Sam Lundwall

(February 24, 1941 – )

Sam Thore Jerrie Lundwall, who published as Sam J. Lundwall, is a Swedish SF writer, translator, publisher, and singer.

He entered fandom in 1956, having learned of its existence in the Swedish prozine Häpna!, and quickly formed the small Club Cosmos in his Stockholm suburb of Hägersten. For the club, he began publishing the single-page and carbon-copied Cosmos Bulletin in 1956, then the genzine Andromeda with three issues in 1957 and 1958, the last of which, with 46 pages was, at the time, the largest Swedish fanzine produced. In 1958, he also started Science Fiction Nytt (Sf News), which then became his primary fanzine: in all, and in various guises (as a fanzine, as the member publication of the Swedish SF Book Club, finally as a semiprozine) it saw 75 issues until folding in 1983.

Lundwall was also active as a convention organiser, initiating the Stockholm conventions in 1961, 1963, 1973, 1975, 1977, and 1979. He co-founded the Stockholm Tolkien Society.

Lundwall began publishing sf professionally at an early age, his first story appeariing in Häpna!’s September, 1959, issue. He published a further five stories in the magazine before its demise in 1966, and had by that time also written two novels which were serialised in fanzines, one in SF forum, the other, not finished, in his own Sf nytt. During the 1960s, he also published in mimeographed form the first version of his bibliography of sf and fantasy in Sweden.

Later, he worked as a photographer, a cartoonist, an essayist in mainly photo and film magazines, a singer-songwriter, and for a year as a producer at the Swedish TV network, where he aired six half-hour programs on sf. This led to his writing the first Swedish book on sf (which he later expanded and revised as Science Fiction: What It's All About, Ace Books, 1971). The book in turn led to a position as acquiring sf editor at Askild & Kärnekull publishing, where he launched a line of sf novels as well at a Swedish sf book club. After two and a half years, he left to work for his own publishing companies Delta and Sam J. Lundwall Fakta and Fantasi, where from 1973 until 1998, he published some 300 sf and fantasy books.

His first professionally published novel was actually an Ace Double (No Time for Heroes and Alice's World) in 1970; he has since published prolifically. As a critic-cum-sf historian he is principally known for his early critical works, though his general distaste for American SF and expressed preference for continental and especially Cold War Eastern-block styles did not win him much of a following in fandom. He translated a number of SF-related articles and works from Swedish into English. He edited the Jules Verne-magasinet, a Swedish prozine, from 1972 until 2013, or for 42 years, as far as is known a world record for sf magazine editing.

Lundwall resigned as regional director of SFWA due to the war on terror and later from his board position in World SF due to poor health. His contacts with fandom have been minimal since at least the 1990s.

Entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Fanzines and Apazines:

• Andromeda [1957–58]
• Cosmos Bulletin [1956]
• Science Fiction Nytt [1958–83]

Awards, Honors and GoHships:

• 1974 -- SfanCon 5
• 1980 -- Spacecon 80
• 1981 -- Regncon
• 1986 -- Ballcon
• 1989 -- NasaCon 10
• 1990 -- NasaCon 11
• 1999 -- Trinity

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Person

1941—

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