superfan n.

I never was a super-fan of the Conan-type fantasy.

‘The average fan is the victim of sexual repression.’ ‘Is he?’ ‘Without a doubt!’ ‘Well—er—I daresay. But I don’t consider myself to be an average fan. Do you?’ ‘Certainly not! I said the average fan. I’m a superfan—a top liner. I am not sexually repressed. But the average fan is. See?’

In my first year I progressed from a non-fan, to a fringe-fan, to a neophan, and finaly [sic] to a master-fan. Who knows how far I will go in my second year? Would anyone deny me the ambition of becoming a BNF or a super-fan?

What I despise are the two-page party reports that used to abound in fanzines and which said only ‘I had fun.’ (‘So then I went over and sat which [sic] Joe and Robbie and Rog and Honey came over for a while with Fritz and we spoke to Terry and Miri and Bill and then off to dinner with Poul and Karen and Djinn and then later that night Hiram Superfan seduced Innocence P. Youngfemme and...’)

At last the superfan of the hour, Don Wollheim, could endure no more. He founded a counter-organization yclept the International and Allied Organizations for the Purpose of Upholding and Maintaining the Use of Metallic Fasteners in Science Fiction Publications in the United States of America, Unlimited. This was known as the IAOPUMUMFPUSA, Unltd, for short.

Martin M. Horvat [...] is a Pogo-superfan. He has most stf mags later than 1945, and would like to do some trading for his many duplicates.

Terry Hughes’ Mota is even more timebinding. Trufen reprint Walt Willis columns; superfan Hughes recently printed a new Willis column presenting the Irish Legend’s return to fandom, at the 1976 British Eastercon, after an 11-year gafiation.

Susan Wood [...] had just started to become involved with feminism and was still a year or two shy of achieving the Superfan status she would enjoy for the latter half of the 70s but it was already clearly evident that here was a fan who could work with consummate skill in all areas of fannish creativity.

It wasn’t a real battle between The Front and The Enemy yet. For that we needed the help of the Scandinavian SF Association. Their clubzine Fanac was edited by a moron, I thought, so I started a campaign to get the super-fan Bertil A G Schalén (BAGS) as editor.

[O]ur recollection of these books [sc. Philip José Farmer’s The Image of the Beast and Blown] is that the first was darkly powerful, startling stuff, while the second, more comical in tone, was much inferior and obviously written in haste to fulfil a contract; the latter novel features real-life sf ‘superfan’ Forrest J. Ackerman as a character.

In 1948 Stapledon, invited by super-fan Arthur C Clarke, gave an address to the British Interplanetary Society.

Those who did talk with Variety all agreed that the best defense is to avoid provoking fandoms in the first place. In addition to standard focus group testing, studios will assemble a specialized cluster of superfans to assess possible marketing materials for a major franchise project.