SEFF
The Scandinavian-European Fan Fund was launched in 1983 by Ahrvid Engholm, Erik Andersson and David Langford, with the object of every second year sending a Scandinavian fan to some European convention outside of Scandinavia, every other some non-Scandinavian to a convention in Scandinavia, winners to be chosen by popular fan vote.
The first SEFF trip was taken by Swedish fan David Nessle, who went to Seacon '84, the British Eastercon in 1984. In 1985, Scottish fan James Baker attended SweCon '85 in Stockholm. In 1986, Swedish fan Maths Claesson went to Britain's Eastercon (Albacon III in Glasgow) and in 1987, Swedish fan Anders Bellis attended Conspiracy '87, the Worldcon in Britain. This trip officially was the last, due to the gigantic feud resulting from the vote where Bellis won; funds left over from his trip were given in 1988 to Martin Tudor, who that year attended NasaCon 9 outside Stockholm.
The origin of the feud following Bellis' SEFF win was the enmity between Bellis and Ahrvid Engholm. In the race, Engholm supported Norwegian candidate Johan Schimanski, while most Swedish fans, including earlier fund winner Maths Claesson and John-Henri Holmberg, supported Bellis. When Bellis won, Engholm declared that this was due to vote falsification and cheating, and that consequently Bellis, Claesson and Holmberg were guilty of forgery, fraud, theft of the fund money, and in general criminal and unfannish behavior, and should be driven out of fandom. Engholm, nothing if not energetic, wrote voluminously about this, inundating virtually every Swedish fanzine published with his accusations, and the entire atmosphere in Swedish fandom became vitriolic.
When Bellis wrote about this in his fan column in an issue of the prozine Nova science fiction in late 1987, Engholm resolutely got hold of the delivered but not distributed print run of the magazine and absconded with it. In the end, the feud led to four lawsuits, all lost by Engholm, as well as to most Swedish fanzines either folding or sneaking off into MF-APA, an apa founded by Kaj Harju with the express purpose of circulating fanzines among all interested Swedish fan publishers except Engholm.
By now Engholm, never prone to changing his mind, has repeated his accusations for thirty-five years.
| Fanfund | 1984—1987 |
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