books. From 1982 on, as LFP expanded to publishing, a number of part-time employees were taken on, many of them fans, and including at various times Anders Bellis, Maths Claesson, Ahrvid Engholm, and Roger Sjölander. Engholm was employed as managing editor of Nova science fiction during the period from late 1984 through 1986; however for several reasons, including both the worsening feuds, which precluded his cooperation with others employed by the company, and the fact that sales of LFP publications were stagnating and that thecompany was in financial trouble, Engholm?s employment was terminated by the beginning of 1987. In the fall of 1987, Anders Bellis devoted his fan column in Nova science fiction (in the much delayed #1 1987) to a discussion of the animosity and feuds then dominating Swedish fandom. Ahrvid Engholm had never returned his set of keys to the LFP offices; it now became evident that he still both retained and used them, for at some point after this magazine issue had been delivered from the printers, but before it had been mailed to subscribers, Engholm visited the offices, read themagazine, took offense at Bellis? column, and removed the entire print run of the magazine issue (some 2,000 copies) from its place in the LFP storage room. When contacted by the company, Engholm declared that he refused to return the magazine unless Bellis? column was torn out of all copies and an apology to Engholm instead printed and sent out with the issue. LFP refused to submit to this demand and instead both contacted the police and ordered a reprint of the issue from the printers. A month later, the issue was finally mailed to subscribers; by this time, a new print run had been delivered and Engholm had as well returned theearlier copies after being charged to do so by the police. (Incidentally, it was also at the LFP offices, where SEFF administrator Maths Claesson was employed, that Engholm in Claesson?s desk drawer found the votes given in the SEFF campaign and photocopied them, thus gaining the ?proof? of the proxy votes he has referred to since.) The incident of the removed print run of Nova science fiction led to several court cases during the years 1988 through 1993. In 1988, Engholm was first sentenced in criminal proceedings to a suspended sentence for arbitrary conduct in removing the magazine issue from its proper storage space; later the same year, he was sentenced in a civil case brought by LFP to reimburse the company for the cost of reprinting the magazine issue. Engholm, in rebuttal, first tried to bring suit for defamation of character against thepublishers of Nova science fiction; this case, however, was dismissed by the prosecutor?s office. He then sued LFP, Inc., John-Henri Holmberg and Per Insulander in civil court, claiming not to have been paid for the work he had performed on behalf of LFP (curiously, the amount of payment demanded by Engholm was virtually identical to the amount paid by him for the reprinting of the Nova SF issue). This case was tried by the Stockholm District Court, which found against Engholm. On appealing to the Superior Court, Engholm was informed at the pretrial court hearing that the defendants were tiring of his innuendo and would this time demand restitution for all costs caused by the trial; Engholm then at the suggestion of the Court dropped his charges. He has since claimed that he did not lose his case.(note3) It should be noted in this connection that Engholm already by the end of 1987 had begun selling through his fanzines various books and magazine issues published by LFP, something he continued to do for years, with the proceeds from these sales purportedly going to what he called the ?SEFF Damage Fund?. He claimed at the time, and has continued to do so, that what he sold were his contributor?s and staff member copies. It remains a fact that the number of free copies of books and magazines normally given to contributors and staff members is quite limited. The various feuds continued virtually unabated for close to ten years, until the middle of the 1990s; a very large number of individual vendettas, bizarre incidents and vehement animosities are not recounted here. By themid 1990s, Swedish fandom was no longer recognizable: from being, in the late 1980s, larger and more active than at any previous time, it had now shrunk to the point where virtually no fanzines were published, few conventions were held and for years virtually no new fans had appeared and stayed on. The only fan carrying on unabated was Engholm himself, who during the 1990s spent great efforts ? initially quite possibly due to his various conflicts with most other Swedish fans ? in creating ties to fandom in such neighboring Baltic countries as Finland, Estonia and Latvia. He also began writing short stories and created the SKRIVA Internet discussion list, where amateur authors criticize and develop their writing abilities. Lately, however, a feud on that list has led to Engholm?s ousting, after which he has created a new SKRIVA list while the earlier one continues as previously but without him. Engholm himself has by now published a number of short stories professionally. Although his fanzine publishing has diminished and virtually stopped in the last few years, Engholm kept publishing actively up until the end of the 1990s. Notable are titles like Virkbilagan, a personal fanzine published both on paper and electronically for several years, a huge number of apa-zines (Engholm was active in most Swedish apas during the1980s and started several), and numerous ambitious oneshots such as his Fandboken or his translated Swedish fanzine anthologies Swede Ishes #1 and 2. He is genuinely interested in fan history and has done much to document otherwise easily lost parts of Swedish fandom?s past; worth mentioning are his Filmfandom, a video cassette publication collecting amateur movies produced by fans, as well as his simultaneous publication on paper and onaudio cassette of Swedish fannish filksongs. Despite these commendable efforts, however, it is difficult to view Engholm?s influence onSwedish fandom as primarily positive. The feuds beginning as early as 1979-1980 and dominating his activity from 1984 and for at least ten years were disastrous to the general tone and activity level of Swedish fandom. Engholm has never seemed able to recognize any connection between his own opinions and actions on the one hand, and on the other the dramatically negative influences onfandom as a whole they have had. John-Henri Holmberg Notes 1. As ?evidence? of his claims that the board of directors of the Alvar Appeltofft Memorial Foundation are scoundrels, Engholm has many times repeated his peculiar claim that John-Henri Holmberg with the aid of theother board members should have defrauded the Foundation by borrowing money from it. The Foundation, capitalized primarily by bequests made by Alvar Appeltofft?s parents (half of whose combined estate was left to the Foundation), invests its assets in stocks, bonds and otherwise; at one point, early in the 1990s, a loan running at market interest was made to John-Henri Holmberg. The interest was paid continuously and the loan principal was repaid in full at the end of the1990s. It may be noted that the only two fans to have served on the board of directors since theinception of the Foundation are Lars-Olov Strandberg and John-Henri Holmberg, who have both been re-elected every third year; they also wrote the initial bylaws of the Foundation when asked to set it up in 1977 by Alvar Appeltofft?s parents. Lars-Olov Strandberg, born in 1929 and an active fan since 1956, ended his professional career as Head Actuary of Sweden?s leading insurance corporation, Skandia, and was in the unique position of being retained as a consultant with his own office at the corporate headquarters for five years after his obligatory retirement. Lars-Olov Strandberg was also a founding board member of the Scandinavian SF Society in 1959, remained an officer of the SSFS for over 20 years, served ? often in the capacity of treasurer ? on the committees of at least 15 Swedish national sf conventions from 1965 on, and is the first and so far only Swede to be selected as a Guest of Honor by a world sf convention. 2. John-Henri Holmberg, born 1949 and an active fan since 1962, holds a B.A. degree in Literature and Philosophy from Stockholm university and has since 1972 been a professional book and magazine editor and publisher, critic, translator and writer. He has translated close to 200 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and so far published eight books of his own, including a two-volume historical and critical overview of science fiction. He reviews books both for Sweden?s third largest daily newspaper, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, and for several magazines; at the Swedish Book Fair in 1999, he received the prestigeous Jan Broberg Award for outstanding literary criticism. 1988-1994 he served as the Fiction Publisher for Bra Böcker Publishing Group, then the third largest publisher in Sweden; since 1995, he is a director of Replik in Sweden AB, a company specializing in Swedish-language editorial productions for foreign publishers, and in this capacity has overseen close to a 2000 international book co-productions. Since 2004, he edits and publishes the resurrected prozine Nova science fiction. Per Insulander, M.D., born 1950 and an active fan since 1967, is a physician specializing in cardiology; he simultaneously runs his own medical practice in Stockholm city and is senior specialist and head of thecardiology staff at Huddinge University Hospital in Stockholm. John Ågren, Ph.D., born 1951 and an active fan since 1968, is Senior Professor of Metallography at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and has been a guest lecturer at M.I.T., CalTech, Sorbonne, the Universities of Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg and numerous other institutions. 3. Obviously, these court cases are a matter of public record. Among allegations often made by Engholm is the one that LFP was ?bankrupted? by its owners, notably John-Henri Holmberg and Per Insulander, and that in somefashion they enriched themselves to the detriment of printers, authors, translators, and others who had performed work for the company. In fact, during 1987, it became evident that LFP was no longer profitable, and by early 1988, the company was in severe debt. Operations were closed down and the owners had the option of either declaring bankruptcy or bailing out the company. Declaring bankruptcy at this stage would have been entirely legal and would also have saved theowners from having to pay a fairly large part of the total amount (roughly SEK1,5M, at that time around US$300,000) owed by LFP. However, after discussions, since by Swedish law the owners would in any case have to pay that part of company debts pertaining to taxes, it was decided that LFP should pay all its debts, since paying only the government but using bankruptcy to get out of paying the fellow fans and others who had actually performed work was felt to be dishonorable. Thus, the LFP assetts were sold to two newly formed companies owned by respectively Per Insulander and John-Henri Holmberg, each company borrowing half the amount owed by LFP in order to liquidate (but not bankrupt) the earlier corporation. LFP was then left dormant for a number of years and finally volontarily bankrupted and dissolved in the mid-1990s; at that time the company had no known assetts nor any known private debts. By this procedure, employees, printers, translators and others were all paid, although in many cases late; the loans taken by Insulander and Holmberg ran for ten years and were finally paid up by the end of 1999, at which time they, including interest, had contributed well over $500,000 in 1988 currency towards making a clean end of LFP. It is, however, sadly true that subscribers to the company?s magazine and various book lines could not be reimbursed for the outstanding parts of their subscriptions. ----- SKRIVA - sf, fantasy och skräck * Äldsta svenska skrivarlistan grundad 1997 * Info http://www.skriva.bravewriting.com eller skriva- request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx för listkommandon (ex subject: subscribe).