NESFA

The New England Science Fiction Association is an active club based in the Boston area. It sponsors Boskone and ran NESFA Press.

History

Prompted by discussions at NYcon 3, the 1967 Worldcon, an organizational meeting was held September 23, 1967, at Bill Desmond's house. Tony Lewis was elected Acting Chairman and NESFA held its first meeting a couple weeks later on October 8, 1967.

Naturally, the first order of business was to select a name. The existing Boston Science Fiction Society was rejected because it had developed a troubled reputation. Also rejected were "Massachusetts Science Fiction Association", "Bay State Science Fiction Association", "Massachusetts Bay Science Fiction Association" and "The Boskonians" or The Eddoreans. (The latter was actually used for a time as an alternative name, but it didn't catch on.) Both were following the tradition of The Lunarians

Today

It is one of the rare sf clubs that boasts its own clubhouse, in which the group holds weekly meetings most Wednesday evenings, for socializing, projects, and miscellaneous business, plus two weekend meetings each month: a Business Meeting (for administration), and the Other Meeting. The club also publishes a regular newsletter, Instant Message, and hosts an annual convention, Boskone.

NESFans also present two more or less annual awards, the Skylark Award and the Jack Gaughan Award, and run NESFA Press.

Their vigor in approaching fan politics and tendency to congregate together at conventions, sometimes in matching t-shirts, has caused some acerbic fans to refer to them as the "Marching NESFAns," and to remark, "NESFA makes the trains run on time."

Website.

NESFA Clubhouse

NESFA purchased its clubhouse at 504 Medford St., Somerville, MA, in 1985. It is used for business and other meetings, the NESFA library, game nights, clubzine collations, con worksessions, storage of Coop crates and a bewildering amount of other stuff, bookcase construction parties, and whatever else local fen need space to do. Oh, there are a lot of books there too.

The clubhouse was a former dry cleaning establishment, and its purchase was finances by the club's available cash, plus a loan raised by means of the NESFA Lunar Realty Trust #1, which raised around $60,000 from club members as well as a generous loan from SCIFI. The club repaid the loans in full within about three years.

Deconstruction and reconstruction (a huge task -- see the articles below for much more on it) was led by the late Monty Wells. Many fen learned valuable skills which they later put to good use when they entered the housing market.

Reports and articles

• Saga of the NESFA Clubhouse by Mark Olson.
• Everything I Learned About Buying and Renovating Buildings I Learned from Monty Wells by Laurie Mann.
• File 770 56, p. 7 report by Mike Glyer.
• The Shaft.

NESFA Lunar Realty Trust #1

When NESFA decided to purchase a clubhouse (see Saga of the NESFA Clubhouse), it felt that it had enough income to pay for it, but not enough cash -- it needed a mortgage. But banks are not used to loaning money to fannish clubs (it probably could have been done, but it would have been very hard). Instead, NESFA decided to borrow money from its members and, to keep it formal and above-board, set up the NESFA Lunar Realty Trust #1 (as in Encyclopedia Galactica Foundation #1).

The NLRT was a trust organized under Massachusetts law (and largely set up by Don Eastlake) which collected around $60,000 towards the purchase price. The NLRT sold bonds worth $100 each and paid interest based on the prime rate. Most of the money was raised locally, but S.C.I.F.I., the organization which had just run the huge and financially quite successful LAcon II, purchased $20,000 worth of NLRT bonds. (It's noteworthy that they paid for it with 100 checks for $137 — it's a long story — plus one more check for $6300.) The NLRT bonds were paid off completely over the next two and a half years.

NESFA Press

NESFA Press is the publishing pseudopod of NESFA. It published annual GoH books in conjunction with Boskone, a series of NESFA's Choice books bringing back into print the works of deserving classic SF writers, and reference books of science fiction and science fiction fandom.

It was founded in the early 1970s when Bill Desmond (with assistance from Robert Weiner and Donald M. Grant) produced the first Boskone Book. At about the same time, Tony Lewis started the NESFA Index, a continuation of the MITSFS Index. For many years, these were the nearly exclusive focus of NESFA Press.

By the late ’70s, NESFA Press had become moribund -- the NESFA Index was no longer being published and a combination of limited interest on the part of both NESFA and a series of Boskone GoHs, led to the Boskone Book going into hiatus. NESFA Press was revived by Chip Hitchcock (nearly singlehandedly) producing a Boskone Book for Boskone 18 in 1981 (Unsilent Night by Tanith Lee).

In the early ’90s, Mark Olson pioneered the NESFA's Choice series of books, bringing back into print classic sf in quality hardbacks. This series eventually extended to over 25 volumes.

NESFA Press was given a Special Committee Award at Denvention 3 in 2008, but by around 2010, the club had lost interest in publishing and the press's output had declined to about a book a year.

• SF Encyclopedia entry.
• NESFA Press website.

Fannish NESFA Press publications:

• NESFA Index
• 1976 -- Noreascon Proceedings
• 1990 -- An Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction
• 1992 -- Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man by Dave Langford
• 1994 -- Making Book by Teresa Nielsen Hayden
• 1996 -- The Silence of the Langford by Dave Langford
• 2016 -- Making Conversation by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

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Club

This is a club page. Please extend it by adding information about when and where the club met, when and by whom it was founded, how long it was active, notable accomplishments, well-known members, clubzines, any conventions it ran, external links to the club's website, other club pages, etc. When there's a floreat (Fl.), this indicates the time or times for which we have found evidence that the club existed. This is probably not going to represent the club's full lifetime, so please update it if you can!