Fan Fic

[andrewducker]

As it's been making the rounds, and I've been involved in at least two fanfic discussions recently, here's the rather good quote from Teresa Nielsen Hayden (and editor at Tor books)

Good fiction gets under our skin. It can change the way we see the world. But whatever its effect, it’s a significant experience. It would be a bizarre thing—unnatural, even—for writers to not engage with that experience. They always have. I could show you stuff centuries old—heck, some of it’s millennia old—that’s fanfic by any modern definition.

Of course, it would have to be a modern definition. In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published by Viking. It’s a re-imagining of the life of the father of the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can’t. I can only see two differences: first, Louisa May Alcott is out of copyright; and second, Louisa May Alcott, Geraldine Brooks, and Viking are dreadfully respectable.

Comments

[opusfluke.livejournal.com]

If it weren't for FanFic we'd never have "Frankenstein Unbound", "Dracula Unbound", "League of Extrodinary Gentlemen" or more than half of the Jerry Cornelius novels that are kicking about nor some of the genius HPL parodies. Besides it isn't ripping off other writers' works, it's a tribute.