Fanzines were the key pre-digital mode for sharing knowledge and love about sci-fi across space and time, and now the University of Iowa Libraries is beginning to make thousands of them digital.

Their plan is to start with the James L. “Rusty” Hevelin Collection, which contains thousands of volumes, spans decades and features elaborately hand-illustrated titles and hand-drawn artwork.

The library acquired the collection after the author and artist passed. His work covers sci-fi culture dating back to 1941 and the first ever science fiction convention. These zines not only helped fans, but they also assisted aspiring authors.

From Hyperallergic: “Fanzines like the Futurian War Digest from the 1940s made in Leeds, England, and The Phantagraph published in the 1930s and 40s in New York were DIY materials imagined for a growing sci-fi community and often distributed by hand.”

“They also provided an accessible platform for writers including Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clark who would go from fanzines to the icons of the genre.” In many cases, the earliest work of these greats rests only in zines, not in books, and would be lost if only their novels and published short story collections remained.

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A lot of hoverboard fanatics were disappointed to learn that recent sleek-looking attempts were ultimately limited to skating above the surfaces of special magnetic plates, often carefully concealed beneath pavement or ramps, but this model goes above and beyond, using actual fans to float is riders.

The ArcaBoard from ArcaSpace can hover a person for six minutes using a combination of 36 fans strapped beneath it – 300 horsepower lifting a human up to around 250 pounds. On-board stabilizers help keep it upright while a cooling system and aerospace-grade composite materials prevent overheating.

The device is not cheap, listed at $20,000 but really meant more as a proof of concept than good for purchase. It is still a long way from a cheap, sleek, off-the-shelf model, but at least this version is free of the constraints of other models, if only for a few minutes at a time.

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It takes both a machine and an observer to make this magical lighting trick work, since the effective ‘frame rate’ of the human eye effectively puts together a series of independent flashes to reconstruct the image in play.

Skip to around 1 minute and 30 seconds into the above video to get a sense of not only how this works but of other potential applications – a clock is just one kind of display, but anything is possible. You can write static (well, moving) messages, or scroll text or images or patterns, or even send remote commands if the device is wireless.

This particular model USB powered fan LED will spin really fast providing a good chill for those hot days of summer, and on the face of the fan a clock appears on the spinning blades.  The blades are soft for safe use, and keeps the time even after removing it from the USB because of internal rechargable batteries. Doesn’t require any installation and the flexible neck lets you point it anywhere – great to stick into the side of a computer as it is quite portable and can be charged by USB.

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