Jannick Storm

(February 24, 1939 -- May 9, 2015)

Danish author, editor and translator who discovered sf in his teens in a country where virtually no sf was published. In the mid-1960s he met Swedish author and critic Sven Christer Swahn, who at the time worked as a lecturer in literature at a Copenhagen college, and through him came into contact with Swedish fandom; from then on he worked tirelessly as a newspaper, magazine and radio critic to popularize sf; he also edited lines of sf for two major publishers, started an "experimental literary magazine", Limbo, irregularly published 1970--1972, which might be called the first Danish fanzine. Brian W. Aldiss dedicated his 1973 history of sf, Billion Year Spree to him: "To Jannick Storm, who colonised Denmark". His efforts were surprisingly successful: after coming in contact with Storm via a letter of his published in Australian SF Review in 1967, an avid sf reader named Svend Kreiner Møller wrote him to ask if he knew of any other fans in Denmark. Storm both informed him of Swedish fandom and, with Møller and a handful of others, initiated an informal annual meeting of sf fans which first took place in 1968. In 1971, the first specialised comics and sf book store in Scandinavia was opened in Copenhagen, and with the help of the store, Jannick Storm in 1973 arranged the first Danish "Science fiction festival", where 35 feature sf films were shown but where also Storm as well as a number of invited guests – Swede Sven Christer Swahn, Norwegian Tor Åge Bringsværd and Britons Brian W. Aldiss and Philip Strick – gave talks on science fiction. Inspired by this, and by a further but smaller festival in 1974, a handful of fans in April, 1974, decided to form a club they named Science Fiction Cirklen ("The SF Circle") and to publish a critical magazine about sf, Proxima. Both are still active (2023). This laid the organizational foundation for Danish fandom, though Jannick Storm largely distanced himself from it, as his professional interests gradually turned away from sf and towards poetry, and his later contacts with fans mainly consisted of attending conventions in Scandinavia and Britain and keeping in touch with fans and pros he had come to know personally.

Entry in Sf Encyclopedia: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/storm_jannick