April 15th, 2010
by
Yonmei
There are various arguments along the similar lines to “who invented science-fiction”? But most people agree: fanfic in the sense we use in the 21st century, was first published between forty and fifty years ago*, and has always been an area of writing which has been primarily by women.
There are advantages to this and disadvantages: I noted in a panel at Anticipation that writing fanfic frees you up to write anything – and people do.
Orson Scott Card seemed to think (when writing his Foundation fanfic story about Seldon after the original Foundation left, and when writing his fanfic novel of The Abyss) that he was inventing something new, in taking the work of an established writer and writing his own story from it, or in watching a film and then writing a story based on what he saw and heard and understood – as any fanwriter does.
And of course there were the bright lads at Fanlib who really did seem to think they’d invented fanfic for their own profit.
John Scalzi is now claiming to have invented fanfic, on the basis that he’s writing what he calls a “reboot” of Little Fuzzy, which has never been done before. (Of course it has, by Ursula K. LeGuin in The Word for World is Forest, and by Ardath Mayhar in Golden Dreams, but – all together now! – She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art. )
Fanfic frees you up. I can think offhand of two or three fanfic writers who I thought were pretty damn good: who when they could write with no concern for anything but the laws of grammar, the rules of punctuation, and the conventions of text formatting, wrote fantastic adventurous exciting stories… and then went pro. And flattened out. Suddenly the editor and the market and the contract got between them and their mad spirit of wordy adventure. Or something did.
That writers who are pro see us having fun in our whirlpool of words and want to join in, is understandable. And they can.
But please: no trying to kick everyone out of the pool and then claim it’s your own personal “discovery”.
*See
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Filed under Writers & Artists, fandom, fanworks, feminism, slash, women writers | Comments (8)
But please: no trying to kick everyone out of the pool and then claim it’s your own personal “discovery.”
Sing it!
I’m not even particularly a fan of Scalzi as a writer, but . . . he didn’t say he invented fanfic. He may have been unaware of previous novel rebooting efforts, but I don’t know that it’s fair to view those two things as the same.
Victoria: Sing it!
“Do not meddle in the affairs of filkers, for you are mockable and your name scans in Greensleeves.”
Katie: he didn’t say he invented fanfic.
He asserted “I took the original plot and characters of Little Fuzzy and wrote an entirely new story from and with them” – fanfic, in other words – and then claimed “as far as I know it’s never been done before”.
Which… duh.
Yeah, it’s been done plenty, and at least once explicitly for that same novel, but … pretty much all the people who did it, were women. See Joanna Russ on How To Suppress Women’s Writing, lesson one: Deny it ever happened until a man did it.
When you claim that “no one’s ever done it before” aren’t you claiming “invention”? And when people have done it before you – have been doing it since before you were born (since Scalzi was born in 1969) doesn’t it deserve quite a bit of public mockery?
Actually, a better title for this post: “Don’t Tell Granny You Invented The Sucking Of Eggs, John.”
Also, if we look outside SF, good heavens, this has been going on in English literature since at least Chaucer. What’s Troilus and Criseyde but a fanfic of Homer, after all? And Chaucer got the idea from half a dozen European writers who did it before him, so.
There has been some fanfic around lately that has been regarded as new and clever literature. The story of Mr Marsh from Little Women, for instance, and I’m sure there’s some others. I have wondered why SF fanfiction, and SF generally, is considered by the literati to be a bad thing, while literary fanfic is a good thing, and now you’ve explained it: “They” simply didn’t know they were following an age old tradition.
So I don’t know what “they” make of the Pickwick club in Little Women, or the Arthurian lit that seems to be built on a fannish basis (story tellers seem to have loved Gawain for a while, then Lancelot, and so on), and the other fanfic Delagar mentions.
This seems to come up every time we discuss fanfic: ownership and authorship are not the same thing.
In the modern sense of the word, fanfic is fiction written where you can only be author, never owner: fanfic couldn’t exist until the modern invention of copyright and until the still-more modern invention of fandom.
Like definitions of science-fiction that start earlier and earlier until you are examining the Odyssey, you can call the Miracle Plays Christian fanfic, or assert that most of the surviving Athenian tragedies are Iliad fanfic, or inquire if Socrates was in fact Plato’s Marty Sue, or if Lucy Snowe or Jane Eyre were, either or both, Charlotte Bronte’s Mary Sue.
But this tends to require quite a bit of redefinition about what fandom is (Christianity as Jesus fandom?) or what fanfic is.
I think it’s arguable that Sherlock Holmes was the first fandom as we understand it: but, notably, though we can be sure people were writing Holmes fanfic, what got published – including what was published by the Holmes fan clubs – was only meta speculation about the canon: fanfic did not get published until after the series went out of copyright and authors could claim ownership of their own interpretation of Sherlock Holmes.
In a later post Scalzi admits he wrote fanfic…
I like the idea of dating fanfic from the arrival of copyright together with the notion of intellectual property. It sounds like a sensible way of defining what we are talking about. Before, I was thinking of fanfic as the product of people who really love a story, such as the Iliad or Robin Hood, or really hate a character, like Cressida, and just have to get it off their chests by telling their own story. It is a fuzzy definition and too open to the questions you have raised, so I am happy to adopt your suggestion.
What, then, would be the word for fiction which has been written out of admiration for an original, identifiable tale?
What you say about Holmes fanfic suggests that things like Star Trek and Star Wars might have to reboot every few decades so as to keep their copyright out of the hands of fans.
What, then, would be the word for fiction which has been written out of admiration for an original, identifiable tale?
I don’t know.
The first example that comes to my mind in the modern era – besides all of the Holmes novels! – is The Once and Future King in which T. H. White created an AU to known medieval history, based on The Morte d’Arthur, which itself is a part of the great tangled root web called the Matter of Britain.
Or indeed all the retellings of Robin Hood.
One of the reasons we don’t have a word for it is that until the invention of copyright/intellectual property made it possible to separate such stories off into the legal and illegal, those written inside and outside copyright, these kind of stories were just normal. People tell stories based on their personal experience, and our personal experience includes the stories that are important to us.
What you say about Holmes fanfic suggests that things like Star Trek and Star Wars might have to reboot every few decades so as to keep their copyright out of the hands of fans.
I imagine they’ve already thought of this. (Not to mention the power of corporations like Disney who can simply have the US government extend the copyright period after the original owner’s death. Disney doesn’t want Mickey Mouse and other classic Disney characters to go out of copyright – and currently they’re safe till 2041. So in the 2020s, I would guess we’ll start hearing about how 75 years is really too little time, in the modern era, to really milk a copyright… and the law will change again in the 2030s.)