Fan Q Awards - Fanlore

Longtime fans Paula Smith and Sharon Ferraro ran the first Fan Q Awards at the second SeKWesterCon, formalized by the editors of the letterzine Halkan Council. The "Q" stood for quality, and it was to be a recognition of the best work appearing in Star Trek fanzines. In the first year of the award, there were only two categories: In the "best writer" category, Leslie Fish won for The Weight, which was still being serialized in Warped Space. Connie Faddis won for "best artist" for her body of work in the previous year.

Fan Qs were awarded at various cons for the first few years until 1981, when they were awarded at MediaWest*Con 1, where they've been awarded ever since. In 1982, the first Fan Q awards were given to Star Wars fans.

The categories changed over the years, as did the fandoms honored; eventually it was decided that any fandom with three or more nominations in a category could have their own award.

Controversies

In 1986, Star Trek fans started to feel shut out of the Fan Q's, and started the Surak Awards, given out at a variety of K/S and Trek cons.

In the early 1990s, some in slash fandom started to feel that they weren't getting the Fan Q recognition they deserved. (Some fans alleged that for years, the Fan Q people simply threw away ballots which voted to nominate slash stories or novels.) In 1992, they started their own parallel award via a separate balloting process, the STIFfie Award which was given out at MediaWest*Con. Although the STIFfie Awards presentation was held annually at MediaWest*Con, they were not in any way affiliated with MediaWest*Con. The STIFfie Awards continued for another 9 years.

Possibly in response to this, in 1993, slash and gen zines were broken out into separate categories for the FanQ awards, and no longer competed against each other for categories like, "Best Zine", "Best Cartoon", etc.