Some trace the zine’s origin to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or the chief magazine of the Transcendentalists, The Dial, brought to life because no one else would publish their ideas. And the zine has that air about it, seemingly breathed into its very form—the air of humble defiance: fresh, feisty, and transcendent. All the same, the bigger beef of the zine comes later, from that other crowd of literary weirdos—the science fiction writers. Frustrated by the space tales of the 1920s and 30s in Amazing Stories, America’s first sci-fi magazine, readers started writing to each other rather than to the magazine, lifting personal addresses from the letter column. To combat their defiant scrutiny of the magazine’s stories, they started passing their own ideas through the mail—wild tales of aliens and time warps, crossing the country in a grand orchestration: the written conversations of strangers. Like social media, but without all the insanity of the instantaneous. The readers became the critics, the reviewers, the writers: through their own offshoots of protest, many found that channeling their ideas into small, serialized, pocket-sized booklets, was the real wave of their future.