George Sjöberg
(1930 – September 11, 2004)
George Tage Valentin Sjöberg was one of the earliest very active fans in Sweden, forming in 1954 a mail-order sf book service. In 1955, he started his first fanzine, Star SF Fanzine, which saw five issues, with the last published in 1957; Sjöberg immediately replaced it with a new title, Fhan SF Fanzine, which had a total of four issues through 1958. In fanzines, he sometimes used his middle names as a pseudonym, signing himself Tage Valentin.
In late 1959, he was one of the founders of SFSF, the Scandinavian SF Society in Stockholm, which remains Sweden's largest active sf club. Sjöberg became its first president and was also the first editor of its clubzine, Science Fiction Forum.
His fanzines were notable primarily for their attractive layout and impeccable reproduction; Sjöberg was a talented artist and a fine writer. Problematically, Sjöberg also had an obsessive personality, which brought him into conflict with other fans: as chairman of the SFSF: he first tried banning smoking at meetings; later, when, in 1962, it was disclosed that he was also active in neo-Nazi politics, an emergency club meeting stripped him of his chairmanship and expelled him from the club.
From 1963 on, Sjöberg had no further contacts with Swedish fandom. During his last decades, he lived in Uppsala but continued to read sf and had an impressive book collection, including probably the only copy in Sweden of the asbestos-bound limited first edition of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which was for a long time the most expensive antiquarian sf title to be found.
| Person | 1930—2004 |
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