Dear Guys and Gals,
I am now launching a fannish information website, listing Canadian and Pacific Northwest clubs and conventions, as well as less regional information for fanzine fans and aspiring writers. Please check out https://www.vcn.bc.ca/~garth2/ and let me know if you find it useful. The plan is to edit the web page monthly.
Any critical comments or helpful suggestions are welcome, so I have put an email link on every web page to make it easy to contact me. I have no aesthetic sense, so this month’s edition is almost entirely text-only. (My smiling face is on the welcome page, but it’s a bit large – I think I must cut it down.)
Many thanks are due to the Vancouver Community for hosting this website, and to their Help Desk and to Kalin Stacey of the Canadian SF and Fantasy Association for getting me over some glitches.
Yours cordially,
Garth Spencer
On March 10, 2026, Amazing Stories will mark a singular milestone: one hundred years since the moment science fiction became a genre with a name, a home, and a future.
On a cold Wednesday in Manhattan—March 10, 1926—The Experimenter Publishing Company released the first issue of Amazing Stories. Its cover was impossible to miss: bright yellow, boldly optimistic, and illustrated by Frank R. Paul, who would soon be recognized as the founding visual architect of science fiction. Behind that cover stood editor and publisher Hugo Gernsback, holding a radical idea: that stories grounded in real science, boldly extrapolated into tomorrow, deserved a magazine of their own.
With his opening editorial, “A New Kind of Magazine,” Gernsback didn’t just launch a publication—he defined a genre. He called it scientifiction: stories that were entertaining, intellectually serious, rooted in known science, and unafraid to speculate. Sometimes they advocated. Sometimes they warned. Always, they invited readers to imagine what might be.
That first issue of Amazing Stories did more than publish fiction. It established science fiction’s rules of engagement, made the future visible, and—perhaps most importantly—created a conversation. The magazine’s letters column became the birthplace of science fiction fandom, a community that would grow into clubs, fanzines, conventions, cosplay, superheroes, and an enduring global culture. The modern world’s relationship with the future can be traced, in no small part, back to those pages.
It is no exaggeration to say that the last century would look very different without Amazing Stories.
Why This Matters Now
At a time when scientific progress is accelerating faster than ever—reshaping how we live, work, communicate, and even define what it means to be human—science fiction’s original mission feels newly urgent. For a century, Amazing Stories has explored both the promise and the peril of innovation, reminding us that the future is not something that simply happens to us, but something we actively imagine, question, and choose. As we confront challenges that once seemed purely speculative, science fiction remains what it has always been at its best: a rehearsal space for tomorrow, powered by curiosity, skepticism, and hope.
We invite readers, writers, historians, fans, and future-builders to join us in celebrating this extraordinary anniversary. Celebrate with us in person at Ravencon in Richmond, Virginia, April 26–28, 2026. Or celebrate in your own way: read a story, discover a new author, write a review, or visit our website to explore a sampling of what began on a newsstand in 1926 and helped shape the imagination of a century.
It has been our privilege, honour, and joy to help keep Amazing Stories alive. We look forward—with appropriate scientific optimism—to carrying its legacy into the next hundred years.
(A formal centennial celebration will be held at Ravencon, Richmond, Virginia, April 26–28, 2026.)
In this newsletter:
2026 CSFFA Registration is Open
Registration is open to purchase your 2026 CSFFA membership. This will allow you to add items to the eligibility lists, nominate (February/March) and later vote for this year’s awards. Memberships are open to Canadian citizens and permanent residents.
Registration is available both for returning members from 2023-25 and for new members directly on our home page at www.csffa.ca. Just click the box (Not a Member yet? / You are a Member?) that applies to you.
2026 CSFFA Calendar
We have updated this year’s CSFFA Calendar. It has start and end dates for all of the 2026 activities such the Aurora Awards, our development grants, the CSFFA Hall of Fame, our AGM, and when the Awards Ceremony will take place. Some of the dates, such as the voters’ package start date are flexible. If we get works from our finalists quickly then we will open it up earlier.
For a the full calendar go to our website: https://www.csffa.ca/about/calendar-of-activities/
Aurora Book Club Meeting Reminder: January 22, 2026
BOOK CLUB MEETING: January 22 8:00pm EST / 5:00pm PST
Join us on Discord in our voice/video channel Book Club Meetings channel on the 22nd to learn more about Phyllis Gotlieb’s winning novel, her life and career. Featuring special guest, Aurora-winning author Candas Jane Dorsey!
More info on the book club:
Starting in January 2026, we’re inviting everyone to join us for the Aurora Awards Retrospective Book Club. The aim of the Book Club is to read every “Best Novel” Aurora Award winner in the association’s history, in time for CSFFA’s 50th anniversary. We envision the book club wrapping up by the proposed Edmonton Worldcon in 2030, where we hope to host some form of anniversary celebration.
January 2026 is our inaugural book club month. We’ll be reading Phyllis Gotlieb’s A Judgment of Dragons, the first novel to win the Aurora Award – in 1982.
Join us on Discord at any time in January to discuss the book with us.
Learn more about the book club, how it works, and see the full schedule at the book club page of the CSFFA website.
As of November 2025, our annual eligibility list submission period is underway. You can see our current list of confirmed eligible works on our public list page here. This page can be shared widely, everyone has access to it. This public page contains links to external URLs for each work, which you will find to the right of the entry marked as [info]. For works that are available to read in full online (eg. short stories in online magazines), the [info] link should direct you to that work so you can read it. For other works, the info link provides publication details, synopses, and purchase options.
CSFFA members are encouraged to add works they are familiar with or published in 2025. In order to add works before the end of December, you must have a 2025 membership (ie. paid the membership fee in the first half of this year). Starting in January, you will need to purchase your 2026 membership in order to access the member-only eligible work submission forms.
If you are a publisher or a creator without a membership and would like assistance adding works to the lists, please contact us. If you only published a few works, we are more than happy to put them in for you. You must send us full details of the work and a URL where members can get more information about the work or access it in full (if such is available online).
For questions or comments about eligibility lists, please contact us at volunteer.csffa@gmail.com
We’re happy to announce that CSFFA is joining the great Discord bandwagon, and has created a community server where fans, readers, creators, and all Canadian SFF enthusiasts can gather online to discuss Canadian speculative fiction and the Aurora Awards. The Discord server is open to the public, and you can join us using this link.
(Sometimes Discord invite links don’t work as intended, so if you find that to be the case, please reach out and we’ll try to get you sorted.)
Zines to share!
From George Phillies, President, N3F: There was a slight issue in the most recent Eldritch Science. Part 2 of John Thiel’s story was included before Part 1 had appeared. You are therefore here receiving both parts in the correct order. ES202601Supplement
Also received from the N3F: Ionisphere_Issue 49_January 2026 and N3F Fan Gazette Jan2026
We have received the following fanzine to share. Enjoy!
From Ahrvid Engholm in Sweden: Let’s invade & Kidnap a little!
Mission completed!
Intermission too. It’s a complex, chaotic world, and here’s something
to make it chaotier! We found Hugo Gernsback’s excuses for not paying his authors, take you on a tour through Bobby Heinlein’s fantastic home and present the A-Bomb’s mother. We go through the Ukraine peace plan, a conflict almost as intricate as some fanfeuds. Then we turn to poetry, a concon and prepare to join the paperclip-makers… An idea: Instead of Greenland, why don’t go for Blueland or perhaps Yellowland instead?
You need Intermission for national security!
Only necessary cookies,
–Ahrvid Engholm, editor-in-chief
Comments welcome! Due to some mail snags make CCs of comments to
ahrvid@atomicmail.io
5) THANK YOUWe thank Danny Sichel, Keith Braithwaite, Joe Aspler, Cathy Palmer-Lister, and Josée Bellemare for their specific contributions today. Thank you, as well, to all of our contributing participants, along with everyone who helped to plan and run today’s e-meeting. We also thank, of course, all of you who joined us here on ZOOM; don’t forget to comment on today’s get-together (www.MonSFFA.ca).
MonSFFen will gather online again via ZOOM on Saturday, February 21, for our next e-meeting, set to unfold from 1:00PM to 5:00PM! Mark your calendars accordingly, and we hope to see you all then!
Thank you all for taking part today. We appreciate the enthusiastic involvement of our members, and we hope to see you all again next month! Until then, be careful navigating our slippery streets and sidewalks, and keep warm!
1) INTRODUCTIONWelcome to MonSFFA’s first event of the New Year, our January 2026 e-Meeting! We are gathering, this afternoon, exclusively online via ZOOM. Note that MonSFFA’s peak winter meetings take place exclusively online; we return to our downtown meeting hall in March, as winter wanes.
Our programming agenda begins at 1:00PM; the meeting will conclude at 5:00PM. This opening post has gone up 30 minutes before the meeting’s start time to allow folk to gather online at their leisure. A closing post will go up at 5:00PM to officially thank today’s presenters, and to preview next month’s MonSFFA event! Proceedings will be getting underway shortly.
To join our ZOOM-chat and take part online, see the instructions, below (Item 2).
To take part in this afternoon’s meeting online, join our ZOOM Video-Chat, which will run throughout the next few hours. Simply click here and follow the prompts: This Afternoon’s MonSFFA Meeting on ZOOM
If you’re not fully equipped to ZOOM, you can also take part by phone (voice only); in the Montreal area, the toll-free number to call is: 1-438-809-7799. Including call-in numbers for out-of-towners, complete directions can be found here: Complete Directions
Also, have this information on hand as you may be asked to provide it:
Meeting ID: 861 7379 0718
Passcode: 754672
As we will be talking vintage sci-fi toys after the mid-meeting break, club members are asked to showcase, live on screen, any cool such toys they may possess!
Artificial Intelligence: How Prescient Was SF?
We compare SF’s visions of A.I. with the real-world models in development today! Will we regret not taking James Cameron seriously enough; is our future under A.I. likely to be more dystopian than utopian?
A primer on perspective, or, creating the illusion of three dimensions in 2D art!
The club’s treasurer offers a brief report on our successful 2025 Super Sci-Fi Book Sale, held last month.
A fond remembrance of the SF/F toys of our collective childhood!
The meeting officially begins at 1:00PM! Thanks for joining us today, and enjoy the afternoon!
MonSFFA’s first event of 2026 is the club’s January e-meeting, scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday, January 10, from 1:00PM to 5:00PM!
We’ll be comparing artificial intelligence as depicted in SF with the AI models currently in development in the real world! As well, we’ll feature a primer on perspective as a useful guide to producing striking works of sci-fi art, and we’ll remember fondly the classic SF&F toys of our collective childhood! Finally, we’ll also select our Executive Committee for the coming year.
Join our ZOOM-Chat tomorrow afternoon, Saturday, January 10, from 1:00PM to 5:00PM for all this, and more…
Note that MonSFFA’s peak winter meetings are conducted exclusively online via ZOOM; February’s e-meeting is slated for Saturday, the 21st. We return to in-person meetings at our downtown conference room in March, as winter wanes.