Quote of the Day

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, writing about the phenomenon of fan fiction:

Personally, I’m convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.

One of the most peevesome things about the hectic period I’m in at my day job is that I no longer have time to follow Making Light comment threads– I saw that post go up yesterday, but by the time I got around to looking at the comments this morning, there were already 245 comments. I can either read those, or prep for my morning classes, but not both…

My personal feelings on the fraught subject of fan fiction, below the fold:

I’m not particularly interested in most fan fiction, simply because the really famous sorts (Star Trek, Harry Potter) tend to be set in fictional universes that I don’t find rewarding of deep thought. Both of those have a sort of ad hoc feel to them, with critical new information about the way the world works tending to be revealed as the plot demands, in a way that feels like it was made up just to address a particular plot point.

For some people, this apparently leads to a need to write some backstory to explain the real rules. For me, it leads to a thinning of the fictional universe, and makes it seem like a waste of time to spend more effort on thinking about how things might work. I’m sure somebody could write a perfectly decent story about how some quirk of the latest Harry Potter book was really there all along, and wasn’t just made up on the spot to get J.K. Rowling out of a plotting problem. but since it feels made-up to me, I’m just not that interested in reading it.

(Weirdly, there are authors who I know for a fact have made up stuff on the spot– Steven Brust is the chief example– who manage not to trip this same reaction even when they’re improvising to tweak their fans. If I could figure out the difference, I’d get out of this science racket, and make millions as a literary critic. Or something.)

(Further complicating things, Brust has actually written fanfic, or at least a Firefly novel on spec, which is just about the same thing. It’s not bad, but it’s much more a Firefly novel than a Steve Brust novel, if that makes sense.)

As for the ethics, Teresa makes a good point about the respect accorded to “Literary” fanfic. I still sort of feel that it’s rude to meddle with someone else’s universe, particularly when they’re not done with it yet. I think there is a clear difference between the Little House on the Prairie thing she cites or Gregory Maguire’s Wicked and random Harry Potter fic dredged up off the Internet, which is that Laura Ingalls Wilder and Frank Baum are both dead, and unlikely to want to do anything else with those characters that might trash the whole rationale of the fan fiction. I have less sympathy for the estates of dead writers than for living ones, so I’m less bothered by the existence of Literary fanfic about those works.

But this has undoubtedly been brought up and discussed over at Making Light, in far more erudite terms than I’m going to manage here. I don’t have time to read it, but if you do, go over there and see what they say.